Originally published in Comm Arts

With design by Code and Theory, this online platform gives content creators their own cryptocurrency and their fans access to exclusive content.

Responses by Arjun Kalyanpur, associate director of creative strategy, product, Code and Theory.

Background: Rally is a cryptocurrency-based platform that empowers creators across sites like YouTube, TikTok and Twitch to create their own independent digital economy. In exchange for supporting a creator, fans get access to exclusive content and rewards, while creators are able to develop direct relationships with their fans.

Rally is at an exciting moment in time: in advance of announcing several new partnerships with athletes, artists and others, it went through a brand refresh, seeking to build a new site that could scale with its ambitions. Code and Theory helped translate the brand to digital and selected a technical foundation it could build upon.

The site itself serves several functions: to educate and inform visitors about the Rally brand, creators and suite of offerings; to encourage users to take actions relevant to them, such as buying coins or becoming content creators; and to support and deliver value to users pre- and postconversion through content and features. Being such a diverse platform, Rally has several core audiences to which the site caters: prospective creators, creator communities, potential new coin backers, crypto enthusiasts and developers, among others.

Larger picture: Code and Theory partnered with ACE Content to develop a new flexible brand identity that enables creators to take the guidelines and apply them wherever and however they engage with their fans. The new brand identity provides structure and consistency while enabling the community to take the brand and adapt it in a decentralized fashion. Throughout the collaboration, Code and Theory and ACE converged a transformational, decentralized crypto project with the evolution of a web 3.0 creator economy brand into a dynamic, accessible and beautifully designed digital experience that represents the creative communities Rally serves.

A new brand identity translates Rally’s proposition into a cohesive narrative that inspires and energizes creative communities built off the insight that creative communities deserve more of what they create. The breadth and depth of Rally’s creators and their communities are demonstrated throughout this identity, which also provides iconic flourishes that evoke a freshly minted coin.

Design core: The site has to balance education, marketing and the actual financial data that powers each individual creator’s coins. Along each of those verticals, there are several core features meant to amplify content and messaging.

For the education and marketing pieces, the site uses a mix of several interactive storytelling components that break down the complexities of cryptocurrencies and Rally’s offerings, while espousing the benefits of being both a creator and a supporter.

To deliver the financial data that is at the heart of the Rally platform, we balanced creating net new features with redesigning how its core product data appears on site. Net new features include the prominent coin ticker on the homepage, which shows the current value of each coin and enables you to directly jump to a creator’s biographical page. Additionally, on the Explore All Creators page, we created narrative components that enable the Rally team to curate and feature different creators every day.

Finally, the core value of the platform is the creators that power it. In line with our overarching design theme—which was to balance modernity, approachability and technology—we updated the designs of each creator’s biographic and coin data pages.

Time constraints: This project had a fast recommendation, design and development timeline. Ultimately, the platform we delivered was exactly what we set out to accomplish as part of the Rally rebrand. The time constraints enabled us to focus on what was most important to launch with while shifting additional items and features to fast-follow phases that will later enhance the site.

Navigation structure: Given that Rally has a diverse audience base with different needs—creators, presumptive creators, supporters and followers, the community, developers, and others—we structured the navigation to speak to each of their primary needs. Creators are given easy access to the knowledge and guidance they’ll need to create or enhance their coin, new and existing supporters are both able to easily explore all the different creators on the platform and learn more about Rally, and the community and developers have consolidated resources and access to other parts of the Rally ecosystem.

Given the creative nature of the platform and its creators, we also sought to differentiate the design of the navigation from other websites. Rather than presenting an endless list of links, the Rally navigation prioritizes key information through a horizontal structure. Certain sublinks can even be appended with an image to further enhance the link.