The Blockchain Institute Brand Identity
The Blockchain Institute built free, Creative Commons courses that taught blockchain, complete with instructor guides, so anyone anywhere could pick them up and teach. I was brought on to give the organization a complete brand identity, from its voice to its courseware to its merchandise. Not a logo and a color palette, but a full, documented system a small team of writers and developers could build on without me in the room.
Company
The Blockchain Institute
Date
2018-2021
Role
Brand & UX Designer
The Problem
The organization began as Blockchain WTF, a news blog, before pivoting into an educational nonprofit and rebranding as The Blockchain Institute. I came on first as a freelancer to design the initial logo, then joined to build the full visual identity and the website it would live on. The real challenge was cohesion: a single, recognizable identity that had to hold across course materials, a website, merchandise, and promotion, and stay consistent even as different people created content inside it.
The Objectives & Key Results
The identity needed to deliver:
A documented system of colors, illustration style, fonts, and voice.
Reusable components and patterns for the website.
Guidelines that let developers and writers create and maintain content on their own.
Promotion with real reach.
The Process
I opened with competitor analysis, studying both blockchain sites and online-education platforms like Lynda.com, alongside stakeholder interviews. From there I built the first style guide: the Brand Voice and the logo.
That is where the first real tension surfaced. The logo had been designed for the organization's professional side, The Blockchain Institute, but it clashed with the warmer, more conversational Brand Voice the content actually needed. That conflict would drive a larger change later.
I built the brand guide on atomic design principles, atoms, molecules, and templates, so the identity could scale into components, courses, and merchandise as a system rather than a pile of one-off assets. Building the website made the logo tension impossible to ignore: a youthful, conversational tone needed a logo to match. I ran card-sorting sessions to name the public-facing brand (which landed on We Teach Blockchain), then designed new logo options and tested them with the organization, its donors, board, and users until a clear favorite emerged.
Usability testing with five participants surfaced wayfinding and user-flow issues, which I resolved before launch. Finally, market research pointed to a Chicago public transit campaign: low cost, high visibility.
The Solution
WeTeachBlockchain.org launched in 2020 with the full brand identity in place, plus a last-minute addition: an Ambassador program that let volunteers teach the courses in their own communities. From there, users presented the courses around the world, and the in-house writers built new content straight from the brand guidelines, exactly as the system was designed to let them.
The Results
The work landed. Investors and stakeholders responded to the identity with real enthusiasm, the Ambassador program carried the courses into more than 25 countries, and the Chicago transit campaign put the brand in front of 2.3 million people.
The organization itself folded in late 2021 when its funding ran out, a business reality that had nothing to do with the identity it was built on. What that identity achieved in its short life (a coherent brand system, a global volunteer network, and millions reached) is the real measure of the work.
