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There's a corner of crypto that thrives on chaos. While institutional players embrace traditional finance aesthetics, the degen trading community lives in a different world entirely; one of manic Telegram threads, unhinged takes, and emotional whiplash that swings from euphoria to despair in minutes.
Instead of sanitizing this energy, Studio Freight and Bullpen worked to make it the central pulse of their brand identity. In this written conversation, design director Matthew Roop walks through his experience building a brand for a subculture that refuses to be tamed.
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CF
Let’s grab this conversation by the horns (sorry). Can you share a bit about your thoughts heading into this project?
MR
Absolutely. I was excited to see the brief come in on this project. Long before I was a design director at Studio Freight, I was a hopeless trading degen caught up in the crypto bull run of 2017.?? I could easily spend half a day perusing Discord servers and trying to track down the hottest Telegram channels. And while that experience yielded little in the way of profitability (for me), it certainly taught me the culture of the proverbial crypto degen.
Once Bullpen came along I knew that I had a great opportunity to help it be exactly what it needed to be. These online crypto communities are comically spastic, shameless, meme-obsessed, and have a dark sense of self-deprecating humor when things go wrong.
In my experience these users they take nothing very seriously, be it huge wins or huge losses. They do their best to find an edge but at the end of the day, it’s more about the journey and community, even if they won’t admit it. Knowing all of this, it was easy to develop a concept that “felt right.” I knew from the start the hard part was going to be selling it to the client.
Once Bullpen came along I knew that I had a great opportunity to help it be exactly what it needed to be. These online crypto communities are comically spastic, shameless, meme-obsessed, and have a dark sense of self-deprecating humor when things go wrong.
In my experience these users they take nothing very seriously, be it huge wins or huge losses. They do their best to find an edge but at the end of the day, it’s more about the journey and community, even if they won’t admit it. Knowing all of this, it was easy to develop a concept that “felt right.” I knew from the start the hard part was going to be selling it to the client.
CF
Were there any key considerations coming into the project?
MR
Well, whenever I work on a project I am always thinking about how I can steward a bold, striking visual identity with significant emotional impact. Emotion is our key to connect to the other humans living out there, so any identity must embrace that. It just so happens that emotions are extremely present in the daily lives of crypto degen traders.
They experience extreme highs and lows in the markets based on price fluctuations, in their communities based on interpersonal drama, and as a result of the larger crypto industry that they partake in. It would be an absolute disservice to create a brand trying to relate to these audiences without tapping in to these emotions in a self aware kind of way, by speaking their own language.
They experience extreme highs and lows in the markets based on price fluctuations, in their communities based on interpersonal drama, and as a result of the larger crypto industry that they partake in. It would be an absolute disservice to create a brand trying to relate to these audiences without tapping in to these emotions in a self aware kind of way, by speaking their own language.
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CF
What was the core insight to unlocking the brand and where did it come from?
MR
The conceptual center for this project was the decision to rely heavily on a visual language inspired by the very place that these communities exist. The way people speak on these Discord servers and Telegram channels is completely unique, and this is the way we felt the Bullpen brand should speak. So… pulling from our own pasts as recovering degens, we landed on the visual language. What you get is an identity that makes use of inside-jokes, hyper specific acronyms, ridiculous user-names, chat bubbles, emoticons, and so on.
The choice to go in this direction was also a result of functionality. The project was rather limited in terms of timeline and we wanted to give them something simple and easily reproducible. The design solutions we proposed are intentionally simple, bold, and easy to use.
The choice to go in this direction was also a result of functionality. The project was rather limited in terms of timeline and we wanted to give them something simple and easily reproducible. The design solutions we proposed are intentionally simple, bold, and easy to use.
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01 of 03
CF
Makes sense. So was this approach an obvious “hell yeah” for the teams?
MR
Not really.?? In reality, the language that you find in these chat rooms is WAY more colorful than what would be appropriate for a brand to use publicly. We definitely had to tone that down haha. I remember getting a hell no or two during the internal refinement phase. But I guess it’s better to go too far than not far enough.
When we first presented the brand concept to the client, their initial reaction was a bit adverse, probably because it’s rather in-your-face. But we walked them through their own references, and explained the concept thoroughly. After they had some time to think it over (a week or so), they came back loving what we originally pitched.
When we first presented the brand concept to the client, their initial reaction was a bit adverse, probably because it’s rather in-your-face. But we walked them through their own references, and explained the concept thoroughly. After they had some time to think it over (a week or so), they came back loving what we originally pitched.
“We spend weeks designing these concepts, it’s not always fair to expect a client to ‘get it’ after seeing it for 20 minutes.”
In this case, it was a matter of being patient but also not immediately caving to their initial hesitance. Sometimes people need to acquire the taste for something they’ll come to love. I always say that we spend weeks designing these concepts, it’s not always fair to expect a client to “get it” after seeing it for 20 minutes during a first round presentation.
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CF
How about the bull? What’s the story?
MR
The original Bullpen logo was a rather atypical bull head. The style of its rendering was certainly not appropriate for the direction we designed, so we naturally had to recreate it. From there it was a matter of simplifying. Do you really need the whole bull? Its whole head? Instead we thought, what is the most iconic piece of the bull? Naturally, the horns.??
And since the name of the brand is Bullpen, there’s no worry about getting the horns confused with another animal. From there, it was a question of how to style them. We chose to have them right-facing to indicate aggression and forward-thinking. We also gave them a “bullish” up-tilt in the spirit of positive returns.
And since the name of the brand is Bullpen, there’s no worry about getting the horns confused with another animal. From there, it was a question of how to style them. We chose to have them right-facing to indicate aggression and forward-thinking. We also gave them a “bullish” up-tilt in the spirit of positive returns.
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CF
What’s a part of the project you’re especially proud of?
MR
We built a library of 100 old-school emoticons expressing a wide variety of emotions for the brand. They don’t get used as a loud piece so it’s easy to miss them. They are more like easter eggs for those who would seek them.
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CF
Anything that didn’t end up working out?
MR
In some of the initial explorations, we looked at using all-caps typography. This wasn’t quite right because the client was looking for something a bit more friendly and approachable. While the all-caps looked nice it did feel too aggressive so we scrapped it.
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CF
Any takeaways or lessons from this one?
MR
When you know that you have a banger,?? focus on presenting with clarity and eloquence, and create space for things to click when the client has self-doubts.
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