Sasha Pais Identity Web Poster Tech Culture Extras

NEAR DevHub

NEAR DevHub started as a place for developers building on NEAR to connect: to learn, get support, share knowledge and contribute to the ecosystem. At first DevHub covered a lot of ground: they were building tools, supporting educational initiatives, growing the community, and running both online and in-person hackathons. That’s when I was invited to create a visual identity that would reflect all of it and be a flexible, scalable system.

As the project grew, some of the areas gradually spun off into more narrow focused initiatives. Hackathons became HACKBOX (check out the project here), developer tools and documentation moved under NEAR Dev, Open Sourse intitaitives got gamified and supported by Race of Sloths (also do check, it’s fun), among others.

After shipping DevHub’s visual identity I was invited to join the team as Art Director and Lead Designer. I was developing the brand in a way that could scale both online and offline — from serious documentation websites to Tin-Tin comic themed treatment for ETH CC in Belgium or off-tracks swag for [REDACTED] (aka Nearcon) including customised Sriracha sauce in Bangkok.

Logo idea was quite simple, but very scalable and familiar to devlopers. In Unix systems there’s always dev/ directory that contains the special device files for all the devices. near/dev/hub is a directory (hub) for all NEAR developers.

The core brand had to have visual links to NEAR identity, so I used their green along with adding vibrant secondary palette to colour code different aspects of DevHub activities, much like code editors have. In terms of typography I went with warm and humanistic Aeonik combined with its techy brother Aeonik Fono.

Visually DevHub had two distinct directions: everything related to product itself (developer platform) was intentionally made minimalistic, zero bullshit and structured. In the meantime, social and community side were designed to be more vibant and playful, especially regarding brand treatments for real-life events.

Intros to work groups and community calls that were always live recorded. Each group or community had its own colour througout website and socials.

Events

We were always trying to make people remember us. Blockchain conferences are as eventful as you can imagine, so there’s always great competition for people’s attention. Our audience, developers, also likes to be entertained. So we hid special secret NFTs and bounties on T-shirts: they had to run the code to achieve something cool. We made them hunt for rubber ducks, limited edition items, and, most importantly, a lot of them reached out afterwards. For a long hackathon we once produced vanity kit and funny socks instead of offering boring black T-shirts no one even takes anymore. Imagine a developer who just pulled several all-nighters and shipped a product, who receives that.

Some events required more expression than others. ETH Denver was always like that: if you’re a solemn suit trying to sell something boring, people won’t talk to you. Here the crazier you appear, the better. So we went and did that.

We also had to be location sensitive. What worked in Denver had to be different in SF, and even more so in Paris, Berlin, Brussels and then Bangkok. So among things we had made were classic comics, customised hot sauce, fruit labels, temp tattoos and many other unconventional things.

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