Wildish & Co. opt for public domain collage avatars in their identity for DAO onboarder Metaphor

HQ’d in Miami, Metaphor makes it easy to discover, join and participate in a decentralised autonomous organisation, or a DAO – which is a grassroots group that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain. Essentially, DAOs are open-source, unlike the traditional top-down structure of most companies. Metaphor has collaborated across the pond, working alongside London-based design studio Wildish & Co. to craft their identity – looking to stand out from the crowd and visually surprise the emoji-filled fintech space. This mission was led by Wildish & Co.’s ‘Embrace New’ strategy, having refined the brand’s strategy and architecture under this notion, with the idea of connection and Web3’s burgeoning community powering the visual motifs throughout the brand. A theme most overtly embodied through the collages of images from the public domain that make up Metaphor’s user’s avatars. “We created them in Illustrator and designed a structure so that the avatars were generative,” Managing Director Sam Fresco tells us, with hundreds of assets and the intention to continually add to the photographic stockpile. “It’s worth mentioning that a core element in designing the brand was that we were building a platform for a community,” he adds, “so the concept was that in this strange new world, you were never alone,” setting the rule that avatars are always constructed with pairs of two or more characters.