YGG AMA: Behind the YGG Rebrand and the Rune System
In this AMA, Gabby Dizon, Jen Yu and other members of the YGG core team revealed the guild’s new look and discussed the rune system as part of its goal to decentralize the YGG brand.
The YGG core team unveiled the guild’s new logo and brand design on March 19, 2023, on YGG’s Discord, where they discussed the concept behind the rebrand. They also explained the rune system, through which the communities that make up YGG can create logos that signify their affiliation with the guild while highlighting their identity as a group. After, the team hosted an AMA to answer questions from the community about the rebrand and what it means for YGG.
Members of YGG’s core team who participated in the AMA included co-founder Gabby Dizon, Head of Design Jen Yu, Global Chief Operating Officer Colin Goltra, and Head of Product Development KnightAV. The event was hosted by Leah Callon-Butler, director of advisory and investment firm, Emfarsis.
The following is an excerpt from the AMA. Watch the full recording on YouTube.
Something New at YGG! (YGG Rebrand AMA)
Jen (13:45): Whenever we go into a rebrand, we have to be careful about preserving the things we love about it, while making room for the future. And the most important signifier for YGG is the shield. It signifies community and the sense of belonging in the guild.
It was a challenge to keep this medieval vibe but also being able to modernize it. We wanted to honor YGG’s history of guilds — all the games that we play that are full of knights and wizards and adventures, but we also wanted to modernize it.
YGG has grown so much in the last couple of years where we have so many people coming to us from different places. We have players, we have creators, we have streamers, we have coaches, we have developers, we have so many different kinds of people, all the way from Asia to Europe, and we are continuing to grow.
We wanted to be able to celebrate our community with how we approach the new design. And because of this, we started with a question of how we can highlight individuals and different guilds in YGG. When we started thinking about our brand, we didn't want to make just one logo. We wanted a way to make many logos to show off all the different groups playing with YGG. This represents our philosophy around our new design system.
YGG is composed of many people coming together to make something bigger, so the small pieces are just building blocks to create something much bigger. Here's a first look at our rune builder. Let's check out how these small pieces make something bigger. On the left, we have our grid system where you can stack and piece together these individual blocks. And then in the middle, we start to see how the building blocks start to form a shape, logo or an image.
Now, the new YGG logo is only the first of many things we can create. These pieces are here for everyone to be able to make their own runes. You'll also notice that we have a lot more colors that we're going to be using in the new brand. And because of the growing community and different personalities at YGG, the way we thought about color was that we didn't want to just use one color, we wanted all of them. Because we're not just going to tell you to use the color blue. If you don't like blue, that's okay. Pick a different color because we welcome you to make it your own.
There's so much talk about decentralizing in web3. And this design challenge was about how much we could also decentralize our brand. Decentralizing a brand means that it belongs to everyone, and that everyone can create something of their own. Everything about the YGG brand is a building block in our new brand kit. This is an invitation; we want to see what you can come up with.
Gabby (20:03): The rebrand is not just for the sake of having a new logo as you can see from what Jen presented. This is coming up with something like “branding Lego blocks.”
YGG is made up of dozens, if not hundreds, of individual communities. So, we wanted to create a system where we can show the unique identity of YGG, but still show the individuality of its different parts.
We’re starting with some of the teams that are part of YGG, such as YGG Core and YGG Pilipinas. YGG Elite have started to create their own logos using the new rune system that we've made. In the near future, we want the community groups to come up with their own runes.
We want you to represent yourselves as a group on the internet, particularly on Discord, in the various games related to web3 that we are playing. You can showcase your group identity under the YGG umbrella using the new runes and logo.
As these branding Legos are for you to use and integrate, we'll be coming up with tools to help you do so in the near future.
You can watch the full AMA on the Yield Guild Games YouTube channel.
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