# RaidGuild's Headless Brand

## TL;DR

To summarize, this outline is structured into two primary sections. The first focuses on defining a coherent and practical source of truth for brand components, and the second aims to explore the abstract "essence" of the Guild. Both discussions are intended to be conducted in parallel to align the vision for the RaidGuild brand.

## Overview: Defining a Branding Source of Truth

- **Objective**: Establish a "branding source of truth" for RaidGuild to create a consistent approach for visual and thematic elements.
- **Current State**:
- Utilizes a Figma file for designers to interact with UI components.
- Chakra component library compiled in Storybook for front-end developers to engage at the code level.
- **Recent Developments**:
- Completion of a Raid Improvement Proposal (RIP) to enhance visibility and synchronization between the Figma file and Chakra component library.
- **Expected Outcomes**:
- Increase consistency across all RaidGuild-branded builds.
- Serve as a reference point ("source of truth") for evaluating changes in UI components.
- **Next Steps**:
- Introduce a second "branding guide" as an additional source of truth.
- This guide would incorporate:
- Existing formal elements like colors, fonts, typography, and layout grids.
- Additional elements like the Guild's "essence" or "vibes," personas or mascots, and a clearly articulated tone of voice and demeanor.

## Deliverables

#### Brand Guide
- **Objective**: To articulate the essence, guidelines, and values that form the brand.
- **Outcome**: A comprehensive brand guide that encapsulates all of the above.

#### Guild Guidelines and Handbook Update
- **Objective**: Provide clear interaction and contribution rules for guild members.
- **Outcome**:
- Updated to guild handbook.
- Articulation of what constitutes an "Archers Posse" and how it is distinct from Wordsmiths and Shillshop, if at all.
- Note: These are not just rules but guidelines that clarify where each entity fits in the organization.

#### Strategy for Individual Contribution
- **Objective**: Enable individual guild members to contribute effectively and independently.
- **Features**:
- Empower both veterans and apprentices to work swiftly and independently.
- Allows for individual iteration on any area of skill or interest.

#### Metrics and Standards for Evaluation
- **Objective**: Develop metrics to assess contributions and align them with guild branding.
- **Features**:
- Metrics for evaluating brand coherence across multiple deliverables:
- Tweet threads
- Blog posts
- Business development pitch decks
- T-shirts and merchandise
- Promotional materials
- Includes guidelines for public appearances such as AMAs and marketing collaborations, like the one with wPOKT Network Team.

## Potential Elements of the Headless Brand SSOT

### Essence

- **Definition**: Building on Bennisan's term "essence," this refers to the high-level atmosphere or environment that RaidGuild operates within.
- **Objective**: To articulate RaidGuild's essence in a decentralized manner, serving as a foundation for future conversations.
- **Approach**: Align members around a collective understanding of the Guild's unique atmosphere.

### Character Scaffolding

- **Objective**: Establish a visual language for branding elements like logos and characters.
- **Elements to Include**:
- Logo variations, e.g., the "extreme black metal font" deployed in February.
- Literal characters, as being developed by members like Lou and Bennisan, and many others throughout the guild.
- **Contextualization**:
- Create a "universe" where these elements exist and relate to each other.
- Discussion on aesthetic approaches like the 8-bit style oftehn used, color scheme gradation, or a "speculative DnDpunk aesthetic."
- **Consistency**:
- Ensure characters are rendered consistently to align with the Guild's aesthetic preferences and theoretical foundations.

### Tone and Attitude

- **Objective**: Informed by the general "essence", move towards concrete manifestations of RaidGuild's brand in public settings.
- **Elements to Articulate**:
- Tone: The overall mood or feeling the Guild conveys.
- Attitude: The Guild's disposition or approach to its work and interactions.
- Vision: The long-term aims and aspirations of the Guild.
- Values: The fundamental beliefs guiding the Guild's behavior.
- **Format**:
- A manifest-like presentation to make these elements explicit and clear to both internal and external audiences.

## Additional Considerations

### Scribe and Bard Focused Source of Truth

- **Objective**: Create a reliable guide for members involved in content creation like blog posts, Twitter updates, podcasts, and interviews.
- **Importance**:
- Members are diverse and unique but should represent the Guild consistently in public forums.
- Differentiate between an individual's personality and the Guild's persona.
- **Components**:
- Tone and Attitude guidelines.
- Writing guidelines possibly starting with prompt engineering for scripts.
- Moving towards psychological archetypes and persona creation for the Guild.

### Compilation and Evaluation of Existing Efforts

- **Objective**: Compile existing work to assess what the Guild currently has in terms of branding and guidelines. Get it all living in one place.
- **Specific Aims**:
- Scribes to offer metrics for evaluating the quality of written content.
- Possible formation of a "Wordsmiths" writers circle to ensure high-quality output.
- **Learning from Past Experiments**:
- Insights from the experiment to form a separate Wordsmith's DAO circa 2021.
- Engage with Shillshop, already an autonomous DAO, to incorporate their insights.

