The Layout #24
A layout of design highlights and thoughts
Welcome to The Layout #24. The substack about design that makes life a little easier with fun insights and key resources for you to level up. Now, let’s get on with it.
What NFT’s failure can teach us about judging products and value.
NFTs were a craze years back. Long story short, you could buy mostly pictures or images, and videos as a token and attach them to your crypto account. These pictures according to NFT experts were said to hold unique value because they were attached to a unique owner which gave it value and worth (I am not really an expert in this so please spare me). Now, it is almost like buying fancy art but in digital format.
The issue that I always had when people bought a certain NFT for almost $100k was why don’t people just screenshot this image and save it on their computer? Some people during that period told people to stop saving images of their NFTs since they had ownership of that image. The issue was this wasn’t the Mona Lisa, this was something that was made using graphic design tools over a clearly short period of time.
Most products that are going to be successful in the long-term always provide a unique value that is hard to come by or replicate i.e. some products at launch look so wacky or unconventional or out of the fray but they still offer a unique proposition that was unique to that market. Remember the first iPhone Launch, It was way more expensive than its competitors at that time but it had something unique that set it apart which was the Capacitive Touchscreen which changed the face of mobile telephony forever.
NFTs were unique as a new product entry but there was always this innate suspicion that it was a Ponzi scheme because people still felt innately that it was just a picture that could easily be copied and pasted somewhere else. How can be something valuable when it can easily be replicated and used by others? That was the question that NFT’s evangelists were never able to answer and the other benefits or applications that they could hypothetically do didn’t come into fruition
In summary, great products create value and can’t be easily replicated by others which makes them unique in their own right and gives them value and worth.
Resource Break
Shader gradient: A unique way to make interesting gradients for various uses Click here to explore
Simple Icons: Getting SVG icons of top brands that you know and love. Check it out here.
n27 Font: A font to use for your projects. Check it out
Typography Tutorial: A unique way to learn typography for beginners. Check it out.
Color Brewer: When you want to pick colors for your maps???? Check it out.
Start the morning with some Ben Bohmer
The Berlin show didn’t dissapoint
Have a wonderful week and keep creating. Please subscribe and share with your friends if you found this helpful. Thank you and God Bless.