Jacob Waites
I design, prototype, and build brands and interactions full of expressive type, fun motion, bold colors, and minimal line-work. Sometimes I write and speak about design. My craft is the way I speak to the world, I work to help others find their voice and make them successful.
Station
A home for DAOs to build community, and for creators to do their best work while building a trackable and traceable reputation through decentralized proposals.
The Station team is a craft-focused and fast-paced group of ideators driven to give DAOs and creators a decentralized alternative to traditional work and organizations. At Station, I created a complex V2 design system in Figma, and many different product features, including Proposals and Request for Proposals. I also launched and maintained a marketing site and materials for the proposal and RFPs launch.
The Station Marketing Site
Below is a capture of the station site I built, maintained in webflow. The main hero section had a rail-switching pathway to change between content for DAOs and for Contributors. My favorite interactions shown were the interactive train at the bottom of the page taking you to our app, and also the functional rail map for navigation. The proposer page also had a series of proposal templates in an interactive copy/paste view.
The Product
Proposals are the root of working on Station's product. Users can create proposals to do anything from having a conversation, brand partnerships, exchange ideas, or even get paid for rendering services. Once accepted, a smart contract maintains the relationship and any funds attached to the agreement, and automatically manages the payout once both parties accept.
Request for proposals could also be created, putting out a call to all members of a community to make proposals given a template or terms. This primitive is a powerful tool for decentralized organizations and communities to create a fully traceable and on-chain record of operations, as well as enabling members to remain fully anonymous if necessary, all while still building a verifiable resume of projects.
After speaking with users in the community, we decided to refactor the proposal creation experience into a 3-step process in a single modal view to speed up creation. Many users got lost in an intimidating blank canvas of an editor.
RFPs underwent several redesigns to show relevant information for submitting proposals. The final iteration had a gridded interface with pertinent details.
For the proposals launch, I created a set of marketing illustrations and animations to promote and craft our viewpoints. I also created a system for our marketing materials and changelog, as well as templated animation process in Figma.
In addition, I worked on many different templates for explaining our releases and creating a visual standard for the station brand when talking about new features.
Animations and Motion
Example Contributor benefits animation
Example DAO benefits animation
Example Marketing announcement for new feature
Through our many product iterations, I created a large set of components and iteractions for facilitating more real-time and dynamic digital spaces for projects, these ranged from canvas environments to group editable proposals and living documents.
Interface and Component Samples
A stand out component that went through multiple iterations was the caboose, an onboarding list of tasks that helped the user get from proposal creation through to completion. The caboose guided the user through the process step by step, updating live as authors and contributors made actions on the proposal.
The user profile view acted as a gallery of past work to build on as a live resume.
Early on, I explored the idea of Station having an interactive canvas for squads to do work in and organize deliverables for proposals. This exploration was definitely ambitious for our small team to build, and we ended up pivoting away for a more traditional interface.
The first iteration of an inbox for incoming proposals was originally a messaging interface. However, after studying and interviewing community members, the team decided to support notifications and comments on proposals directly instead.
Notifcations, comments, and mentions was very involved in dev, and also needed controls for frequency and muting.
Handoff and deliverable flows were worked on, but in most cases where not yet entirely needed by the market as they were handled outside of the product.
The Design System
I was responsible for maintaining the Station design system, which was updated weekly over a shared knowledge slack channel. Components where separated into pages for organization, and embedded within a separate layouts library for easy grab and go access to full views.
The separate views library housed gridded app frames with nested interactive components to give designers an easy foundation to build new views and layouts from existing ones.
Other interactions and designs
After many iterations, we began experimenting with a DAG flow interface for creating a custom smart contract caller. Early designs are below.
