A Swiss Army Knife for Creative Production

Overview

A three-person team covering an ecosystem this size needed tools that fold out to do more than one job. These channels are the Foundation’s Swiss army knife: a weekly podcast, a print-on-demand store the whole ecosystem orders from, and a run of plush Corgis that became the project’s mascot. What they produce between them is broad - editorial and interview production, apparel and product ranges, packaging, soft-toy manufacture, store merchandising and campaign graphics - but the output is not really the point. A decentralised ecosystem has no office, no shared timezone and no org chart to belong to, so belonging has to be manufactured. These are the cultural artefacts that do it: a running narrative people follow week to week, insignia they can wear in public, and a totem that ends up on a shelf at home. Tribes cohere around stories and objects, and an ecosystem this scattered needs both if the people in it are going to feel like one group rather than a mailing list.

Approach

Every channel had to answer the same question before it shipped: can this run without me? That meant two things in practice. Self-serving, so whoever wants the output can produce it from approved templates instead of filing a request and waiting. And self-sustaining, so the raw material is a byproduct of something the Foundation already does rather than a new production burden - events generate recordings, recordings become episodes, and nobody has to invent content from a standing start. Designing those loops is the real work; the artwork is the easy part.

DWeb Decoded

A podcast is the cheapest networking instrument a brand can own. It gives you a standing reason to ask a founder, a researcher or a policy lead for an hour of their attention, and people who would turn down a meeting will happily take an interview, because the interview gives them something too. Every episode is a relationship that did not exist the week before, and the guest list doubles as a map of who the Foundation is actually connected to.

The overhead stays low because the raw material already exists. Filecoin Foundation had years of event content - speaker sessions, panels, conversations with ecosystem builders - with no format to carry it beyond the room it was recorded in. The name came first. DWeb Decoded signals the subject and the promise in two words: this is the decentralised web, and we will make it legible. That accessibility stance set the editorial bar for everything after it, so each episode lands as a deliberate editorial product rather than a raw recording with a logo on it.

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A podcast identity carries one hard requirement most brand systems never face: a new episode every week, indefinitely. The visual system is built around that cadence. Episode artwork and thumbnails assemble from templates in minutes, guest photography drops into a fixed treatment, and type and colour hold the show together across YouTube, Spotify and podcast players I do not control. Most episodes start life on a stage - recordings are transcribed and cleaned, cut to episode length, packaged in the show’s artwork and shipped to every platform, with AI carrying more of the transcription and edit work as the tooling matured. That distribution list includes IPFS itself, which felt like the least a show about the decentralised web could do.

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The Swag Store

The store is a production line the ecosystem operates itself. It runs on decentralised print-on-demand with drop-ship fulfilment - no warehouse, no stock, no manual packing - and orders print close to wherever they are going, so it ships worldwide without freight overhead. The design work went into the layer above that: an approved product range, artwork prepared to each manufacturer’s specification, and templates that let internal teams and ecosystem partners spin up their own branded merch through the same pipeline. A community organiser in another timezone can kit out an event without anyone on the creative team knowing it happened, and it will still look like Filecoin when it arrives. Merch stopped being a design request and became infrastructure other people build on.

Filecoin merchandise from the Swag Store range

Filecoin branded apparel from the Swag Store

The Corgis

The one thing in the programme deliberately kept off the automation path, because it works on an audience need no template can serve. Everyone at a conference has the same errand waiting at home: something for the kids, something for the partner, something for the dog who will destroy it within a week. Most conference swag fails that test badly - nobody has ever brought a branded notebook home as a present. A plush Corgi passes it, and people will work for one: at Web Summit in Lisbon we dispensed them from a vending machine built into the Filecoin Station, and attendees queued for over an hour to get one.

Each edition is themed to activities in the city rather than to local cultural artefacts - skiing in Davos, lion dancing in Hong Kong, being an obvious tourist in Brussels - and produced at roughly 80% of expected demand, so every run sells out and stays wanted. That scarcity is what turns a giveaway into something worth carrying through an airport. The payoff is placement no media budget buys: a Corgi that leaves an event ends up on a child’s bed or in the dog’s toy basket, in a house where nobody has heard of decentralised storage, and it stays there for years. Editions that sell out at the event stay available on the store for the people who missed out.

Filecoin Corgi - event-themed edition design

Outcomes

DWeb Decoded ran to 128 episodes across two seasons, each one a conversation with someone worth knowing, carried out to audiences on YouTube, Spotify and IPFS long after the room emptied. The store has absorbed most of the 160-plus merch requests logged since 2021 without any of them landing on a designer’s desk, and still ships worldwide with no inventory to hold. The Corgis, scarce by design with editions themed from Davos to Buenos Aires, sell out at events and travel home in hand luggage. Three channels, three different jobs, and the only reason a team of three could run all of them at once is that none of them needs the team to keep running.