This blog post is a continuation of part 2 of our “Design At Arcana” series, written by our Chief Design Officer, Sharan Grandigae. If you haven’t checked the first blog out already, here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3AHXVPA

This latest blog post gives a sneak peek into the evolution of our design language and the choices we’ve made around design. Read on.

How Web3 Dictates the Design Language & Choices at Arcana

When designing for a Web 3.0 platform, it’s necessary to keep in mind the context in which the design exists.

To sum up the evolution of the internet, Web 1.0 was about publishing static websites on steroids, which is what Gutenberg would have done. The transformation was short of the original revolution of the 1400s with a jetpack strapped to its back. Web 2.0 ushered in the age of interactivity, where you could get information off the internet and talk back. And boy, did we talk! And boy, did they listen, snoop on our conversations and watch our interactions! Data is the new oil they claimed. An apt comparison as the old oil is putrefied dinosaur juice while the new one has been produced by squeezing it out of us.

The two previous periods of the internet lacked commerce embedded into the fabric of the web. If the web was meant to bring us closer together, this commerce layer remained the last hurdle to overcome. And then the Bitcoin blockchain appeared and changed everything! Then Ethereum came along and enabled solutions to the next challenge for the trust-less coordination of society with the idea of smart contracts. The next obstacle is storing data that underpin every action we take, resistant to censorship and geographical catastrophes, and Arcana is building that.

Now, to find the design essence of Arcana, I started to think about the shape of Web# itself. If we were to draw out the topography of the web before Web 3.0, we would have many nodes with lines drawn between them with some rectangle boxes of different sizes representing big and small servers, payment gateways and such. With Web 3.0, it would be the same, but without the servers in the middle, because the Ethereum Virtual Machine and storage are built into the fabric of the web itself. And then you wouldn’t need nodes because they all represent just one idea, capable of performing all tasks and achieving one objective. It could, therefore, merge into a single dot. But then a drop is such a two-dimensional character that it couldn’t capture the complexity of what’s happening here. So, a sphere turns out to be a better representation instead.

But a sphere is a sphere. So what sets this one apart? So we breathed life into it to represent the vibrant worlds with the “gloss dial” turned up high.

Could we make it all just one colour? No, because each sphere is a different concept. A blue one, a red one, an orange one, a green one, and a pink one came to life. And then some are active groups, and some are dormant. So what’s the opposite of a vibrant, colourful world? A black one without colours. So black spheres had to exist, but with a bit of a shine on them to represent the potential within to return to a colourful, vibrant world.

There are things in our world that are under scrutiny and surveillance. Anti-government activists, reporters who are voices against powerful forces, or just people opposed by the champions of the status quo — the people without whom our realities would be much poorer and diminished — they are all first-class citizens within Web 3.0 (and therefore the world of Arcana) that doesn’t discriminate. Their representations within this world were created through filmography techniques where the same scene can be viewed without filters, and you’d see one thing but apply a filter and see a whole new reality in the same space. We represented this idea in black and white, which was a stroke of luck because that’s how some of them may view the world — in terms of black and white. They emanate colour within this space when the wrong people aren’t looking and stay black and white at other times. These people add texture to our world, and we feel their presence even if we can’t see them. That’s led to the grunge effect.

I call the design system that emanated from this squiggle of a thought “Spatial Gloss”. And as with any sound design system, it creates constraints for the maintenance of consistency and also provides ways for it to evolve, so it’s always fresh. My team, including Daiyaan, Ipshita, Anjali, Arush and Digant, have taken the original idea further and added in layers, unfurling a world seen through their eyes, making it a more prosperous world, a fantastic world.

Like most designers, I don’t like explaining my process, and I resisted writing this. But Web 3.0 will change all of our lives for the better, and it can only happen when we in the design community get involved and view it the way we do, shaping it the way we can. So if it’s possible to inspire you to action by sharing my own story, I had to give it a shot.

About Arcana Network

Arcana is Web3 infra for devs to launch and scale apps through its Auth, Store, and Access SDKs. Web3 apps use Arcana’s SDK to authenticate users with Social and Passwordless Auth and create non-custodial wallets, Store Encrypted/Unencrypted Data, and Manage Access. Built for Ethereum and EVM-based chains, with Arcana’s privacy stack, developers can build secure and privacy-preserving apps with a seamless user experience.

Arcana has raised 2.7Mn USD from some of the leading investors and founders in the ecosystem, such as Balaji Srinivasan, Founders of Polygon, Woodstock, Republic Crypto, and Digital Currency Group.

Watch out for Arcana’s upcoming Mainnet in December 2022. Want to know more about our Mainnet features? Book a demo.

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