Designing for DeFi - Richard Burton

switching back to kind of just the the ui ux focus um so you know people are working on on things experimenting and building new things um our next presenter is somebody who has a uh can bring the voice of experience uh somebody's that's been working on ui ux for quite a while i believe even going back to maybe the early days of ethereum um correct me if i'm wrong rick but i believe uh also curve curve is one of my favorite ui ux in in the space i i just love the retro vibes and it's uh it's so much fun to use that that's all michael i can't claim it uh uh but i think i think we we came up with the name together so that was fun but uh yeah no no he he was the one who led the leather charger i believe it's actually a default css library from someone who just wanted to make the windows feel again so it was kind of a fun choice for sure gotcha well yeah there's a lot of really interesting uh different approaches to to design in d5 and across daps in general so um rick's in a great place to give give some insight on on that and uh kind of tell you where his head's at right now so yeah thanks for joining us rick great and um i was just wondering just briefly before i start i'd love to just see these comments that are coming on twitch so i can respond to any questions or comments or things like that um and and that would be really helpful so yeah let me just should we switch over to my screen and then i'm just basically just going to run you through here we go down the vortex i'm basically just going to run you through um like a big project that i've been working on recently and just like all the thinking and interactions and like the messy kind of back and forth of the design process and then perhaps share a little bit more about um you know uh what some of the interactions are now um like uh with the community as we begin to make this project kind of more widely available um so the protocol that i'm currently focused on helping out is known as fey protocol or fei and it's a major contribution to the stable coin space and ideally uh to the d5 space in general um and and the way in which fey works is that it's it's it's trying to uh uh bring about a kind of under collateralized stable coin or a stable coin that can maintain its peg without needing you know it to be massively over collateralized um so obviously there's been a lot of um hype and different stuff in the stable coin space we've seen you know tons of different projects come out that have you know different takes um and and faye really is a bunch of different mechanisms that i'm gonna try and like add design to over time and i'm really just like probably like a month into this process so the the the the design process began with like talking about um how the the protocol itself is going to raise capital so uh the company that's building phase raised kind of private money um but the protocol itself needs capital to exist in the same way kind of maker uses capital to produce die fei needs capital to produce fae the the stable coin and so this was a kind of prototype that joey and seb um threw together for like how these things could work and and and and and what i want to kind of emphasize here is that the design process began like very broad like we've got to cover not only branding but you know capital loading um managing different systems uh we've got to kind of do the naming the timing um explain different things and we started with some really rough prototypes of how we're going to explain the bonding curve and all these things and and and really the whole process was like a back and forth um of white boards quick figma prototypes lots of comments um you're looking at how other people have addressed these things i think gnosis have done some great work there um and drawing inspiration from some of the like previous ui work we did at balance um and and really thinking carefully about like how all these um things should work and how things can look um so yes you can see here that really i'm just trying everything like just just trying a bunch of stuff for genesis but this was like the initial engagement with the with the phalads and then further over in the document and i i don't really segregate too much early on i'm thinking about this theme okay so fae is actually uh referring to something called a yapstone there's also the rye stone community um and so we're kind of drawing on similar themes looking into you know what it meant to have a yap stone uh what it meant to record data uh and over here you can see all my sketches and early ideas and brain dumps of like what what how does this protocol work how does it manage liquidity how does the system function and i was starting to think about combining some kind of like electrical theme with the kind of stone based simple system because i think that's you know kind of interesting that we're we're kind of combining these new accounting systems together where where we're we're moving forward from systems where humans would account for things and we're starting to kind of build this infrastructure that's like computer controlled accounting um and that's that's was like yeah just where my head was at and still is that is i'm thinking about ways we can kind of make the protocol look like an embedded chip system or something like that and and all this theming is is um is interesting and something i really wanna hit on more um and so next i'm gonna move uh into you know what i think is really important is thinking through icon work and this has really been a collaborative process both with the team at fae um and and um and a bunch of community members who've chipped in ideas um and so and it's most like basic levels start with the kind of obvious face stone themed whole um uh uh in a circle and then looking at different kind of block styles or hexagons or kind of appealing to those those different um there's different themes and really it was just like tons of variation and sketching and um and then you know more broadly we realized that uh obviously there's gonna be two token designs here this is a two token model there's the fei usd which is the stablecoin and then there's tribe which is the governance token that will be managing