<aside> ™️ Hey everyone, below you’ll find the current plan for sBTC and Stacks brand work. In light of recent suggestions to move up our brand refresh exploration of Stacks, we have an opportunity to work on top-to-bottom assessments of the two brands as part of a greater whole (and where/how to benefit from the interplay and/or separation). The full process will take time, but we’re confident giving the experts space to really get this right is the best long-term move. We describe shorter-term steps we’re making in the interim to buy us the time for these deeper brand explorations.
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Problem: Since sBTC was announced, needs for resources and educational materials have been piling up. We need to be able to offer the deliverables in the short term (and importantly, do so with some level of professionalism) without being blocked on the full brand exploration which will take 2-3 months. Examples of resources we need that can’t wait on the full brand process include presentations for partners, follow-up BD assets, developer resources for hackathons, event graphics, and other content. Even in just a quarter of working on sBTC we’re suffering from a lack of cohesion on material related to sBTC and need to quickly remedy it.
Solution: To solve for all this quickly, we’ve created a simple placeholder brand for sBTC which is intended to be swapped out or upgraded before launch. It is intentionally minimal and inoffensive, as well as easy to work with/hard to mess up too badly - it doesn’t say a lot on its own and that’s by design - it fits the stage of the project we’re in. To that point, we’re still learning a ton about the design of the system and the personas we want to target between now and launch, so this approach gives us some freedom to experiment without as much risk of damaging our final brand in some way.
Summary: This placeholder will unblock us in the short term, open us up to plenty of learning opportunities while we wait for the full brand work to finish, and prevent us from painting ourselves into any corners while we forge ahead now.
Note: The Bitcoin B was intentionally not used here so as to allow the WG to explore this further. Feedback suggested there was a risk of negative reaction to something seen as an affinity marketing scam.
For access to the assets, please contact [email protected]. They will be managed somewhat more tightly than the Stacks brand to try and reduce the number of places we have to update later.
There are multiple reasons we’re aiming to release a small v1 website with placeholder branding sooner than later. If you’re interested in the rationale and uses, many of them are here:
This work is in progress now that the placeholder brand can be used. It will house key sBTC material and content. The goal is for it to launch on April 25th.
<aside> 🔔 Updates on this project are available here.
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Eugenia, with support from Jeff, will be kicking off a new Working Group focused on branding this week. Mitchell and Claire are currently signed up as support. Andre is likely to play an advisory role on the work related to sBTC. The two current priorities are: