PLAYA3ULL

PLAYA3ULL needed an identity. The company had a games and Web3 ecosystem (Nodes, 3ULL Coin, multiple game products) but no cohesive brand to hold it together, and the main site hadn’t been updated since inception. I led the end-to-end redesign of the site and the creation of a new visual identity, including the design system, onboarding, and core flows like registration and account settings.

The challenge wasn’t a lack of product, it was a lack of through-line. The company had multiple commercial offers (Nodes, 3ULL Coin, games) that the existing site couldn’t articulate, and the visual identity carried no consistent point of view. Users couldn’t tell which products were core, what 3ULL Coin was for, or how the games fit. The brand needed to come from inside the company, not be imposed from the outside.

I ran a series of stakeholder workshops with the leadership team to extract the company’s core values, the audiences they were trying to reach, and the products they wanted to elevate. The point wasn’t to author a vision in a vacuum, it was to surface what PLAYA3ULL already stood for, in language and structure the team could rally behind.

The workshops gave us a tighter set of values and a clear product hierarchy. From there, I translated the strategic outputs into design direction: a visual language with a single confident point of view, an information architecture that put Nodes and 3ULL Coin where users could actually find them, and an identity that could carry across marketing, social, and in-product UI without rebuilding itself for each surface.

Three coordinated deliverables:

• Brand and visual identity. Logo, type system, layout principles, motion, and tone, all derived from the workshop outputs.
• A robust design system. Tokens, components, and patterns that could span product UI, marketing, and social without drift.
• The flagship site and core flows. Site redesign, onboarding, registration, account settings, all built on the new system.

I joined in October. The audit, redesign, and delivery of the design system and the new site ran across November, December, and January, and engineering built from February through to March and April.

Keeping design and code in step across that handover was its own problem. We maintained the component library in Storybook, which gave the developers a single live reference for every component and state rather than a set of static frames to interpret, and meant a change to a pattern was visible to both sides at once. The system also had to travel outside product: the marketing team carried it into video and content, which was the real test of whether the tokens and patterns held up away from the interfaces they were designed in.

A revamp this wide could not be run off a backlog, so I defined the process we worked to and ran it in fixed cycles.

Before planning a cycle I went to the other teams for their appetite. The site rebuild was the anchor, but marketing and the wider business had their own needs, a slide deck one week, a campaign asset the next, and those were real work competing for the same days. Gathering them up front meant they got shaped into a cycle instead of arriving mid-sprint as interruptions.

The other decision each cycle was who was building. I split the work by what I could design and build myself inside the timeframe, mostly in Framer, against what had to go to the developers. Making that call at planning time rather than at handover kept the engineering queue on the things only engineering could do.

The identity needed assets that did not exist yet. The objects at the centre of the ecosystem, the pyramid logo, the nodes, and the HODL tickets, were carried by flat images that could not hold up across video, marketing, and the site.

I reimagined the set from scratch and partnered with 3D artist Alex Ferrabetta to produce six of them: the pyramid logo rebuilt in full 3D, the HODL ticket and the 3ULL HODL ticket, the full node with a fractional variant that had to read as visibly divisible to communicate fractional ownership, the VI3 Pass, and a base Play and Earn pass. I art-directed the work end to end, writing the scope, supplying low-fidelity sketches and animation notes, and reviewing each pass against the identity. The VI3 Pass had to land as premium and solid, closer to a futuristic VIP keycard than a graphic.

The animation direction was written as beats rather than adjectives: the logo turning through 360 degrees with a little jiggle over roughly a second and landing bouncy, the full node rotating slowly and linearly across six to eight seconds with a glow at the top, the HODL ticket flipping in front of a glowing node. The fractional node needed its own storyboard, because the whole point of the asset was the idea of splitting: a base node, then each fraction sliding in from the top and clicking into place, then the stack activating by glowing.

The Play and Earn pass is where the system thinking showed up in the 3D work. Rather than modelling a pass per title, we built one base model with a layered texture system, so a new variant could be produced for Nexus, Ordinem, or Dogs of War without starting over. Every asset was delivered as a looping animation and a set of static renders at multiple angles, with source files organised so the team could keep building on them. They run across the site, the marketing content, and the video work.

A system is only worth the surfaces it can carry, so the year after launch was spent proving it could. I designed the new web app, splitting and reorganising the ecosystem’s features into 3ULL Hub, and designed and built four game subsites in Framer myself: Starvin’ Martian, Dogs of War, Ordinem, and Nexus.

Building those personally mattered for two reasons. Each one shipped without waiting on engineering capacity, and each was a direct test of whether the system held its shape under a different game’s art direction.

Launched a new flagship site and design system now used across all online touchpoints. The rebrand was widely adopted across marketing, with community feedback highlighting improved clarity around products like Nodes and 3ULL Coin, and better showcasing of the games portfolio. The onboarding flows (in development) provide a much smoother entry point for new users.

Twelve months from joining, the ecosystem had a new brand, a design system running across product, marketing, social, and video, a rebuilt flagship site, a redesigned web app, and four game sites live.

This was a high-stakes, high-speed 0-to-1 design and product ownership challenge. It pushed me to define a company’s identity not by imposing a vision, but by extracting and elevating what it already stood for, visually, structurally, and experientially. The success of the launch reinforced the importance of running brand work through real stakeholder workshops rather than aesthetic guesswork, and of investing in a system that the team can keep extending without me.