Creative Operations · 2021–2026
Tools, Not Artifacts: The Systems Behind Five Years of Output
- Branding
- Content
- Marketing
Overview
The creative team at Filecoin Foundation was a small team, a handful of people serving a huge ecosystem of different companies, different projects and different kinds of stakeholders all across the planet. Everybody wanted something: branding, logos, marketing support. The only way to get anything done was to keep strong boundaries around the team’s time and bandwidth.
The remit stayed wide — brand, events, marketing, media production, merch, internal comms — but ad hoc work for outside entities was out. Instead that demand was met with self-serve tools at hub.fil.org/design and fil-city.io, so teams could help themselves. At peak moments we brought in partners rather than growing the team: directing LIT Collective for brand research and development, The Branding Kings for merch manufacturing, and Invisible North for specialist event production.
We build tools, not artifacts
The instinct of most designers is to make beautiful artifacts, and that’s worth having. Some things deserve to be bespoke and taken as far as they can go. But a small team becomes a bottleneck the moment everything has to pass through it. So the recurring problems get a system instead of a file. The job isn’t making the thing, it’s making sure the thing gets made well, whoever ends up doing it.
Events are the best example of this in practice. It took the team ten weeks to prepare an event properly, and events were coming every six weeks. So we built FIL City, an event design system for producing cohesive, high-quality visual identities — consistent across every event, but tailorable to each one’s own location.
We set a high bar for the ecosystem
The purpose of building tools rather than artifacts wasn’t to reduce the amount of work we were doing. It was to meet the demand of a growing, sprawling ecosystem.
Setting the bar meant showing what Filecoin should look and feel like in the real world. Everything the team touched — events, social, collateral, websites — had to be polished, accurate and on brand, because it was the reference the rest of the ecosystem worked from.
We were the first users of every tool we built. FIL City ran our own events before it ran anyone else’s, so its limits showed up as our problems and got fixed in the course of the work.
We give our tools away
We weren’t precious about any of it. The ecosystem works on open source principles and the creative function worked the same way, which meant building the tools so anyone could pick them up and use them. Nothing in a decentralised ecosystem can be imposed, so the only version that spreads is the one more useful than what a team would build alone. The aim was to make doing the right thing the easy thing.
FIL City went out to the ecosystem, and some organisations ran their own events on it without involving us at all. By building the tools we needed and sharing them openly, we enabled other teams to put out good work without needing us to hold their hand.
Good design is never arbitrary
When repeatable systems and tools can streamline day-to-day tasks, time and creativity are freed up for more interesting projects — such as our NYC Open Data infographic.
As part of a partnership with New York City to expand its Open Data project — five years, at no cost to the city, to improve accessibility, accountability and transparency — my brief was to show that relationship in an infographic.
I built it on the subway map. The lines carry the flow of information, control and finances between the organisations and the government bodies involved, so where the money came from and where it went is visible on the same diagram as the data.
Outcomes
The result was a high-throughput team with an outsized impact, working by thinking strategically about its relationship to the ecosystem and addressing its needs before they surfaced. Around 2,400 deliverables over five years, roughly ten a week, including 170-plus blog headers and 147 video edits.