Beeldconcept: HiveCreators collaboration

Briefing for HiveCreators

Ola Amigos!

This is the second briefing for my collaboration with HiveCreators published on Hive for full transparency. In this brief, I'll be taking you through the discovery phase of the project. HiveCreators and I also had our first Voice Meeting (involving: @eddiespino, @enrique89, @samgiset, and myself), which was pretty cool given the fact now that there is a Spanish and Dutch collaboration working on strategy and the branding of Hive! Eddie, you're a hero for remembering every word we say and translate. This phase took me a little over 5 hours to finish (including a brainstorming session with HiveCreators). The voice meeting was pretty productive and it's always good to work on team building during a collaboration.

Cheers,
Ruben

@Enrique89:
For approval: please comment on this blog post so I can start with Phase 3: Development
For Feedback: please comment or DM me in our group chat on Discord.

Phase 2: Discovery
In this phase, I'll be discovering (limited) more about Hive's market position (feel free to add more regarding updates around our market position). I will discuss and analyze the current visual identity of Hive and share my findings through constructive feedback. At last, I'll be figuring out if I can discover and start with developing an idea to introduce and further develop a few User Personas that will help me make better decisions during the upcoming phases.

Understand Hive's market position, current target audience, competitors

Current Market Position:
Steady growth since the launch in 2020. Currently ranked #165 (CoinMarketCap) with a market cap of $212 million (Price per HIVE token is $0.4595). Hive has around 2.4 million accounts with around 200K Daily Active Users. Hive is mostly known for its decentralized social media platform, while Splinterlands is among the top most played Blockchain games in the space. Hive is among the fastest blockchains with an irreversible block time of 1.8 seconds on average. Hive's USP is that it is a fully decentralized protocol, governed by its community. There is no team, no pre-mine, no VC, no ninja mine, and is being developed and governed by its community. Another USP is that Hive funds development through the use of a DHF (including this project that I'm currently working on). The community is Hive's most valuable asset.

Hive has gained a lot of popularity in the countries such as the Philippines, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Target Audience:
Hive users mostly consist of blockchain/cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Because Hive is mostly known for its Social Media Platform interfaces, this has attracted content creators, traditional web2 social media users that have shown concerns about privacy, censorship, and data-selling platforms, and users who have generally been interested in blockchain technology combined with social media. If we look outside of the Social Media Platform interfaces, Hive has also attracted (blockchain) developers and a few individuals that can be seen as investors. We also see an upcoming amount of people getting attracted toward Hive to develop or play games powered by Hive. Due to this nature, Hive has multiple audiences that can be targeted.

What does the competition do?
It is difficult to find competitors that have the same characteristics as Hive. There are a few blockchains that reward users for participation. Since this project is focusing on improving Hive's brand identity with a visual concept, we need to take a look at other DPoS consensus algorithms protocols that have established their name and brand, or other blockchains that have consistently published top-level graphics and visuals. I have seen blockchains such as EOS, and Solana sharing complex and very appealing graphics. While Hive is different from these blockchains, it is good to see what other blockchains have provided to target their audience. The challenge with this is that Hive has no (marketing) team that guides employees or produces top-level graphics. Working with the community is rather a new, yet innovative way to include anyone in participation.

Analyze the current visual identity of Hive to identify strengths and weaknesses

The visual identity report given to me by @hivecreators looks very promising and would function as a strong base to start basing our fundamental designs. I'd love to see more consistency in the work of icons, those are minor adjustments, but finetuning can make a big difference. And, if possible, I'd love to see more subtle elements that could be used as background fillers, or as elements to fill in an overlay of a design. Using part of the Hive logo for icons and elements is just genius. It also secures the ability to create unique elements specifically for Hive, and that is exactly what a brand needs to stand out. Imagine someone else (stealing) using our elements and icons, they would be promoting Hive without realizing it.

Still, there is plenty of room for growth that I'm seeing in this visual report.

What I really would love to see is:

More consistency overall
- sharp edges versus round edges
- color noise --> monochrome noise (define percentage in AI, PS, etc)
- 3D Gradients versus 2D graphics (feels inconsistent)
More clear guidelines on how to use elements, and how to explore/expand as an individual designer
- in case freelance designers would like to create graphics for themselves with the Hive logo etc.
- in case Hive content creators want to create graphics that are inspired by Hive DNA
Thinner lines to emphasize retro-futurism a bit more (GIF sample included on Discord)
Specific pages for -each- element that already has been produced

This visual report could be implemented into the existing brand book. Whereas the fundamentals can be quite simple, and the expansions can be undergoing ongoing development. My feedback in general would be simple, focus on creating a guide that explains just the fundamentals of the Hive brand-book, and add in "expansions", this way, our brand book is undergoing ongoing development, and it would be much easier and simpler to introduce pages to the existing brand book that contains just the fundamentals. It is also a good practice to see how strong and how long-term the fundamentals will work out. If you see yourself using the fundamentals every time you're starting to design, you have done a great job. At some point, you should start seeing a shift in placements, fonts, colors, etc. The trick? Keeping something minimalistic can have a huge impact long term.

