Category: Tech

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Can’t Read My Poker…Profile Pic? NFTs Give Gambling a Go

I’m not a gambler myself, as I’ve had many bad luck moments and I’d rather just not get my money involved in it if I have the choice. It came as a surprise when I found out that NFTs have taken a new step into money-spending: online casinos. I guess there’s something for everybody, right?

NFTs actually can promote gambling in various ways. Online casinos, for instance, promote games on the result of an NFT match. NFTs are also used as rewards for players, sell merch, etc. Apparently it’s a thing.

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Minimalist Logos (or A Short Title to Match the New Design Trend While Annoyingly Using Parenthesis to Make the Title Longer Than Necessary)

I’ll be honest: I’m a fan of minimalist movement in design as much as I’m a sucker for negative space, which is a lot. Shoot me. But, as a Designer, I have to consider the viability of reproducing logos in multiple sizes, materials, and conditions, while also being time efficient and creating something that looks unique for the client.

The realistic feeling of older maximalist, detailed logos can be eye-catching and fun when on a website, but work terribly if not printed in the most favorable conditions and are hard to break down into simple and recognizable color palette and shapes.

Most efficient logos have easily recognizable shapes, are descrpitive of what the company does or the company’s name, and are easy to reproduce in different sizes without losing details.

I think that we have a hard time saying goodbye to maximalist logos because they’re the last grasp we have of the 2000s, a time when technology felt promising and we weren’t doomed to run around looking for outlets to charge our smartphones. But, as much as people will complain, it is time to move on and embrace new trends – we already do it with TikTok, why not with logos as well?

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Windows and the 2000s Logo Design

On my last post I talked about abrupt logo changes in design, specifically Instagram, and how that helped to promote a new persona for the brand. That modern and serious twist is something that we’ve seen happening more and more often this past decade.

Even though not being the most simplistic of the examples, Instagram’s redesign followed a slow trend of flat logos and logotypes that might be referenced as the “2010s style” in the future. The trend is opposed to previous work made in the early 2000s, when everything online was shiny and brand-new and all the tools available should be used at once in order to display how advanced technology was. I’m talking gradients, shadowing, glow, details, and life-like mascots. As time passed by and the Internet stopped being such a chaotic place, designers were able to tone down their work and eventually all the previous work from the last decade was seen as tacky and busy.

Windows might be the best example of how this sudden peak in technology changed logo design and determined a remarkable style for a short period of time. The image bellow shows how Windows has updated its logos along the years to fit the technology and style at the time they were created:

Windows’ Logo throughtout the years

It’s interesting to notice how the first logo and the most recent one are mainly the same concept, while 2001 to 2009 are different adaptations of the same storyline.

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Revisting Instagram’s Logo Change

Everyone in their lifetime has probably experienced a logo redesign that sparked feelings of hatred or disgust – it’s just one of the many powers of design. Mine was Instagram’s leap from its iconic brown instant camera to the colored glossy square with a circle in the middle, a redesign that happened in 2016. In some way, the brand grew popularity while being identified by its unique and surprisingly detailed logo that also referenced polaroid cameras (extremely romanticized by Tumblr back then).

As much as I was initially overwhelmed by the rebranding, I got used to it and the message it carried along: Instagram had consolidated itself as a strong social media platform that was here to stay.

Evolution of Instagram's logo
Instagram’s logo History

Brands are like people – they have a voice, a purpose, and memories that you relate to them, and, just like people, they change. Instagram begun as an image sharing social platform (something that Jamie Lee Curtis had in mind for years) that took blogging into a different turn, but wasn’t able to sustain itself with just pictures. Not to back-in-my-old-day this, but when I joined the platform in 2012 (!), all pictures had to be in square dimentions, no videos were allowed, and only one picture per post was support.

And look at Instagram now!

People have literally built careers just by using the platform the right way. This change from being a cool teenage-eganging social media network into its professional self had to be represented in all aspects of the brand – including its logo.

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Are NFTs Worth Boiling the Earth?

Short answer: no. Do we really need a longer one?

To understand how NFTs affect the environment, we first need to understand a few concepts around it. NFTs are promoted online through bidding and sales, and even though some think the Internet is magic (sometimes I do), it is actually a network of various computers that store and transmit information to each other around the world. The whole process requires a lot of electrical power to work properly and, therefore, produces a lot of heat.

The combination of the transactions behind NFTs (powered by Ethereum, a crypto  and small contracts marketplace) and data storage overall increase carbon emissions in the atmosphere. As a platform that promotes the future of trades and the way we consume art as a society, it would be expected that NFTs would be more climate sensitive, especially following the recent trend behind major corporates to rely on sustainable methods as a marketing stunt. It’s overwhelming to see yet another futile and powerful energy consumption bomb rise while we could be using money, technology and resources to promote alternative ways to appreciate art and culture.

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Buying Tweets? NFTs are getting crazier

Hey, rich people! I could use some money and I have about 16,000 tweets I can sell. Anyone?

Here’s me saying something revealing in a language you probably don’t know

Okay, I might be a little flustered after learning that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s World’s first tweet (“just setting up my twttr”) was sold for $2.9 million in 2021 to Sina Estavi, a crypto entrepreneur from Iran. During the process, the bidding multiplicated in six times its previous value before closing.

This story comes with a twist: more recently, in 2022, Sina tried reselling the tweet, or better saying, the proof of ownership of it, and bombed. Aiming for $48 million, the bidding went as high as $280, and it stayed there. Apparently he was also arrested, as his company goes through rough waters. I guess I’ll keep my tweets to myself.

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Art NFTs: I googled it so you don’t have to

As an avid Twitter user, I’m constantly bombarded with random discussions (thanks, Elon Musk) that hardly come with context or breakdown points. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that my timeline is usually flooding with very predefined POVs regarding Art NFTs, even though I personally had no idea of what all the fuss was about. I just know that it was important for me to pick a side and chose if I think they’re good or bad (there’s no between!), and if you’re anything like me you probably considered doing some quick research before making a personal statement, but got a little demotivated by the long tech magazine articles and cryptocurrency terms.

In simple terms, NFT stands for non-fungible tokens, which basically means that instead of creating a cryptocurrency that you can actually trade and share value, whatever you own as an NFT is unique and it belongs only to you. That concept gets blurry when we see NFTs being applied towards digital art, that can be pirated, copied, replicated, screen-captured, tweeted, you name it. In other words, the NFT itself isn’t the art you own, but something that proves you own it, a form of document that can’t be copied. What do you do with that? Brag about it, I guess.

On the other hand, there’s a promising side, as crypto transactions get more popular over time and promise a more technologically advanced future. Some understand NFTs as a digital art collecting culture, that include bids as high as $69 million. It’s is an interesting way to put value to digital artists that are creating innovating content that might’ve experienced piracy before.

Get to know if I’ve decided how I feel about it in my next posts.