Everything You Need to Know About TOFFY’S DOMES Token Art & Rarities
The ToffysDomesNFT collection is 405 unique domes of Toffy that will live on the blockchain.
Who’s Toffy?
Toffy is the protagonist in my award-wining science fiction novel, TOFFY’s DIVIDE. As the lead engineer for the mega corporation, he breaks away from his duties to fight oppression in a highly divided J City.
He fights this oppression not with weapons but with his words.
J City is a city in this world and outside of it. A city separated by an actual ‘line’ demarcating the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’
When I wrote Toffy’s Divide, I envisioned Toffy as the ‘writer’s’ writer. The writer that respresents the aspirational writers dreams. To write a story that the world listens to or pay attention to.
Toffy fuses his experience as an engineer and a storyteller to challenge the order, inspiring action in a world that is under constant surveillance by the powers that be (J Enterprise, and it’s megalomaniac boss, James).
When it became time to design the cover of Toffy’s Divide, I wanted the cover to represent these ideas. Ideas of inequality with a mix of blended ideas that represent something, explicit or implicit, about this story in the year of 2049.
As we started thinking about the NFT project, we wanted to use the cover design as the basis for the series but with varying elements and rarities.
The cover artist and I worked on these concepts over a five-month long process of iteration and we are very proud of the first series of the collection.
We have five characteristics, that when combined together, give us 405 unique tokens to token holders.
Here are the five characteristics from the collection:
1. City (7)
J City is a fictional city but it represents a lot about the cities across the world that we live in.
Often times, these cities have a wealth gap — a visible inequality. I have had the opportunities to travel around the world and visit different cities. I chose seven real cities that I have lived in or visited, that mean something to me.
These cities influenced the way I built J City. As the first series of the collection, there are seven cities, and the image shows a split shilouette with the city’s architecture (skyline on the left, and “not-so-wealthy” neighborhood on the right).
My goal is to spotlight the inequality in our cities and each token holder will be able to hold or ‘adopt’ one of these cities in the collection.
Now that we are familiar with the cities, what is the backdrop?
2. Background color (3)
This is more straight forward. The original cover for Toffy’s Divide is whitish/gray.
In addition to that color, we added two colors — yellow and blue. Those two colors were chosen because they just worked and looked good.
But the more I think about them, we can call the yellow background — the Press Play variation (the color of my first book). The blue background will be the variation of my next (& third) book— M’s Mixed Tape (the new book that comes along with the purchase of any of 405 tokens in the series.)
As a publishing tool, this NFT collection gives me the opportunity to experiment with different levels of access and content depending on the background color or rarity.
The background is the backdrop of a city divided. What are the attributes that divide each of these cities?
3. The Divide (3)
There are three inequalities that separate communities in each of the city represented in the collection.
These themes — economic, digital, and narrative divide — were highlighted in the Toffy’s Divide story.
Each of these three elements can be seen in the flipped pyramid.
The economic divide that separates both sides of town is represented with currencies.
The digital divide is represented by “0s and 1s” of binary language.
And the narrative divide (“one-sided storytelling” controlled by those that hold the pen and access to media) is represented by a collage of media technology (radio, tv, newspapers, computers”)
Along with the divide, there is the frame color that goes along with each divide. Let’s talk about it.
4. Frame Color (3)
The frame color is another characteristics that makes up part of each unique token.
There are three frame colors — white, red, and blue. The frame colors also match the color of the pyramid within the frame.
Each of these cities have different backdrops, frames, and are divided uniquely but what are the bridging elements to bring these two sides of the city, in Toffy’s mind, together?
It’s has to do with music, writing, and asking the right questions.
5. Bridging Elements (3)
As a recurring theme in Toffy’s Divide and a lot of my writing, there are things that I believe can bring divided communities together.
Those things are empathy, curiosity, and storytelling.
These are the three bridging elements in the artwork. You can find them hovering around the flipped pyramid at the top of the shilouette in the art.
It follows the attribute that we can use empathy to connect with the people around us. Music is a great tool to build empathy, hence the musical notes.
Curiousity is a super power that we can all cultivate to galvanize personal growth and problem solving. This is denoted by the question marks — asking questions.
And lastly, storytelling. Storytelling is the ritual of a hopeful society. It connects people and inspires action. The more diverse storytelling, the more we can come together, in a hopeful way, to build a better tomorrow. This attribute is denoted by the handwritten notes.
All these 5 different traits combined produce 405 unique tokens. 👇🏾
Mathematically, with the combination of all 5 traits (7x3x3x3x3), we can have a total of 567 unique combinations as tokens but we settled on a collection of 405 tokens because of its significance.
That number signifies the number of pages in the first edition of Toffy’s Divide.
The cover artist and I worked on these concepts over a five-month long process of iteration and we are very proud of the first series of the collection.
Each of these tokens provide these five benefits to the holders and I hope you’ll be one of them.
So which of the 405 tokens will you resonate with when the series launches on Sept 20, 2022?
Will you pull one with musical notes of empathy, or adopt the Bay Area or Lagos as a city? Will you get one that represents the need to bridge the income or digital divide with music or storytelling?
Get your own Toffy’s Domes Token here!
