Exploration

Blockchain Projects 2021–2022

A year deep in Web3: a Yat emoji portfolio, an Airfoil agency rebrand, and a Sandbox redesign. What survived the hype was a design lesson about abstraction, and a personal one about burnout.

Role: Brand & Product Designer
Timeline: 2021–2022
Team: Solo
Tools: Figma, Adobe CC

I took on as many NFT and crypto projects as I could find in 2021 thinking it was the opportunity of a decade. It was a lesson in what happens when you optimize for the wrong thing. The work was interesting. The ecosystem was not. This led to my first real burnout, which led to therapy, which over the years helped me build a stronger foundation than I had before.

The design work itself holds up, and so does what the year taught me about the space.

What the ecosystem taught me about abstraction

To design for Web3 at all, I had to learn its primitives properly: wallets and seed phrases, gas and why it fluctuates, what a smart contract actually commits you to, how L1s and L2s trade off. The lasting design lesson was that almost none of that vocabulary belongs in front of a user. Every project below wrestled with the same question from a different angle: how much of the machine do you hide before trust breaks, and how much do you expose before comprehension does? The best crypto interfaces I studied behaved like good banking interfaces: the complexity is real, load-bearing, and invisible until the moment you genuinely need to see it.

That instinct, keep the rails complex and the surface calm, turned out to be portable. It's the same job as making multi-entity accounting feel simple, and I've been doing some version of it ever since.

Yat: Emoji URL Digital Portfolio

A design challenge for Yat, a platform that lets you own an emoji-based URL. The brief was to design a digital portfolio concept using a Yat as the primary identifier.