the system um and you know when i look at crypto icons a lot of them kind of abuse um quite a few basic principles of design um so nearly all of these icons that you see here would look really hard if you zoom out it's really hard to recognize them there's a few that work but what you're always wanting to optimize for is like the lowest fidelity option right because imagine you know the fey usd on a um android phone with the with the kind of smallest resolution the smallest screen could they make out what fair usd is in this kind of sea of different tokens uh and you know there's some people who've done a good job like tkn and a couple of others but in general i'm pretty disappointed with the like current state of the art of token iconography and i'm not saying we've got anything better necessarily yet but i just want to point out some of the problems like you look at something like kin right that's an incredibly intricate design that just will not render on like 16 pixel icons uh it'll just end up being a blur um iota obviously a bit of a disaster protocol disaster token as well um but yeah you can basically just see like generally you're looking to see is this visible when it's zoomed out and would this work on a low resolution screen and and and i think a lot of tokens fail that test and that's why they're kind of they're not driving themselves into the consciousness i think ethereum has a very recognizable branding it scales up it scales down works really well um but there are many many other tokens that kind of don't meet that test and and i just get almost token blindness a little bit and would struggle to pick them um out of a kind of lineup of other tokens um and so yeah actually on new year's eve i was with joey and seb and we were just chatting about ideas and vibing you know together and like uh really talking through what we want to kind of communicate and there's this kind of tribal element to the whole project that we're calling it the tribe the people who help out uh members of the tribe the people who are investing members of the tribe the community who are coming in are all part of that tribe and and one kind of idea that i touched on was um this idea of like stonehenge or like these kind of tribal stones and the way in which they're uh set up and and and that's how our kind of early prototypes for tribe token and and the kind of face stone ended up looking and we were starting to get towards something here but we weren't super happy with it we're like that this is cool but we haven't like probably cracked it another thing that's so important i think uh in design and thinking branding for different projects is finding like the emoji that really captures the project it seems like emoji based projects or ones that have like emoji like arves ghost or others just capture the memes and like capture the livelihood of the of the community in a really interesting way so we very early on we started debating you know what would it what would it mean to have a have a an emoji that represented both tribe and fair usd um yeah so here we go some more different prototypes experimenting with color and this is the most important thing is seeing what it looks like at multiple sizes and like does the spacing work both when it's large or does it work when it's small and really diving into those those variations and then when uh joey and i were doing a trip together uh i touched on this idea of you know fey usd um could be represented by the pyramid that is on many different dollars denominated um notes uh this is and then we went down the rabbit hole on you know what is what is that pyramid what what is that kind of uh i um and and and i went really into like um i believe it's it's it's related to the eye of providence or and there's all kinds of um uh you know other elements to that and like uh symbolism built into this idea there's this kind of all-seeing eye and that it's part of the like the us's um kind of strength and and control and things like that um so so yes we built off that theme and we thought actually this this actually does capture the stable coin quite well um and went through a ton of variations uh on those and and um eventually got to this place where we thought we were happy with it like we thought okay we're getting close towards you know a kind of cohesive token branding strategy we're happy with it's fun to kind of place it among um you know other things and and then several members of the community came in and offered some really great input so there was lol d5 and boku uh so initially lol d5 was thinking more of a kind of um abstract t here with with different setups and we went through a bunch of variations together um and and like ended up looking at how those spacings looked and and how they could work um and and this process is again just a massive amount of back and forth and it was so fun to like involve community members in that and you can see here some of lol defy's other great ideas um but really what we're getting towards now uh and this is commit this is an idea from boku is is this notion of a kind of negative t so we're actually going back to that stonehenge theme and we're using the space created between the rocks and as a kind of negative implied t and so this is where we're getting to currently it's by no means finalized but i just thought i'd show some of the the live work here um as things progress cool so again let's switch out of branding and we'll go back over to what's really important which is how the protocol will accrue capital and this has been a long process of different design work i was showing you some of it earlier but um but what it's got towards uh is is a kind of pretty uh kind of basic system where we are trying to just kind of communicate uh the variables involved as fey raises capital and how it can have an influence so we're trying to make it clear that people can you know deposit capital and that like different amounts of capital will have an impact and the price of ether will have an impact on how much of the eventual tokens you end up getting um and then we're going through uh kind of different states so thinking through um you know what are your deposits how much have you raised what what are you able to do