### Extending to Peripheral RG Entities

- **Objective**: Extend branding guidelines to other sub-guilds like Hunters Guild for business development, Spellcast for contract audits, etc. Increases the accountability and offers some rails for these entities to maintain the benefits of being associated with the guild and offers them resources for formatting their marketing materials.
- **Scope**:
- Not focused on developing databases, CRMs, or other non-branding assets.
- Focus on defining attitude and presentation for sub-entities when dealing with clients.
- **Connection to Larger Branding Strategy**:
- Entangled with the high-level essence and characterization of the Guild's ethos.

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#### Note: There's a Guild-Wide Concern for Vision and Values

- The outline is indebted to the clear articulation of visions and values. We need to make visions and values a Guild-wide concern and not confined to specific sub-groups like designers, marketers, or hunters.

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# TW's Initial Ideas
*A first swing to get the ball rolling. This is not part of the proposal, but intended to serve as a starting point for converation.*

### Essence

I posit that we are navigating a world that feels as chaotic and dark as medieval times, the dark ages, after the end of the world. Despite these trying circumstances, we persist. We survive without resorting to moral degradation; we are the torchbearers and bringers of light. This light isn't solely about economic coordination. It's multi-faceted, involving social and cultural elements, or what I would call 'Eye-Hand-Heart coordination,' a full stack ontology lol.

In contrast, the darkness that envelopes us is the failure of coordination. To describe this, we can invoke the concept of Moloch, which has strong origins in the Cypherpunk meme culture. While some may be distancing themselves from this idea, it remains pertinent to us and serves our narrative effectively. The term "slaying Moloch" has always troubled me slightly, primarily because Moloch is us — humans failing to coordinate. When we use the term "slay," are we describing homicide? We refer to confronting an endless, tumultuous cascade of demons that are both us and not us. This brings in psychological complexity, as we aim to design mechanisms that facilitate our most noble aspects, while also setting up guide rails that discourage Molochian tendencies in ourselves and our culture.

Our world is fraught with desperation and darkness, a brooding atmosphere filled with distrust. Yet the Guild is not intimidated. We've learned to navigate these complexities, so much so that we've begun to experience them as intriguing, even delicious. Here, Timothy Morton's concept of 'dark ecology' resonates: entering the darkness begins with fear, turns to curiosity, and eventually become delicious and tantilizing. We've managed to map this labyrinthine world through our experiences and skills, giving us a sense of orientation. Both our mechanics and our learned expertise become the core aesthetic values that we seek to convey.

### Characterization

What is the scaffold or framework for our characters, roles, and classes? A manner loosely reminiscent of a Dungeons & Dragons style of dungeon crawling. Currently, we are navigating a world filled with monsters, difficult to distinguish from other heros, while all pursuing our own fortune and glory. However, this existing scaffold is fraught with confusion. The concept of a loot-chasing dungeon crawler may inadvertently embody the very coordination failure that we are trying to rectify. Despite this, there's an opportunity to hone in on the characteristics of various races, classes, and roles to solidify our collective brand identity.

One practical approach could be to flesh out our own backstory, which is already concrete in terms of our development in the web3 space. The objective is to align the actual backstory with well-crafted lore for moving forward. To be specific, one option could involve developing a "mascot" character with defined attributes: Are they a wizard, a barbarian, a human, a recovering undead demon? What do they look like, and how do they function?

Alternatively, we could lean into a more *meta* perspective, positioning ourselves as Game Masters or game designers who organize players. While this allows us to explore a rich tapestry of interconnected worlds, it also comes with a caveat. Going meta poses the risk of obfuscating design details in favor of a universally applicable game theory framework — a different kind of Moloch that we need to be cautious of.

In summary, whether we decide to focus on a specific character or take on the role of Game Masters, each choice serves as a potential inflection point for our Guild's identity and direction.

### Attitude

How might we define the attitude and tone that will manifest in our behavior, particularly when we interact in various public settings? If we choose to elaborate on a specific character, we could adopt that character's manner of speaking and attitude toward others. This character might be gentle yet forceful, or focused on achieving a particular righteous outcome while bypassing darker temptations. We could use their backstory as a narrative vehicle, much like a Bard and their songs, to convey the message we aim to put into the ecosystem. Alternatively, we might take a more technical approach, detailing our organization's attributes, skills, and inventory as superior to other inhabitants of the dungeon.

In the broader context, we might consider drawing on psychological archetypes to understand the Guild's own complexity. This would help us "perform" more intentionally on a day-to-day basis. Another perspective could see the Guild aligning more with the role of an occultist, soothsayer, or game designer, focused on creating games within games. This orientation might also involve a more philosophical stance, emphasizing the nested structures that make up our world.

