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Proposal: Evolution Development - Graphic Design

Ryan Taylor

Ryan Taylor

Well-known member
Foundation Member
This is a cross-post from www.dashwhale.org/p/evo-designers

We are continuing to plan for a large ramp-up of activity in Evolution development.

@AndyDark and other Evolution team members have been planning the next phase of activities and determining what resources will be required to deliver Evolution. This proposal will provide initial funding for professional graphic designers to create the visual design for the Evolution web client user interfaces. This task was selected to outsource because it represents a stand-alone effort, allowing the team to focus on the technical design activities while accelerating the delivery of the project. The completion of this work is also a prerequisite to produce the UI HTML interface based on these visual. Therefore, outsourcing this body of work will accelerate the delivery of Evolution.

Be aware that we expect the full cost of graphic design to be $10,000. However, since the core team pledged to reserve 20% of the budget for community budget proposals, this proposal is limited to seeking partial funding. The sum of this proposal and all previously submitted proposals brings us to this 20% limit. We intend to request the remainder of the required funds in a separate proposal.

The work is expected to begin in August alongside the X11 hashing algorithm port and last approximately two months.

Requested funding is as follows for the July 6th budget cycle:
Total: 955.17 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain after the project is complete, we will reserve those funds for future Evolution development projects

Manually vote YES on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 yes
OR from the qt console:
mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 yes

Manually vote NO on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 no
OR from the qt console:
mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 no
 
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babygiraffe said:
This is a cross-post from www.dashwhale.org/p/evo-designers


We are continuing to plan for a large ramp-up of activity in Evolution development.

@AndyDark and other Evolution team members have been planning the next phase of activities and determining what resources will be required to deliver Evolution. This proposal will provide initial funding for professional graphic designers to create the visual design for the Evolution web client user interfaces. This task was selected to outsource because it represents a stand-alone effort, allowing the team to focus on the technical design activities while accelerating the delivery of the project. The completion of this work is also a prerequisite to produce the UI HTML interface based on these visual. Therefore, outsourcing this body of work will accelerate the delivery of Evolution.

Be aware that we expect the full cost of graphic design to be $10,000. However, since the core team pledged to reserve 20% of the budget for community budget proposals, this proposal is limited to seeking partial funding. The sum of this proposal and all previously submitted proposals brings us to this 20% limit. We intend to request the remainder of the required funds in a separate proposal.

The work is expected to begin in August alongside the X11 hashing algorithm port and last approximately two months.

Requested funding is as follows for the July 6th budget cycle:
Total: 955.17 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain after the project is complete, we will reserve those funds for future Evolution development projects

Manually vote YES on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 yes
OR from the qt console:
mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 yes

Manually vote NO on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 no
OR from the qt console:
mnbudget vote-many d5f4bfd272458d846ea50f3283ce654f9d77c2d1105059149dfb1bf8f1fcdd36 no
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Shall I slam you with questions now or after this passes/fails?

Cause this one seemed a bit bare, who are you paying? Whats going to get delivered for 10k?
 
TheDashGuy said:
Shall I slam you with questions now or after this passes/fails?

Cause this one seemed a bit bare, who are you paying? Whats going to get delivered for 10k?
Click to expand...
Now seems like a better time than later.

We have not selected a vendor at this time. This is strictly based off estimates from experts on the team that have contracted this type of work before. @AndyDark will have to provide the specific deliverables.

We recently completed some long-range planning and realized that in August and September we were expecting a large temporary ramp in costs, in particular because Core 12.2 development would be starting at the same time as the Evolution team needed Designers and the X11 Hash Ported to JavaScript. In fact, the costs would have exceeded our budget for August and September. Fortunately, because we planned ahead, the entire project can continue moving forward rapidly by pulling some of the August and September costs forward to July, before Core 12.2 (DashDrive) work starts. So the vendor selection hasn't happened yet, but will by the time they are required in August. If the funds are secured in July, that would even allow Andy to start outsourcing these projects right away, rather than waiting until August as originally planned.
 
babygiraffe said:
Now seems like a better time than later.

We have not selected a vendor at this time. This is strictly based off estimates from experts on the team that have contracted this type of work before. @AndyDark will have to provide the specific deliverables.

We recently completed some long-range planning and realized that in August and September we were expecting a large temporary ramp in costs, in particular because Core 12.2 development would be starting at the same time as the Evolution team needed Designers and the X11 Hash Ported to JavaScript. In fact, the costs would have exceeded our budget for August and September. Fortunately, because we planned ahead, the entire project can continue moving forward rapidly by pulling some of the August and September costs forward to July, before Core 12.2 (DashDrive) work starts. So the vendor selection hasn't happened yet, but will by the time they are required in August. If the funds are secured in July, that would even allow Andy to start outsourcing these projects right away, rather than waiting until August as originally planned.
Click to expand...

Can we atleast help pick said vendor? I would hate for another Terpin fiasco...

That being said, i'll have faith you guys know what you need, just PLEASE no more shit, yes I said shit, branding please. Either hit a home run or have the community provide input as to not make you guys look bad.

I beg of you.

Other than that good luck, ill ask more questions as this thread goes on maybe. But I got the majority of my answers for now.
 
TheDashGuy said:
Can we atleast help pick said vendor? I would hate for another Terpin fiasco...

That being said, i'll have faith you guys know what you need, just PLEASE no more shit, yes I said shit, branding please. Either hit a home run or have the community provide input as to not make you guys look bad.

I beg of you.

