Brand Refresh: Visualizing the NEARverse

Greetings everyone,
We are excited to continue with updates on the Brand Refresh and we continue to invite your feedback.

This evolution of the NEAR Brand is crucial in helping people understand the power of the new world that NEAR enables. Since I joined back in 2018, I have been able to see, first hand, how committed the NEAR community has been to building a world where people have control over their money, data, and power of governance. We affectionately call this, the Open Web.

Early on, it was developers who saw the vision for how NEAR could enable this new world. Today, the NEAR community is made up of people from all over the world with many different interests and skillsets. The NEAR Brand must engage all types people in our Ecosystem (and beyond).

This new world is emerging before our eyes. It is vast, and full of opportunity. However, due to the breadth of it, it can be difficult to communicate to people.

“What is NEAR?” they ask.

hmmm… well… it’s… a… a whole lot of things… :slight_smile:

It’s a blockchain, a cryptocurrency, a development platform, a movement, a community… and so much more. It is, in many ways, a new world.

Many in our community have dubbed this world ‘the NEARverse.’

As we sought to communicate the vastness of the NEARverse and how all the pieces fit together, we thought a visualization could be helpful. So, for the past few months, we’ve been working with some brilliant CGI artists and designers to achieve this.

With NEAR as the infrastructure, developers, founders, creators, and community members can build beautiful new experiences–new ways to live, work, play, and connect.

NEAR is an open, living, breathing ecosystem that anyone can plug into and birth something beautiful.

So, today I wanted to share some of the progress on visualizing the NEARverse…

Now, I must warn you. This is quite a bit different than our current visual brand direction, so if you’re change-averse, please let it marinate before you respond :slight_smile:

The NEARverse does not exist in outer space. It is grounded. It is familiar, yet other-worldly.

NEAR is the infrastructure–the foundation for innovation.

It is living and active. Things are being built before your very eyes.

Each element is connected, and contribute to each other creating a harmonic ecosystem.

The environment will appear differently depending on which path you take on the website (developer, founder/creator, community). For example, founders/creators may see things as merely a vision of what could be. Like this…

Here’s the NEARverse in context of the new website which is still a work in progress. With the redesign, we are working to reflect the quality of the tech in the NEAR ecosystem. It keeps the original vision of NEAR which is a neutral base color palette (White/black) with the use of color to reflect the amazing experiences built on top of NEAR. However, we’re moving away from the primary color palette to a more sophisticated and diverse palette.

Hopefully I’ve provided enough context for you to see that we are taking a very intentional approach to the re-brand of NEAR.

So, I encourage you to take some time and sit with this a bit. Think about the future of NEAR, and be sure to check the open brand page to review strategy and find tips on how to provide actionable feedback.

We’re excited to hear your feedback!

More soon

20 Likes

Imagery and Brand

The city images are SICK!

The NEARverse does not exist in outer space. It is grounded. It is familiar, yet other-worldly.

This is important, both conceptually and as a point of differentiation from other blockchain projects.

Conceptually, bridging the gap between where we are now versus the future we want positions us as the pragmatic ledger while others are “floating around in space.” :stuck_out_tongue:

Many other blockchains and projects on top of them go with a space theme. It invokes feelings of wonder and grand vision (similar to our exploration work), but feels unapproachable and in some ways downright cold.

Website

I dig the more minimal direction of the website. It really lets the imagery shine! One word of caution: this styles makes each piece of information all the more important because there’s less of it. On the good side this is a great forcing function to keep things focused and trim fatty copy, but we have to make sure we don’t cut or obscure anything important.

Overall this is an exciting new direction and I can’t wait to see more!

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This looks awesome! This updated brand direction really fits how NEAR has evolved over the past year… artwork looks slick as well. I am excited to see more!

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Nice, like the direction, but would like to see a style guide rather than just a single rendering. You can’t just have CGI elements everywhere? The header and tag are both fluffy, but doesn’t really tell me what anything is or does. The random gradient from the side is giving me an awkward / unfinished feel.

I really like the lack of nearkats.

Current Landing Notes:

  • There is nothing on about WASM, Rust, AssemblyScript (I think it is a massive selling point and your key target is still developers right?) just a massive spot for EVM Aurora
  • There are links to point to applying for a guild, but no way to get to an aggregated guild list to poke around
  • The main entry landing page looks like a tuna can

Mintbase is finally getting a designer next week, we know we are not perfect, but with a team of 3 devs and no designer and 1/1000th the funding, we are getting there. We just need NEAR design game bumped up too ASAP. Competition is piling up.

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@nategeier thanks for chiming in. Glad you like where it’s headed. This is one of many posts introducing the new brand progress and elements. This post was focused specifically on visualizing the NEARverse, hence the title.

Thank you again for your feedback. We are working to make sure that NEAR is communicated clearly, effectively, and with much less ‘tuna flavor’ than ever before.

thanks

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Got it, I asked about the tuna design update plan and @jlwaugh pointed me to this post to comment on it.

I was talking about this gradient which was the only UI element showing Screen Shot 2021-06-23 at 6.58.19 PM

Can you point me to some other good threads?

It is still a work in progress, but I will be sharing more about it soon

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Love the palette & “It is grounded. It is familiar, yet other-worldly.” Love the renderings so far. One question about them, though: why is the NEARverse in a desert? Where are all the trees? :deciduous_tree: :palm_tree: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Chad, glad you’re digging it. We explored some things like that, but the color brought too much contrast to the palette. The environment is supposed to be able to recede and let the content come to the forefront, especially when we’re featuring projects building on NEAR.

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Got it. That’s fair. It still sort of feels like Dubai or Mars to me. If people think it’s Mars, it might not feel as, you know, grounded as we want it to :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like