Tomcat

Background

With the launch of Maverick, a new defi infrastructure protocol, there was a clear opportunity to create a rewards-boosted and vote-aggregating protocol built on top of it. This was a pattern seen previously a number of times, most notably with the Convex protocol, which served a similar function on the Curve infrastructure.

A number of players were interested in taking advanatage of this potential market, and therefore it was imperative that the team move quickly to create an initial marketing site and online identity within defi circles, and then follow soon after with a functional dapp, to begin capturing liquidity.

The team

I was the sole designer on this project, working alongside a team of three engineers to create this intial identity and MVP product.

Branding

Initially, the team didn't have a clear idea of what the identity of this new protocol should be. The only starting point was that the team wanted it to tie into the Maverick Protocol's own branding and identity, as they were closely tied and would frequently be seen together. To begin I ran a short brand ideation session, exploring possible directions in which the Maverick brand could be iterated on.

The team collectively decided to push further with the references to Top Gun which Maverick was known for, as this had a lot of potential with community building and organic marketing, which we considered an essential in the world of defi. To this end, the name "Tomcat" was settled upon.

From here I explored a variety of different emotions which we could evoke in both users and the wider community through this brand, stemming from different elements of the Top Gun movies. There was also a fourth element which arose through discussion, to utilise the "cat" in "Tomcat" to create a mascot-like figure who could feature in our brand itentity.

This was popular with the team, and the final descision was made to utilise a bright and positive brand identity which made frequent use of low-detail graphic spot illustrations. These illustrations would feature both our mascot, a cat in aviators, and iconic elements from the Top Gun films.

I created a logo which would be used for both our brand and our specific token when it appeared on other protocols. This featured our mascot and our primary orange color, which was particularly chosen to complement the pruple Maverick brand colour that it would frequently appear alongside.

Main site intial design

In our previous expereince with defi, the team knew that it was essential to begin building hype around the product, and a community around it, as soon as was possible. To this end, the first thing which the team wanted to launch was a small marketing page. This would outline at a high level what we were working on, and act as an access point for users to join our community on Discord and Telegram. We had very little time to create this site if we wanted to race our immediate competition to claim this opportunity.

After a numbrer of iterations, particularly on the header content and illustration, we settled on the following pages, for the first initial marketing site, and the dapp landing page for once functionality started to be built out.

The launch of the initial marketing site was successful, and a small community began to grow in our community hubs on telegram and discord. From here, I created designs for the main dapp functionality. This began with user and product flows, created by myself and iterated on by the wider team. This helped to clarify our vision for what the Tomcat protocol would offer, filtering a large array of ideas into a consice and easy to understand product.

From these product flows, I created an interactive prototype of the entire landing page and dapp, this allowed for final testing within the team of the complete layout of the site, and the design of the interactions which I included, before it was taken to be built by the engineers.

Project Outcome

Due to changes within the Maverick protocol, the market opportunity which Tomcat was planning to take advatange of in order to provide value dissapeared, and we chose to end the project.

There were several excellent outcomes of the design work completed here, however. Through this project it became clear to the team that our extensive expereince with Defi allowed us to create a strong product quickly, along with a brand to accompany that product. We were able to within just a week create a product and brand which appealed to consumers enough to begin the process of community building, and garner some attention to what we were working on.