2>3
DECENTRALISED WEB3 PLATFORM
Brand Evolution & Visual Language Design
Gelato Network
2023-24
Role
Senior Brand & Marketing Designer
7.5x X (Twitter) follower growth. Day-to-day social content design across the period.
80%+ Web3 market share success supported by designing the launch and communication designs for Gelato's Dynamic NFT platform.
The New Language
THE CHALLENGE
I inherited a brand fighting its own name: Gelato, Italian for ice cream, based at a Swiss Web3 company trying to earn trust in a serious blockchain environment. What I found had no character at all: alienating, neutral, cold. Nothing gave a person a reason to feel connected.
THE IDEA
A brand doesn't have to explain its own name. This one needed more than that. It needed a reason for someone to stop scrolling. Without that, nothing gets remembered; it just gets skipped.
Decision: The logo already had the answer built in. An ice cream, made of two parts: a cone and a scoop. The cone's shape matched the base of the Ethereum symbol, fitting since Gelato was built on Ethereum, so I fixed the cone as the constant, always standing for the network. The scoop stayed open: the product, the message, whatever Gelato needed to say that week.
The tone had to match: not serious, not playful either. Friendly. A cold brand gets scrolled past. A friendly one gets a second look. Same instinct behind everything I make: bring what's complex close enough that someone feels it, instead of just seeing it and moving on.
Experimentation with the scoop, from literal to amorphous, to find the most suitable abstraction.
The adaptation of every conclusion from research and experimentation into the live site.
The Craft
Every system looks resolved on a presentation board. The real test comes after: can the cone and scoop carry a product launch, a social post, a piece of news, whatever that week needs, and still hold their shape?
Decision: I put the system into daily use, building the social, blog, and web assets for one of the first dynamic NFT platforms. Proof that the language could flex without losing what made it recognizable.
The World
ICE
Ice isn't next to ice cream, it's already inside the name. Ice cream is frozen cream, held together by ice itself. That gave the next step its logic: not something added on, but something already there, brought forward. Ice is transparent, clean, shiny, smooth. A design can be all of those too.
Beyond the Frame
Not every brief fits inside a brand's main concept, and forcing it to doesn't serve the work. Web3 moves fast; something new needs answering today, not once it's been reasoned into the cone-and-scoop framework.
Decision: I let the brand's character hold even without leaning on its main visual device, proving the system was flexible enough to survive real, immediate pressure, not just its own showcase.
