AUDT: Keeping It Human

We were approached to make a website for AUDT, which is a stablecoin. Until that, like many people, we had not a single idea what a stablecoin is and didn’t deal much with cryptocurrencies at all. Now we have our own wallet.

About the Product

AUDT, in particular, is linked to the Australian dollar with a 1 to 1 conversion rate and is backed by an Australian bank. It’s rather simple. Our job was to show how simple it is to a wider audience, including many like us who never had any experience with crypto before. The task was to make a website that grabs attention, stands out, with easily readable and understandable text to match.

The Concepts

Contemporary classic. Straight lines and sparse colors, grayscale all over. Clean, respectable, boring.

The references we had considered for this concept.

A calm concept. The second version was soft, warm, with pastel colors and round shapes. It looked more inviting to a nice cafe, something not too cheap, something not too expensive, somewhere where there are couples having dignified conversations.

The references we had considered for this concept.

And the third one was stylish. Minimalistic depictions of people, smooth lines, reserved use of color, but the colors bright and vibrant.

The references we had considered for this concept.

Naturally, we went ahead with the third version.

The Style

Once the prototype was done with all the structure figured out, the work on the key illustration began. Here are bodies, bodies surrounded by tubes.

There’s a person. Face nonexistent, slouched, sitting on a tube with his deformed arm receiving coins from another tube, as his laptop sends dollars into yet another tube. The tubes are all over the place, connected to a big safe. They must be anxious, they are in some Lynchian nightmare, yet all they’re trying to do is convert some currency real quick.

With each iteration, the machine grew more and more cumbersome. The machine that sucks up dollars and spits out coins. The infallible machine that looks like it might blow up at any point. We’re all so used to tubes next to money. You go down to the bank, and there are tubes everywhere. Just a regular day.

Now, why is every illustration isometric this day? And why must there always be a character? It can’t be a shapeless person that everyone could relate to, no one would relate to such monstrosity. And only so many people would relate to whatever particular character you end up working in there. When an illustration is a person dealing with some simple process, just show the process. A person is going to look at it, a real breathing person. Take out the tubes while you’re at it unless you’re selling a plumbing service.

Here we go. Nice and easy. For a while, that wallet had kind of a robot head, but it was way too confusing and sometimes worrisome for everyone involved.

«I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that», says your own wallet as your eyeing a new Steam sale.

Copywriting

Now that we had a perfectly reasonable illustration, we made sure to write the text that follows suit. Most websites about cryptocurrencies, and generally, most financial websites, are bogged down in so much minutiae detail, where another token easily fades away among the white noise. Rather than repeat these mistakes, we wrote the text to work with our design: text that isn’t overloading with technicalities, but is straightforward and gets to the point.

It’s not easy to speak plainly of finances. Rather, it’s very easy. Unlike many agencies, we work with both the design and the content, and as we work with every aspect of the narrative presented, we get to make sure every single detail compliments each other, everything harmonizes. With straightforward text and illustrations to support it, what happens is a website that grabs your attention, a website that works.

Attention to detail: originally, the prism in this illustration was not physically possible, which someone on the AUDT team with a scientific and inquisitive mind had pointed out, and we were quick to fix.

It’s the most obvious thing in the world, and that’s why we often forget it: we’re all people. We’re all people, and we’re all working for people. Keep it simple. Keep it human.