Reserve's new brand and website

[0xJMG]

Reserve launched it’s new brand on Aug 10 2023. Learn more about the new brand design decisions in this Twitter post and the blog post at the end of the thread. The response has been very positive however there have also been some critical feedback, as well as undeniably good suggetsions.

The purpose of this RFC is to invite the community to aggregate the feedback in the comments of the RFC. Community members can post their own feedback or the feedback of others (credited to the source) that they believe important.

Feedback and suggestions are most useful when they are qualified who it is coming from. Is the source a RSR hodler or RSR staker or someone not involved in the Reserve ecosystem? Additional qualifications of the feedback are also appreciated, for example someone’s prior experience or market observations and learnings.

Recommended structure of the feedback/comments:

• Source: “RSR staker since Mar 2023” or “RSR hodler since 2022” or “frustrated observer”

• Problem: The nav bar is on the top and people don’t use top nav bars anymore + an explanation of why the commenter believes this is true; experience, data, etc

• Suggested solution: move the nav bar to the left side, which is more popular these days

By aggregating all the comments in the RFC it will be easier for the community to discuss/debate what should be changed or why the design team made decisions they did.

It’s ok to just leave positive comments as well.

[RyanTreeFiddy]

Did someone compile a list of links to all of the previous suggestions? I provided feedback but now don’t really remember everything I said.

All of my feedback starts here:

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

Just keep scrolling. I also sent a video to admins with more feedback. Thanks -Ryan

[DollarQuestion]

I think the new website is really great. Looks good on mobile and desktop. The messaging is very clear and essential and unrolls in a natural and logical flow as you scroll (for me at least - it’s hard to view it with the eyes of someone new).

Having a hard time finding criticisms. Only possible suggestion is to have a quick link or icon towards the top or in header somewhere to twitter/X… Maybe there’s a way to add it without hurting the aesthetic, but given it’s the first place many people go to suss out a project, might be worth having it where you don’t have to scroll to the bottom. As I check mobile, I see it shows up when you hit the top right menu icon, but arguably could be more immediate.

[Spen]

I generally think the new design looks clean and minimal. I like that. But it lacks consistency.

Wall of text
The introduction text is a bit a wall of text. I like that you are going for a form of abstract of what the protocol is about, but you can make the text more appealing to look at by e.g. highlighting words.

Explain Profit for Deployer
“This hassle and cost can be worth it, since you can turn a profit by creating, governing and promoting RTokens.” This sentence doesn’t really make sense to me as one does not make a profit by the listed activities but simply by charging a fee on the accrued yield. Reserve could do a better job in highlighting why anyone would want to create an Rtoken and what’s in it for the deployer.

Missing Context
“Until everything is tokenized”, I feel this sentence is missing some context. Maybe “Until all real world assets (RWAs) are tokenized”. This would also namedrop RWAs which might also help with SEO.

Unpolished design of boxes
These boxes specifically look like from a website from 10 years ago. Something about these boxes makes them look very unpolished and not great.

Maybe simply adding a border radius as is done for the section RToken Primer would already help. Would also make it more consistent.
Or use the same design as was used for this section:

Inconsistent spacing of sections
The spacing of elements and sections seems all over the place:

Inconsistent usage of fullscreen and padded sections
The Rtoken stats are suddenly a box instead of a fullsceen/wide screen element:

Having it fullscreen like this (removing the rounded corners and the padding of the section element) looks more modern to me and is in line with the section “Creating your own Rtoken”. I’m all for consistency.:

Strange horizontal lines
Sometimes there are the horizontal line and sometimes not. And there does not seem to be any spacing between content and the horizontal lines. This looks unintentional and unpolished.

Notable risks doesn’t end on positive note
The section “Notable Risks” just highlights various risks without leading into a positive note about what the project is doing. I’m missing a “and that’s why we are doing x, y and z. Read more on how we mitigate risks ->”

Correct language?
“Identify a bug?” I’m not a native speaker but shouldn’t this rather be called “Identified a bug?”

Inconsistent capitalization of headers

• “Identify a bug?”
• “View audits of the Reserve Protocol”
• “Notable Risks”
• “Creating your own RToken”
• “RToken Primer”
• “RToken stats”

What now? Are you following Chicago style or not?
If you are unsure, just use a tool like this: Chicago - Title Capitalization Tool - Capitalize My Title - Title Case Tool

Wrong link for Moby
The Moby link in the footer links to MobileCoin instead of to Moby. This link might be better suited: Moby - Pay Privately

[Spen]

Since I’m not allowed to put more than 6 screenshots in a post, here my second one.

Inconsistent usage of border radius on boxes
The audits boxes have a border radius of 0.125rem while the elements further above have a border radius of 0.25rem.
This add on to the feeling of inconsistency.
0.125rem

0.25rem

The list for the RToken Stats even changes the border radius with the screen size:

Rather fix all boxes to the same radius on all screen sizes.

Footer not designed for md screen size
The footer isn’t properly defined for the md screen size.
sm:

md:

lg:

[Spen]

Wrong button design
On the RToken Primer tab Collateral Default, the button “Read the docs” has a white background. There are two types of buttons. Blue button on beige background or white outline button on blue background. One should not introduce more types of button designs:

Missing radius on button
All buttons should have the same radius, this one on the RToken Primer does not:

Suboptimal scaling of graphic
The animated graphic is scaled down when the screen size changes, which leads to unreadable text on the graphic:

[Crypto_Goku]

WOW spen … impressive feedback !! thank you

[0xJMG]

Great feedback @Spen @RyanTreeFiddy @DollarQuestion will discuss with the team.

[Larry]

Amazing feedback @Spen, thank you

I agree with most your suggestions, and the fact that you speak web-dev makes a lot of this more easily actionable.