Fundamentals

Logo
Typography
Color palette
Include clear guides

Expansions

Visual Elements (shapes and objects)
- Ongoing development / introducing a fixed style and kit of elements
Icon-kit
- Ongoing development / introducing a fixed style and kit of icons
Social Media overlays/backgrounds
- Guides for Social Media ratios
  - 1:1
  - Vertical / Horizontal
Additional Color pallets to branch out for specific target audiences and organize them into categories
for example:
- Development/developers
- DeFi / investors
- DeSo / content creators
- Gamefi / gamers
- Academy / Education
- Solids + Gradients
Themes:
- Theme #1: A guide for Retro-Futurism-themed graphics
- Theme #2: A guide for Neo-Modern themed graphics
- etc.
And so on...

Overall, I like what I see. There is some fine-tuning needed to make it more unique, while still protecting and securing Hive's fundamental DNA. Keeping it minimalistic can be challenging, but knowing what to keep minimalistic can help a lot. The definition of themes could be much more powerful if the fundamentals are minimalistic. This also includes the ability to adapt easily to future trends. The positive side of that is that we won't be required to do a complete re-brand, but we can just introduce the next theme that fits the trend.

The only weakness that I'm seeing in the visual identity report, is that Sam played it too safe with retro-futurism and that some graphics may seem too old school, as the style has been used many times in the past. I hope that with the above feedback, she realizes how easy it could be to focus on retro-futurism if working on a theme that serves as an expansion, that started from the fundamental design but introduces a trend.

During our Voice meeting, we already talked about most of this.

Choosing and developing user personas that will help with making graphic design decisions

For ongoing development reasons, I have to censor this part :D

But is it flexible and doable within the budget?

There is a lot of variety possible with these user personas.

Customer/user Journey

In a nutshell, the customer journey of every Hive user is simple.

Hears/reads about Hive
Creates Hive account
Explores Hive
Meets Hivers
Discovers new things to do on Hive
Gets familiar with Hive
Discovers more new things to do on Hive

But, of course, there are a lot of things going on during these steps. And some steps are even crucial to keep our retention rate high. I feel that we can gain a lot by increasing the quality of a few steps.

Let's ask ourselves if we could increase the quality of these steps:

"Hears/reads about Hive" - Yes, What did you hear/read about Hive?
"Creates Hive account" - Yes, UI/UX, LiteAccounts, Logging/Connecting in through a gateway (Facebook/Twitter, etc.), a little education about Hive Keychain.
"Explores Hive" - Yes, but limited to Hive's core UI/UX and Socials
"Meets Hivers" - Yes, teach and educate our beloved community. Everyone could become an ambassador
"Discovers new things to do on Hive" - Yes, by keeping up to date, and spreading the news ASAP from Hive's Socials for example.
"Gets familiar with HIve" - Yes, at this point, the new user has become a full-fletched Hiver --> teach and educate
Etc.

There is some overlap. There may also be a challenge with posting and publishing from the Hive official account. In some way, I firmly believe that we all are Hive, and there is Hive in all of us. Of course, we're all individuals, but what I most liked about Hive in my early years, was that everyone was extremely helpful. This is truly one of our hidden powers if you'd ask me. I can't imagine how many times the same questions have been asked to different people, and answered the same way.

This gets me a few ideas that I want to explore further in the development phase (but already developing in my mind). So, let's stop right here, and see what @enrique89 thinks about this.

Voice Meeting

The goal of our first voice meeting was to get to know each other a little bit better. Right before the meeting, I received @Samgiset's presentation for the visual identity report for Hive from @hivecreators. Overall, the development of Hive's brand is taking a nice turn IMO. There is some further development required that involves some finetuning and bringing more consistency to the identity.

We discussed a little bit about how to brand Hive in the future, and how we could implement and introduce expansions of the brand book. While this isn't my main focus, it is important to build from a fundamental design, I shared my opinion and gave some feedback on a few things that I would love to see.

We brainstormed a little bit, and I had the opportunity to pitch ideas for this project. It was nice seeing that Sam and I are pretty close on the same page regarding with way to go. Which is following the trend of Retro-Futurism and Neo-Brutalism/Neo-Modern styles for graphics. The main "challenge" for me, is to make something nice on a "low budget", so I shared my concerns about this and shared my ideas on how to tackle this challenge. Ongoing brand development is necessary anyway, so it would be good to focus on specific parts.

The voice meeting lasted a bit over 2 hours, which was a little bit longer than calculated and expected, but it ended up as a productive meeting where we got to know each other better, share ideas, and could brainstorm together.

One idea in particular that caught both of our attention before even talking to each other was the educational part. This topic has returned a few times.