Bee Token aims to decentralize the home sharing economy by leveraging the blockchain technology. Both vacation home owners and travelers stand to gain by cutting out the commissions of established intermediaries.
Leading design at Bee Token, I get to bring the brand to life through design while working with an all-star team. Together, we launched the dApp, Beenest — our decentralized application (dApp) powered by the Ethereum blockchain where travelers can rent properties using cryptocurrency.
In this post I want to provide a glimpse into the design of the Bee Token brand at its inception, and our efforts in driving a design-centric culture at Bee.
How it Began
Like many great ventures, it all started as a side project. A friend reached out and asked, “We got 3–4 engineers from Facebook, Google, Uber, and we need real life help [marketing/design].”
I went to Uber HQ to meet up with Jonathan Chou, the CEO of Bee Token, whom at the time was the Lead Security Engineer at Uber. He briefed me on the nascent cryptocurrency industry. It was my first time becoming acquainted with the concept of blockchain.
For Jon to put all his effort behind launching this company, I thought there must be something there. I found myself trusting this crazy person and became the first non-engineer on the team!
By default, startups operate on a lean budget. They get by for the first few years with a couple engineers, a marketer or a business development person and then realize the need for design. However I’ve always believed that for a company to succeed, a culture that values good design is crucial.
As a designer, being involved at the beginning stages is a rare opportunity. My goal was to build a design-driven culture at the onset and create consistent style and messaging across the organization. Weaving design with strategy will only allow us to build a better product.
1) Establish the brand
Startup or not, I believe in following the best design practices of top global brands. Something I learned from Phil Knight’s Shoedog: we must act as if we are an established brand or else we would never get there. To start, I built a brand style guide to define the design standards of our brand and to establish a unique and compelling image. By establishing key design elements, I could then drive consistency across the organization and our products.
Mood boards
Before diving into specific design elements like logos and fonts, it’s important to take a few steps back. What is the brand trying to evoke? Who should it appeal to? These questions are somewhat rhetorical as we can rely on our instincts to answer.
Starting out, I created brand mood boards to obtain a sense of how the team feels about the brand and the industry and thus determine a visual direction. I labeled each mood board with emotions and keywords, as well as possible color palette.
We debated amongst bold and energetic with a lot of bright color, minimal and clean with spots of accent color, and darker and mysterious with color splashes. After playing with these ideas, we went with a combination of 2 & 3 below, with yellow as the main brand color and dark blue as the secondary brand color.
In the creative process, drawing on other areas of inspiration from our lives can be very effective. Jon said yellow resounded with him immediately because he saw a video that highlights the many popular yellow cartoon characters against the blue sky. The video highlights the effective use of yellow as an impactful brand color.
Naming & logo design
Concurrent with determining the brand visual direction, I worked with the team to come up with the company name and key messaging. Inspired by the idea of worker bees working together collectively in a decentralized network, we built our brand around “Bee”.
We also played with word associations. In addition to decentralization and collaboration, the product centers on home sharing. The images of both “home” and “bee” correlate nicely with “nest. “Beenest” thus became the name of our decentralized home sharing platform.
In designing for the logo mark, I researched logos in the home and real-estate industries extensively and collected motifs that represent bees, honeycombs, and houses. I then experimented with different styles: the geometric, the more elegant, or the more abstract look.
Once a direction on general style is chosen, I continued with hundreds of iterations with varying degree of line thickness, roundedness, shape, angle, to finally reach the final design.
I continue to receive comments about the logo since Bee Token launched. A designer friend told me that she loves how the logo represents “coins” with the layered roofs. I received another comment from a member of the Bee Token telegram group saying he loves how the pointy shape on the left looks like a Bee’s tail. I didn’t think about either of these elements while designing the logo. Just like other forms of art, we like to try and analyze the artists’ intentions. The same goes for logos. It’s always a nice surprise when your audience sees more in your design than you originally anticipated.
2) Creating the brand style guide
When left to our own volition, we tend to choose colors, typography, and positioning of logos on a whim. Most people, especially non-designers, rarely notice or question these visual decisions. Without a consistent design strategy and style guide, the visual communication coming from the brand would be inconsistent and appear unprofessional.
Ensuring best practices in design means maintaining a style guide. The style guide informs the other team members exactly how to adhere to the brand’s image. As the only designer in a company full of engineers and marketers, it takes a certain tenacity to convey the importance of brand consistency and style; especially challenging in the startup environment where projects and initiatives happen fast.
Luckily, the team recognizes the importance of branding and design and they do their best to adhere to the style guide. After all as users, we all appreciate clean, intuitive and aesthetically pleasing graphics.
3) Look to the future of the brand
Now that the brand style guide is created, what’s next?
The style guide is never officially “done”. It’s an evolving, living document. As the company grows, we constantly update and iterate upon the style guide as we see fit for the brand. Adding new products or features may warrant additions to the color palette or tweaks to the branding. For example, the font or color I have chosen for brand marketing has been adjusted to adapt to the functionality and scalability when used in a product environment.
If we look at long standing, venerable companies we see their logos, colors and taglines evolve over time with their strategies, customer base and overall image. Just like technology and marketing, style must adapt.
The style guide not only serves as our “design bible”, but it is also an ongoing experiment.
