01WORD was the first ever NFT collection of words in binary code. The project was inspired by the building blocks of computing. The goal was to create a global brand that celebrated binary code (the origin of the digital era) and shaped the trajectory for the blockchain and NFTs.
We wanted to turn binary code into something fun and playful. We knew who we were and who our audience was, we were the cool nerds of the blockchain. Everything we did was done with our identity at the heart of it. We had 3 principles: help the world, design minimally, and max out the awesomeness factor.
Designing the art was one of the most fun parts of the project. We knew from the start that we were going to be making collectibles out of words. Each NFT would represent a word chosen by our community, so instead of selling avatars or abstract art like everyone else, we wanted to create something that people could relate to. Instead of creating scarce properties we relied upon people’s emotional attachments to certain words to create scarcity. The words would serve as the titles of the NFTs and the art would be the word spelled out in binary code.
We developed our signature identity using Baucher Gothic because of its extremely minimal 0s and 1s. Then, we manually customized the colours for each NFT to match the feel to the meaning of the word.
To make our world a better place we introduced our philanthropic arm called 01WORD For The World. We selected certain words that we would auction and donate the proceeds in perpetuity to that cause.
Before we launched, one of our most important goals was to grow our community on discord. We needed to find a way to get visitors interested enough to join our project and direct them to our discord channel once they were.
We designed the website to reveal more details about the project as visitors scrolled and get them progressively more exited about our project.
This meant that we couldn’t just place a button anywhere so we introduced a button that would stick to the bottom of the website, making it accessible at any point of the experience and easy to join our community.
Xavier Esquivel
Co-Founder