Ultimately, this section boils down to identifying a specific tone and voice that emerges from these foundational decisions. It's not merely about reading from a script but about setting the tone and attitude for how we communicate. The guild or DAO might serve as a director, critiquing our approach based on a common metric.

#### How Do We Begin?

- Identify the scope and time commitment required for the initiative.
- Acknowledge the value of the work and plan for appropriate compensation.
- Define milestones that are aligned with specific deliverables.
- Fit these milestones into a larger, long-term roadmap.
- Consider defining a "sprint" focused on three key areas to gain insights and directions.
- Explore the possibility of conducting the sprint in an asynchronous manner to accommodate various schedules and perspectives.

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# Bennisan's Initial Ideas

### Structure


I believe the structure of the RG Headless Brand ideally would look like the scheme above. It consists of a a few different elements, so organised that the brand **'grows outwards'**.

The base elements (numbers 1 to 4 in one Single-Source-Of-Truth-document, number 5 & 6 as separate autonomous items) are managed a decentral way, with a tbd mechanism of voting. These base elements are so defined that they will determine the look, feel, experience, ... of everything that is RG branded (outer ring).

This structure, I believe, will result in a consistent brand, while allowing said brand to breathe, and be open to change.

#### 1. The essence

The essence is the ultimate center of the brand, and everything is build upon it and will have its roots in this essense.

##### Form
I like a lot of the elements of the Essence described in @TravisWyche 's Initial Ideas. I feel however that there is a very specific form to describe the essence: a collection of short sentences/statements + short description.

An example of this, based on TW's ideas, could be:

> **We are the torchbearers and bringers of light**
> We are navigating a world that feels as chaotic and dark as medieval times, the dark ages, after the end of the world. We guide, we bring light.

(I apologise, TW, is this misses your point, but this is just an example of 1 statement + descr.) If we describe our essence as a set of these statement + descr, I believe it can contain different concepts, and let them co-exist in one harmonious whole. Imo, a form that has this capability is essential to make the essence workable as ultimate base of the RG band.

##### Additions
Of the top of my head, these are a few things/concept that I would add (albeit in better words):
- innovation: We're frontrunners. We like innovative things and are not afraid to go beyond the borders of the known.
- service DAO: We are a service DAO before anything else
- culture-bound: A lot of the things that our members seem to like and drive us together, are grounded in (pop)culture, and are therefore an important part of our nature: DnD, fiction, comics, ...

#### 2. Branding Elements

For me, the branding elements are what TW describes under Character Scaffolding: "Establish a visual language for branding elements like logos and characters."

A short list of branding elements of the top of my head:
- Logo + how to use
- Colour scheme + how to use
- Fonts + how to use
- Products guide *

*-> The Products guide would be a list of potential products and the requirements they should fulfil to be considered aligned w the brand. I believe that a UI f.i. should have more requirements (f.i. use the same navbar as other RG apps, ...) then a social media post or a swag item*

#### 3. Character Scaffolding

To respect RG's roots and past branding, I agree with TW ('Characterization') that we should take the opportunity to create a scaffolding around these characters rooted in DnD, and include this scaffold in our SSOT.

#### 4. Tone & Attitude
To quote TW again, I agree that tone & attitude should look something like:
"A manifest-like presentation to make these elements explicit and clear to both internal and external audiences."

The tone & attitude is, imo, a translation of the essence (1.) in more practical set of adjectives, which can be applied very directly when needed. TW's first paragraph of Attitude is a very interesting take on it, imo.

#### 5. Storybook / ready-to-use RG library
To make our digital products more unified and have a consistent brand experience, I believe the Storybook is a giant leap forward. Imo, more specific elements could increase its effect. I'm thinking of a navbar as most tangible example.

Not sure about the technicalities of Storybook, but ideally we should be able to vote on what gets added or edited.

Maybe a short intro on RG UX could also find its place here?

#### 6. Collection of assets, graphics and illustration

As mentioned before, I think a wide collection of graphical elements and illustrations is a key element to express the decentralised nature of our brand, and of us as a DAO/community of builders.

Ideally we could store these in a place where everybody finds them, and manage that storage decentral, so we can collectively decide what gets added.

### Next stepts
All of the above is what I consider the endresult of a long-term roadmap. To reach this end, it is best to chop it up into milestones that we can work towards.

But before we can do that however, I think we should agree on what it is that we are trying to reach. That, imo, is the first step. I can see us having that conversation in this document, in comments, reworking it until we have described an approach we can all align with.

Once we're done with this stage, we can move to a more practical approach of sprints and milestones, and the according compensation, pouring it into a RIP-proposal if needed.