Date: February 27, 2023
By: @TWX MonkeDAO
Welcome to OMC Design Update 2! It’s been two weeks since the first OMC Design Update, and so we’re back to update both the existing and prospective community on the progress we’ve made on the project since then. I’ll also mention that we recently revealed the name of our upcoming collection - Monkes! Give the Twitter account a follow here, enable notifications for our posts and give us your feedback in the comments!.
From a creative perspective, our main focus has recently moved from new trait creation, to updating elements of the existing collection based on feedback from stakeholders, community members, and the wider ecosystem. We’ve also started engaging with talented individuals about our animation requirements for some extra-special Monkes, as well as for the overall branding of the project. Look out for campaigns based on those reveals at some point in the future!
New trait development is briefly on-hold until we update the existing traits above with the help of your feedback.
Before I begin on the creative updates, I’ve noticed some comments around the perceived need to improve the art, so I’ll share our thought process around why we revealed the art the way we did. I think it’s important to understand that the art was always going to be improved from the point at which it was shown.
Generally when art is revealed on a project, the team is releasing a completed product. But the OMC release was more of a ‘snapshot’ of the current Monke prototype at that time. The unique situation that a team within MonkeDAO faces is the organisation’s democratic decision-making process, this meant the team needed the general art direction approved by MonkeDAO members before we could commit any further time and resources to the development of the project as a whole.
As I mentioned last post, the art proposal passed overwhelmingly and the general response to the specific preview images was positive, with most feedback summarised as “it looks good, but with a few improvements it could be great”. We’re committed to this iterative process, and because of that, this update focuses on highlighting the main improvements we’ve made to the OMC collection.
One of the most important objectives we’re trying to achieve with the art is versatility - which attempts to find a balance between having enough detail at full-size (so people can proudly display the Monkes they mint or purchase), with being simple enough to be easily recognisable at the more common pfp-size use case. The current eyes stand out well at pfp size, but we did notice conversations and specific feedback around the eyes potentially looking too lifeless (or “soulless”) at full-size due to their large, undetailed surface area.
Our intention has been that each OMC Monke is created with an eye trait category, where the current eyes were the base style, and a variety of rarer eye traits are also available. One of the those alternative eye traits was called “Kawaii”, as a reference to the popular anime eye style.
We’ve been keeping an eye (pun intended) on the OMC art discourse, and noticed that a significant portion of fan art has eyes similar to our Kawaii trait. You may also have been one of the 466 people in our informal Twitter poll who were strongly in favour of the ‘kawaii eyes’.
So with that in mind, we’ve updated the base Monke eye style to be the Kawaii version.
The new default eyes add more life to the eyes of the base Monke. The style is more optimised for detail at full size, but it still looks good at a smaller pfp size.
We may need to adjust some of the other eye traits to accommodate the new default style, but in general we’re happy to move ahead with this change and we expect most people will be pleased with this.