A New Face for KlimaDAO

February 15, 2022

Today we are proud to unveil our newly redesigned website, app, and blog.

Everything you see was designed and built in-house by DAO contributors, and published open-source on GitHub. No outsourcing, no agencies, no templates. Just talented people who showed up and offered their time, expertise, and enthusiasm—because they love this project and share our vision.

TLDR; this site is fresh but far from finished. We will continue to iterate, improve, grow our team, and ship a huge list of products and enhancements over the coming weeks and months.

Let us take a moment to share some of the thinking that went into the new site and highlight some of the features coming in the near and long term.

We approached this redesign with several goals in mind:

1. Shifting our target audience

When we launched in October 2021, we were moving quickly. Our goal was to harness the momentum in the DeFi space and leverage the hype around game-changing new protocols like Olympus. We saw a brief window of opportunity to capture this energy and capital, and kickstart a new era for carbon markets.

Our target audience were people who cared about climate change, but more importantly, people deeply immersed in the world of crypto. People who knew what we meant by DeFi lingo like “liquidity,” “ERC20,” “staking,” and “rebase.” People who could confidently leap across a Polygon Bridge and dive head-first into a Sushi Pool. In other words, degens.

Our message landed—and reached a far wider audience than anticipated. Whether it was due to or in spite of our very clunky, very green landing page is up for debate. But either way, we hear again and again from crypto first-timers that they were able to understand how truly impactful our protocol could be.

It’s been a very bumpy road, but we are proud to have come this far. We’ve opened the black hole for carbon.

2. Tempering the black hole

KlimaDAO as a ‘black hole’ is an imperfect analogy perhaps, but it makes for a wonderfully effective first impression. Black holes are disruptive, aggressive, unstoppable forces of nature that operate at planetary scale—everything we aim to be.

First impressions are important, and designing for KLIMA is not an easy task. Carbon markets, climate action, crypto, DeFi—each of these topics contain enough depth and complexity to fill a full-time study program. To truly understand our protocol requires quite an intimidating depth of knowledge. And yet, for us to achieve truly disruptive scale, we need buy-in from everyone, which means we need to reach far beyond the worlds of crypto and carbon.

So we present today a much more inviting, approachable, and professional aesthetic. After some debate, we’ve kept the black hole imagery front-and-center (at least for now). We hope the refreshed aesthetic and language appeals to individuals and institutions alike, while embodying our vision, ambition, and character.

And this time the site is designed by—you know—actual designers 😅

3. A set of building blocks

KlimaDAO needs more than a website. We need a web platform. Ideally one which we can easily expand to include new feeds, charts, documents, guides, projects, products, dashboards, and teams. One that we can continually iterate on and rework over time.

We need to empower content creators, authors, marketers, and developers alike. The first step was to create a Content Management System. For this we’ve employed the open-source, developer, and author-friendly Sanity Studio. Sanity powers the new blog you are reading right now. Hopefully it will eventually power everything from merch stores to podcast feeds.

We are a DAO, so we rely on contributors. That means contributing code should be easy. The code we write should be modern, readable, industry-standard. That’s why we are working with popular tech like React, TypeScript and Next.js.

If you like building things for the planet, you can grab a ticket on our GitHub. If you are really motivated, we hope you apply to become a contributor. You can get paid in KLIMA for any meaningful contributions you make. We are especially looking for senior Web (Typescript/React) and Smart Contract (Solidity) developers.

4. A spirit of iteration

Finally, in addition to these broad-reaching goals, we have a long list of practical wants and needs. With this release we’ve checked a few boxes, but the list is endless. Here is what’s next on our to-do list in order of priority:

• Multi-lingual site for broader access to international markets (almost ready!)
• Fiat on-ramp integrations like Mobilum
• Improved user experience for beginners (buy, bond, swap)
• Klima Infinity ♾️ (You’ll hear more on that soon)
• Integrated dashboards and charts for monitoring protocol health
• More first-class content, resources, and tutorials

And of course, constant improvements to accessibility and performance.

You are the DAO

We could have waited a few more weeks for these items to be ready before doing a ‘big reveal’ of a perfectly polished site. Instead, we chose to embrace the spirit of a community-led DAO. By releasing this work-in-progress we’re opening the door for more improvements from contributors like you.

If you see a problem with the new site or have suggestions, head to our Discord and let us know in the #website-bugs-feedback channel.