with the deposits and and and and whether you'd like to commit more capital to the system and so yeah the feedback we've had from that it was it was fairly complicated and it was a lot to process and we're now working on a simpler version and a more advanced version i think for people who are throwing in 5eth uh you know they just generally they're going to hear the project and do that but people who want to put in a lot more money they're going to do you know much more much more than that um and uh and they might want to you know use the more advanced systems so that gives you an idea of just like some of the progress we've gone through of just thinking about how the capital can be allocated to the protocol itself um and let's let's go back into uh you know again the home page is still very basic um but but i wanted to kind of capture the idea of fey as a as a a kind of new way of driving um stability uh i think that the most interesting part of the mechanism is that when phase kind of above the peg it has one set of mechanisms to bring it back down and when fade trades below the peg as a whole separate piece of machinery to to bring it back and get up um and and these pieces of machinery are not actually like human-controlled they're computer controlled and so we really are trying to um you know try to make this thing as clear as possible and and and uh trying to make this trying to share what is going on under with all the code and in the end i settled on this kind of wave theme um this idea that um you could uh uh like make sure that everything is like clearer and the waves are clearer and then you know just just just kind of elucidate that there's this constant flux around a stable coin's peg and that fey wants to to kind of hug that and so went through a bunch of themes um a bunch of different text and copy and trying to explain where it's going and ended up getting towards this kind of dark theme which we're pretty happy with for now uh but again you can probably see there's like five or six different fronts that i'm trying to push the design forward on and it is by no means uh where we want it to be but it's just trying to get to a v zero for everything so that people can use it um at this stage i just wanna quickly come back to see uh the the twitch stream i i don't know how i can see the questions right now so is there any way you can just show me the questions on here or should i go to the twitch stream live i think on the right side you should be able to open the comments button and looks like we look him okay we unfortunately lost him uh but he should be able to load he'll be loading the page probably right back yeah a couple questions here how can the community get involved um that's a wonderful question i think i can't speak to what uh other he's back sorry about that everybody no worries all right sorry i just wanted to see the comments just just to make this a little bit more interactive um how can the community get involved i'm sorry and the comments are they they're showing up uh in the comments section on the right okay great uh how can the community get involved so i'm am i seeing everything live i just want to make sure i'm like yeah um hey great great yeah so the community can get involved by going to the design channel which is on the discord and you can check out that um the link to that will be on twitter.com faye protocol um cool all right well if that's the only question so far then i'll happily just like carry on for um another another five to ten minutes just showing you an overview of like all the things we're thinking about and some of the interactions that we've had from the community so um one quick note rick um you've got linda left um oh okay amazing and some miscommunication so you just have one no no worries no no absolutely um so i'll do one last minute just rounding up like where we're at and this has been great it's just fun to go through a file and hopefully people see a different perspective on like what this stuff looks like and the kind of multiple fronts that we're thinking through and um yeah i'll just quickly maybe uh just show um one thing i've been you know quite quite excited to do is is is think through a a trading ui um again i've done that kind of 10 or 15 times but it's fun to just approach that again um because there are some interesting incentives that come with uh with fae um and so we've just been uh thinking through how to communicate the kind of bonus or the the penalties the burns that can occur as you trade um faith for eth um that's part of the mechanism so there we go i think that's been a pretty uh rip-roaring uh uh go through of like a project that's still live in development um and and and really none of this is where we want it to be it's all about just getting everything lined up to a v0 so everything can kind of move forward and be launched but then we're really hoping to refine this and make this great and ideally i'm looking for a designer who's you know just young hungry fired up and wants to just take this like base level that i've started with and really run with it and make it their own um and so that that's really uh kind of what i wanted to share is like this is what goes on in my brain this is how i work with people in general with founders i just try and send them a figma file full of ideas and then we can get things flowing i'm not just trying to tell them what to do i'm like let's just see what you think about these pixels um so yeah it's been super fun just just kind of giving an overview of irene it's been really fun working on fade protocol so far and if anybody else wants to pop in add their comments you know give feedback then the discord is popping off and we've had some really good back and forth in there in the design channel so yeah thanks so much for everyone's time and really appreciate this opportunity to speak hey thanks rick and uh if anybody wants to keep tabs on on what you're thinking kind of your insights it looks like you have some some great thoughts on your twitter feed do you have a blog or anything uh yeah all my stuff's um you just started my twitter and it's all there all the links to everything so yeah great good to have you all hey thanks again cheers everyone