Design

Designer Of The Week - @esdotge 

Week 03 – Each week, the Design Channel highlights one of the most influential designers in web3 and the Farcaster network. This week, we’re enjoying the company of @esdotge!

Esdotge is the Branding Lead and Co-founder of at Floc*, one of the pioneering strategic design studios in Web3. Since 2017, he has been researching and experimenting with the vision of building a new model for brand building in the Web3 space. This ever-evolving methodology is at the core of the /brand3 concept, which he actively promotes.

He has worked with brands such as Metamask, Polygon, Bankless, Build, Sushi, and Metacartel. Many in the Farcaster community know him as the creator of Degen’s iconic Top Hat logo—a turning point in his career that inspired him to launch personal projects like /odegen, /fartone, /smiles, and /brnd.

1. What's your creative superpower?

I’m not sure if it’s really a superpower, but the conceptualization phase of a project is always what creates that “wow” effect in branding presentations. My creative playground is right at the intersection of strategy and creativity. That phase is the tipping point—a few days of intense mental work, trial and error, until everything finally clicks. And when it does, something magical happens. Finding the perfect connection between strategy and identity is an art in itself. It’s my favorite part of the process, and also the most challenging. Sometimes it turns out better, sometimes worse, but I always give it my all. When I present the concept, explain it, and it resonates with the team or the client, I feel a unique thrill that reminds me why I love this profession above all else. But this isn’t a superpower I can wield alone. For the magic to truly happen, I need the core team at @floc: @victoctero, @0xgsus, and @srferran. With them, this power becomes a real superpower, because together we can take these ideas to the next level and bring them to life.


2. Tell us about a project you really enjoyed — what made it special?

Since joining Floc*, I’ve always tried to build /brand3 as a parallel brand—a space for research, experimentation, and learning about the relationship between Branding and Web3. It’s a project that can never truly be finished, because it keeps evolving with everything on my mind and everything that happens each day. I started in 2017 with a section in a magazine, calling it Blockbrands. There, I analyzed and wrote about design, strategy, culture, creativity, and other topics related to brands using blockchain technology. From there, we began using it as a methodology that’s always under construction. Every new branding project became an exercise to feed this ongoing process. We created live programs, podcasts, and newsletters to try to understand this whole movement. At one point, I even wanted to turn it into a book—I started outlining the structure and wrote some isolated excerpts. But with so much information always in motion, I felt overwhelmed and ended up mainly writing in the newsletter whenever possible. After that, I joined Farcaster, and Brand3 became a channel while the newsletter adapted to Paragraph. The latest touchpoint or experiment for Brand3 is @brnd. What began as an NFT featuring the brands from the Farcaster landscape has turned into a mini-app where users vote daily for their favorite brands in a podium format. The data generated is used to create rankings that measure brand value and help track the momentum of each project. We’re still in the early stages, but the goal is to keep developing /brnd to foster a better relationship between brands and users, and to ensure that projects don’t fade into obscurity if they’re doing well.

...

Read the full interview and check out some of @esdotge's work on @paragraph!

https://paragraph.com/@designchannel/designer-of-the-week-esdotge

I read to freshen up with a new perspective, and I was able to reflect on myself while reading this.