Behind the YGG Rebrand
Yield Guild Games (YGG) has evolved significantly since its inception in late 2020 and has consistently demonstrated its commitment to providing opportunities for its members to level up in the open Metaverse.
Alongside empowering its community through initiatives such as Web3 Metaversity, the guild has expanded its focus to include other key areas such as ownership and decentralization, as demonstrated by programs such as the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), an achievement-driven community token distribution protocol that recognizes guild members’ active participation with YGG-branded Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) that they can use to build their Metaverse résumé.
As part of this ongoing effort, YGG has recently undergone a rebrand aimed at empowering the community to participate in shaping the guild’s identity. In this article, Jen Yu, Head of Design at YGG, shares insights into the rebranding process and highlights how this new approach will enable the community to express themselves through the YGG brand.
Jen is an award-winning creative leader with over 10 years of experience in design, media and technology. She previously designed Emmy-nominated interactive media at Disney, led the creative team at Frog Design, and was Director of Product Design at MasterClass, having also worked with gaming veterans like John Romero, the designer behind the classic games DOOM and DOOM II.
A New Era for YGG: Helping Humanity Thrive by Transforming Play
YGG is announcing a new era of the guild model focused on collaboration and collective play.
Gaming guilds have always been about playing together, and in web3 gaming, they play a crucial role in onboarding and education. Community and collaboration are the building blocks that form the foundation of web3. As a guild, YGG brings to players a kind of gaming experience that is enhanced by having a supportive community — one where they can enrich themselves as they learn, level up, play for rewards and go on quests together.
YGG’s core mission is “when we play together, we unlock more opportunities together” as a means to help each other level up both in games and in life.
“The spirit of togetherness is also about inclusion: about welcoming new people to the community, no matter where they came from,” said Jen. “It’s about helping each other, persevering together, and riding highs and lows together as one giant family. All of our design choices are about welcoming everyone into the community.”
Behind the Rebrand
In medieval times, a guild was a trade association that represented tradespeople and skilled workers coming together. It was a tribe, symbolized by a coat of arms or sigil, something to wear to show allegiance to the group. The YGG design team wanted to stay true to the lore and history of guilds while taking a modern and contemporary approach to the YGG logo that gamers of all ages can get behind.
In the new logo, the “Y” in YGG was transformed to a forward-looking “Y,” giving it a “medieval-meets-digital” aesthetic. Meanwhile, the subtle upward movement of the descender in the letter “Y” is a wink to the community about “yield” — symbolizing growth and earning rewards.
Instead of using colors with a medieval theme such as brown and gray, YGG took some inspiration from companies such as Nintendo, whose game The Legend of Zelda makes use of a friendly and approachable palette. Because YGG is a community of individuals, unique in where they come from and what they hope to become, the design team wanted to incorporate the full spectrum of color so every player can choose their hero color as they chart their journey forward in the guild.
A lot of inspiration for the guild’s existing brand signifiers, the sword and shield, were taken from games such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and RuneScape, connecting YGG to the community’s gaming history and the guild’s own past.
The design team also took inspiration from popular examples of cooperative play within structured systems, such as Lego and Minecraft. They studied the rich and infinitely varied creative outcomes that can emerge from very simple building blocks, and designed the new YGG brand as a system of “atomic elements” that can be combined into infinite possibilities of expression.
“Given our context of web3 and DAOs, we needed to re-examine what branding means when ownership, governance and participation are no longer dictated by a single authority, when in fact, a brand is something everyone in the community can help mold and stretch into their unique expression that contributes to the whole,” said Jen.
YGG as a Decentralized Brand
YGG is also unveiling its “building blocks” concept, a decentralized brand system for all of its community members and subDAOs. A decentralized brand is something that can be reimagined and isn’t owned by anyone but also simultaneously owned by everyone. The community shares and builds the YGG brand together. This new brand system is an expression of one of YGG’s key tenets: that people create something greater when they do it together.
By empowering members and promoting deeper community involvement through its rebrand, YGG continues to push the boundaries of web3 guilds while staying true to its mission of decentralization.
The Runes: Building Blocks of the YGG Brand
Inspired by the symbology of runes found in medieval lore and gaming culture, YGG has also developed its illustration system. Here, the runes represent the community, where each block is a person that is a part of the whole. These building blocks enable any YGG subDAO and subguild to create their own unique guild logo or house sigil while visually aligning themselves with the broader YGG network. This architecture of the tiles and canvas allows anyone to create a digital “coat of arms” within a framing shape — such as a shield, which ties back to the medieval-inspired visual language of the original YGG brand.
When it came to selecting typography, the design team was just as intentional about access and availability. In order to express the right kind of aesthetic that would pair well with the rune system, the team looked at hundreds of open-license fonts before narrowing down to Sora, available through Google Fonts. YGG will also be providing the community with assets and templates that they can freely use to create artwork or other content with the YGG brand.
“We believe that this rebrand will help showcase YGG as a gaming guild that is truly representative of our community,” said YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon. “The team is excited to introduce other products in the works that will help grow the YGG ecosystem further.”
Stay tuned for more updates on the YGG dapp. Create your profile on the new website here and showcase your digital identity.
To learn more about Yield Guild, read the YGG whitepaper here. Join the YGG Discord or follow us on Twitter for future updates.
