Author: TWX
MonkeDAO has grown exponentially since its humble beginnings back in August 2021. Fast forward to today and we now have multiple revenue streams, a presence at every Solana event worldwide, and over $1 million in the treasury — not bad for a group of people with day jobs! But this progress highlighted an obvious disconnect — we’re an organisation that’s maturing at a rapid pace, but our visual identity wasn’t consistent across our many channels, and it also wasn’t flexible enough to adapt to our growth.
With critical projects such as $MONKE, subDAOS, [redacted] and [redacted] in the coming months, now is the perfect time for the DAO to accurately present itself as the professional, forward-thinking organisation we aim to be. That’s why the MonkeDAO Design Team is excited to to announce the launch of our new brand identity! It’s been a long and challenging process, but now we finally have our assets and we’re ready to push the monke brand into overdrive.
Our new brand is designed to communicate MonkeDAO’s different but complimentary personality attributes — professional and confident, but also playful and community-focused. In the centre of it all is the ‘MD’ Logo. The ‘MD’ logo is our core symbol, it’s a subtle nod to a monkey’s face and once you see it, you’ll always notice it. We aim to use the ‘MD’ logo everywhere in order to build quick and easy brand recognition.
The colours are an acknowledgement of the both a jungle environment and the common ‘monkeys eat bananas’ trope. Vivid blues are also included in order to provide further visual flexibility. Nearly every colour works with another colour in this palette, meaning any member can make a distinctive colour combination for their own use.
As mentioned earlier, this brand is a long time coming. The initial proposal ‘Engage the services of a Branding Agency to create a MonkeDAO Brand Identity’ was passed way back in mid-November. This was one of the first major proposals the DAO ever voted on, and from requesting SOL at $230 instead of USD, to severely underestimating the delivery date, the process was a difficult but valuable early experience for everyone involved.
As DAO leaders, we knew that working with an external partner was going to introduce some challenging dynamics. How would we reconcile our duty to member feedback with the speed of central decision-making? Thankfully our agency partner Widgets and Stone were patient and understanding of our situation, and after some growing pains, the Design Team were able to act as facilitators between them, our community, and our board.
We initially worked on a Discovery phase in January that outlined important considerations such as who we are, what do we do, what our personality is, and what the brand will be used for. For the following three months, the Design Team received iterations on type, colours and logos, and was tasked with filtering all of the feedback into actionable information for the agency.
Our final logo and colour palette vote was completed by the DAO a few weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been working to build a system of guidelines that anyone can take and use to represent the monke brand effectively. We also wanted a method to share the guidelines that didn’t involve sending a 20 page PDF file to someone. Thankfully these solutions now exist - we were able to create a brand guidelines website that can easily be shared at any time by anyone, and it’s easy to change and update as required. You can access this now at brand.monkedao.io
Now the initial hard work of synthesising everything ‘monke’ into a visual framework is complete, the MonkeDAO Design Team is focused on refining this brand further in order to empower our builders and creators with this toolkit of visual assets and guidelines. We’re so excited for the future of our DAO and we’re confident that the launch of our new brand is another important step towards becoming the premier decentralised community of Web3.
Long live monke 🍌
—
MonkeDAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization providing unparalleled value to our members and the Solana ecosystem through community-led projects, connections and innovations.
