Report for work done in November:
November was my second month working on this Socket and I have been able to make some discoveries, learnt some lessons and took notes of things that could be done better to organize design efforts in Pocket Network Foundation, while also delivering some design requests within the month.
My Discovery
The Creative Design workstream is still young at Pocket Network Foundation and this is understandable as the team has been more invested in building the core protocol of the project. This basically means that the team has had more engineering core team members and outsourced most designs over the years.
In PNF, Design is currently relegated as an afterthought and mostly outsourced to agencies which currently is expensive to say the least.
The idea of outsourcing some design needs to multiple parties not only will be expensive for PNF (financially), it’ll also create a lot of design debt across the different touchpoints in the ecosystem.
I look forward to working closely with the team in the coming months to implement a system where we have a thriving design organization actively delivering quality work.
Recommendations
As the project heads into its growth marketing era, it’s important to organize the design efforts in Pocket Network Foundation. We can build a standard guide that would enable even external contributors or other community contributors to ensure they keep designs consistent.
Building a Design Organization in Pocket Network Foundation
To ensure there’s a structure for delivering top tier, consistent and user-friendly designs for Pocket Network Foundation. I created a guide here for building a design organization in Pocket Network Foundation.
Design an Internal Component Library & Pocket Wallet Redesign
I’ll be working on a design system to ensure that the brand guidelines is followed across all touchpoints.
Within the scope of this Socket, I can distill different concepts of the Pocket DNA into design elements, create an inhouse component library based on the current brand guideline which can be used to redesign the Pocket Wallet. It is also right to mention that the current Pocket Wallet is based on the old design and would need a redesign while keeping its functionalities – this can be added to the list of design tasks that would be delivered in the coming weeks/months based on priority.
I also think outsourcing the redesign of the Wallet (in the form of a POP or formal contract to an agency) would be more expensive, but this is just a thought shared.
So it’ll be ideal to add this (component library design & redesign of pocket wallet) to my list of tasks for the coming months.
Aligning with the Marketing/Technical Documentation lead for Pocket Network
I got in a chat with Patrick Skinner earlier this week and will be meeting up with Adz later next week to discuss some of my ideas of how to build a design organization here in PNF to allow me to effectively deliver good designs, this follows my already thriving relationship with Zak. This is an exciting progress for me as I’ve been able to connect more with the team overtime and I’m looking forward to the work we will be pushing out together in the coming months and bonding more with the team towards contributing to the ambitious goals that Pocket has for 2024 and beyond.
Design tasks done for the month of November
- I worked on the draft for the design organization strategy. It can be found here. This is a draft and will be updated as I learn more about the Pocket Ecosystem with time.
- I designed the banner for discord channels.
- I designed the banner for the discord main server.
- I designed a visual for the Morse Builders Call.
- I finished setting up the new brand guideline in my design board – ready for the next steps which would be building on the foundation to create a component library that would help in future platform designs.
Comment on the new website
I think the new website was executed well, aesthetically, it’s inline with the brand guideline. These are just a few things I found from it that can be quickly updated if they are necessary.
- There is no testimonial section in the website.
- The website currently doesn’t have a form to collect email addresses for email content marketing – newsletters.
Final Remark
I look forward to the exciting work ahead and how all these plans comes together to make the look and feel of Pocket Brand stand out.