I finally watched Banking on Bitcoin

This was a cool discover over the weekend. I had never seen the independent film on Netflix called Banking on Bitcoin until this weekend. I've been reading a lot about the history of blockchain, tor, cryptocurrencies and other related technologies over the past six months or more and I finally decided I had the time to watch Banking on Bitcoin. I figured it would be a very quick overview of the foundation of the technology, mystery surrounding Satoshi, the decentralized concept, etc. and it essentially was. I thought it did a fairly good job of covering the major players and the history.

Seeing our work pop up

I'm assuming most people on Steemit have seen the movie at this point, so no need to do any bigger recap. I was surprised when 3/4 of the way through the film, a logo that we designed appeared. There is a segment featuring Blythe Masters and her company Digital Asset Holdings. This particular segment seeks to establish the power of blockchain technology has outside of cryptocurrency. The segment is filmed in their old office location in NYC where we met with Blythe and her team to discuss branding Digital Asset and creating their initial website.

The big branding issue

Part of the big issue that we wanted to tackle with the branding of this company was the fact that a lot of people, especially in more traditional finance and banking, were scared of the term bitcoin and also blockchain. Blockchain was associated with Bitcoin, which was associated with Silk Road, which was associated with the newest kind of incredibly illegal activity. So, long story short blockchain = scary... at least to the people who Digital Asset wanted to appeal to and work with. We needed to find a way to communicate an efficient system for transacting using new technology.

Digital Asset's description as seen on their current website:

Secure modern infrastructure to power the future of financial applications

The Digital Asset Platform delivers flexible infrastructure for regulated financial institutions to share processes and data securely, on a need-to-know basis, without the need for reconciliation. It combines a permissioned Distributed Ledger with a powerful financial modeling language to ensure that each institution operates from a single source of truth.

The final branding solution

Our job was to find a way to focus on the new emerging blockchain technology as it relates to improving existing financial systems and particularly to transaction settlements. It's incredibly fast, secure and convenient. We created numerous logo concepts around this idea and eventually ended up with the final logo, which you can see on the Netflix film. The logo shows a system that nearly completes itself into a somewhat 3d cube, but is also composed of two elements that are settling in a transaction. The two elements are above and below each other on the left side. The arrow on the right represents the transaction settling and also completes the cube shape. The theory behind the completion of this shape is that it should feel complete, cohesive, trustworthy, etc.

It was great working with a company that is innovating using blockchain technology and seeing that they're still using the logo. And it was very cool to see our design pop up in a currently important documentary for many people who are just finding out about bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain. The company is doing very well and they're still using the logo today. I'm hoping we can do more work with companies like this in the future.

You can see more about this project on our website.

Ciao for now, Steemians.

- Weston (aka @design-guy)