Other than that good luck, ill ask more questions as this thread goes on maybe. But I got the majority of my answers for now.
Click to expand...
I'm sure that Andy would LOVE input, volunteer graphic designers (as long as they are really good), referrals, etc. You should reach out to him if you know of anyone amazing.
 
babygiraffe said:
I'm sure that Andy would LOVE input, volunteer graphic designers (as long as they are really good), referrals, etc. You should reach out to him if you know of anyone amazing.
Click to expand...

I mean I'm sure for that sort of money, we can find the right guy.

Just none of this "oh im the bestest just because I worked on XX coin" like Terpin kept trying to pull.

www.Dribbble.com has loads of wonderfully talented folks, businesses and so on that would die to work on a project this large.

I'll look around. @AndyDark do you have anything to add sir? :D
 
I love that we are allocating funds to this! This is my favourite proposal yet but I agree with @TheDashGuy, I hope we select a top quality agency.
Would be awesome to know who www.circle.com used? Their app has by far the best design and ux that I have seen on the market thus far.
 
The track record for Dash and web design hasn't been the greatest. Could you at the very least offer several options for the community to help make decisions? Each designer should be able to do an example or provide something from their previous work that we can judge.

Do you need a Web Designer or a Graphic Designer? I think you need both. Don't dismiss the web designer talent above.

And I think you need to be even more specific on the Graphic Designer - icons, logos, info graphics, or layout.

Also I think you will need database support, SSL, etc.

And I would also suggest we look at this from a legal standpoint. If there is a central website managing funds - are there license requirements or locality restrictions. This may need to be decentralized software like bitsquare.

This is a big effort. Plan out all the steps so we don't get into a "we are waiting on x question and b resource" to finish.
 
Hi there,

I will provide some more detail on the design proposal here and try to answer some of the questions asked.

These funds will pay for an external (top-level) agency/graphic designer to work with the Evolution team to create visuals for the various websites and web clients we are building for the Evolution release

We will then take those visuals and build out the HTML / CSS to make sure all our web products conform to what the designer wants in terms of design / look & feel.

This is essential because right now (IMO) the quality of Dash’s web presences are a bit lacking (in terms of design/look & feel) and for Evolution the team wants to make sure our web products look & feel as good design-wise as the services we will be competing with (PayPal/Google/Apple).

The reason that’s important is obviously that when new users come to a Dash site the first impression visually is important to gain confidence in the quality of the product and to retain users the user flow and experience is key also and we need top-level graphic-design input to ensure this is the case. The visual design conveys a lot about the organization behind the product in terms of how current, innovative, relevant and serious we are about delivering our service and it’s also key to making sure the products are easy to use in terms of being able to quickly understand what the product is doing, pick it up and use it without needing additional help and delivering a quality experience when using the software.

Therefore I would like the Network to fund this work to ensure that when Evolution is launched the front-end is delivering more of a ‘wow’ factor than a ‘where do I go and what is this’ factor so we convert users quickly and retain them within an intuitive and rewarding user experience.

The scope of this work will be graphic design for the marketing site who’s call to action is to signup consumers and merchants to Evolution, and designing the consumer and merchant web-clients they will use following the signup process (which are the actual browser-based end-user Evolution "wallets" we are launching first, with mobile following shortly after) and some additional work on social plugins and other smaller elements. This is really a single process we need to design cohesively with a single party which is why a fair amount of design work has been budgeted here in one go (and if anything it’s under estimated).

We want to learn from the experience with the Dash.org project and make sure this is developed within a single cohesive team consisting of people with professional experience to do so because it’s critical to avoid the previous problems that would cause this side to overrun by months which would delay the overall Evolution launch.

Therefore the process for this will be managing this internally in the Evolution with people with the relevant experience and also plug in contributors such as TheDashGuy, Salmion, Perry from Node40 if they are willing/have the time, and anyone else who wants to contribute directly (ping me [email protected] with a bit of background and what area you’d like to be involved with and I’d love to get you involved).

We will then work closely with the designer to visualize the products and get a UX (user experience) / look & feel to make sure our Evolution products look great and are most importantly easy to understand and use and delivered at the right stages to tie into the existing software development required to launch Evolution as soon as possible.

What this proposal won’t be doing is using funds to spend time on micro-governance by forum / core-team members without the relevant professional experience in delivering this kind of a project so we can avoid what happened with the recent Dash.org renovation and this is a change I want to implement more broadly across all of Dash’s official web development / design and just treat this area the same as any of our other areas where the goals are authorized at the network level and the detail work is done by professionals with the experience to do so. This work is also tightly integrated to the underlying Evolution product development and developing this within a single team will remove overheads of having to relay information and spend time on forums debating aspects, then with the right team we can deliver this the same as we can deliver the other Evolution products and the other teams are delivering their products so please support me on this so we can go quicker.

I will be offline mostly for the next week as I’m moving to another (cheaper) location so I can just focus on my Evolution role easier and try to speed up, and funding this will reduce my workload, so please support this proposal and we can get this area on-track and make sure we have professionally designed web products for Evolution and we can deliver them on-time because this is really a key part of attracting and retaining the kind of new users we are targeting with our mainstream adoption strategy.

Thank you for your support!

Andy
 
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Thanks @AndyDark . I definitely support better graphics and webdesign - the web is the only place to find out and learn about Dash.

We are not trying to copy an altcoin site that lists the specs from the ANN thread on bitcointalk. We want to attract NEW non-crypto users. So we should be promoting the usability features like instant transactions and low fees. (blockchain, blocksize, blocktime and masternodes shouldn't even be on the front page) The suggestion about looking at circle.com is great.
 
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