DONALABS.
DonaLabs needed a brand that looked rooted, not loud — DeFi told as old-money botanical. I shaped the wordmark, the photography rules, the type stack and the product surfaces, then handed engineering a tokenised library so the whole thing could ship without me.
- ROLE
- Sole designer · brand → product
- CLIENT
- DONALABS
- YEAR
- 2025
- SCOPE
- IDENTITY · WEB · PRODUCT
- LIVE
- donalabs.xyz ↗
- FIGMA
- ↗ source file
A DEFI STUDIOTHAT DIDN'T WANTTO LOOK LIKE ONE.
Most crypto brands were collapsing into one mood: dark void, electric purple, anonymous geometry. The DonaLabs founders wanted the opposite — patient, considered, almost agricultural. A studio you'd trust the way you trust an old building, not a launch poster.
The first sprint was research and reference, not pixels. I pulled an obscene mood board — 19th-century botanical plates, Italian gallery signage, vintage seed catalogues — then narrowed to three directions. We signed off the botanical one in a 30-minute review and the rest of the system flowed from that single decision.
Greens that read institutional, not farmer's-market. Forest depths first, sage as a quiet support, candle-cream as a release valve — never all three loud at once.
Custom display wordmark for all hero surfaces, humanist sans for body, mono only for receipts and meta. Specimen rules baked into the Figma library so a non-designer pasting a heading still hit the right scale.
Real plant macros, real stone, real cream paper instead of rendered abstractions. Cheaper to license, harder to imitate, and crucially read as 'studio' rather than 'startup.'
Components shipped in the Figma library — buttons, cards, tape, footer rails, the lot.
Total founder-feedback rounds before the system locked. Most decisions stuck on round one.
One Figma file, one Tailwind tokens export, zero design slack threads after week six.
Saksham didn't show us moodboards, he showed us a thesis. The botanical move was so clearly right that even the engineers stopped second-guessing the green.
WALREEL.
Short-form video as a paid-per-view protocol. Sui for ledgering, Walrus for storage, x402 for the cents-per-loop settlement. The product had to feel like TikTok and the payments rail had to disappear — both at once.