As the Head of Design and Product at PechaKucha.com in 2022, we leaned into Web3 technology as a differentiator to other platforms. With similar technology to Twitter Spaces, we wanted to give users a way to token-gate their communities as well as celebrate the brand. We developed and minted a series of 2,020 Unique NFTs and modified our online platform to connect to user's Ethereum wallets to make this possible.
PechaKucha is well known for its large collection of wonderfully designed event posters, so I wanted to develop something unique and artful that incorporated these along with something directly from our branding - our PK logo figure.
Although design is my primary vocation, I am also a proficient Python developer. I wrote a program with a custom algorithm for this project that generated thousands of unique and aesthetic NFT art files. To create a hierarchy of rarity for our NFTs, I designed a set of 8 PK figures, each representing one of PechaKucha's core values and a handful of differently colored tiles. After securing the rights to use a large set of PechaKucha event posters as the seeds for the unique, randomly generated backgrounds, the algorithm parsed and combined the elements to produce thousands of one-of-a-kind, artful NFTs with proper rarity values in 30 minutes of processing time.
To keep collectibilty higher, I designed 26 custom versions that would have an extremely rare or one-of-a-kind status in the collection.
I developed the UX and UI design for the online experience in Figma. NFT owners would be able to connect their Ethereum wallets and view and show off their NFTs on profile pages on the platform. I also developed assets for the promotional campaign leading up to the mint that would live in social media and on-site.
The NFT was launched successfully without any platform integration issues. Shortly after launch, the Cryptocurrency and NFT markets tumbled down. Our base users were not crypto-native, and despite selling out during pre-mint and efforts to onboard those new to crypto and NFTs with options to pay via credit card, the actual mint was not as strong as expected. The effort did elevate PechaKuch.com to a native Web3 company/platform as hoped, and the collection is still listed and can be viewed on OpenSea.
