The Akord Rebrand
Akord has recently had what some may call an epiphany, realising that it wants to project its purpose more clearly to its current and future users and be more focused on its use-case specifics.
In the past few days, Akord has completely rebranded its image, to incorporate and project what it really is about – privacy protection and data ownership – while also showing its new side – content publishing.
In a blog post by Akord co-founder Pascal Barry, all is explained.
So, let’s have a look at the new Akord!
The Akord Rebrand
Step aside Akord v2, Akord “v.reborn” is here… so to speak. V2 is still the main version of the Akord app, but things have become more focused. In his blog post about the Akord rebranding, Pascal Barry mentions how when Akord first started out, they were on a mission to achieve privacy protection, and empower data ownership. But at the time, they had no idea that Arweave even existed. After finding out about the permanent solution, they saw all the possibilities Arweave could offer Akord and, inspired, the team’s creative imaginations ran wild.
The team presented Akord to the Open Web Foundry as a platform for digital heritage, aka a digital time capsule for one’s family. But the possibilities for expansion have been endless, and more ideas flew in.
But, in order to stay focused on what they wanted to achieve and not get carried away by all the possibilities, Akord decided to completely rebrand itself and build up the company’s image afresh.
But where do you start when taking on such a feat?
As Pascal mentions in his post, the main questions that the team asked themselves were:
- How do people, within or new to Web3, perceive Arweave and this permanent storage paradigm?
- Will Akord have more value and appeal for businesses and organisations or individual users?
- What are the best use cases for Akord?
- How do we bring together the app, the API and the developer tools under a coherent message?
To follow through with the rebranding, Akord collaborated with GoodLove, an award-winning creative brand consultancy that “helps founders to scale belief in their company and mission”. The collaboration with GoodLove saw Akord go through 9 decks and reports, 7 workshops that amounted to 11 hours, 12 research group interviews taking roughly 15 hours, and over 200 artboards of User Experience (UX) wireframes and User Interface (UI) design.
So, where did the team conclude they want to focus?
Akord and Publishing
They concluded with publishing. According to the blog post, Akord has noticed a common theme of businesses wanting to publish their content to the permanent web (some even directly via Akord).
While our bread and butter, so to speak, is secure storage on Arweave, we’re now also working on evolving Akord within a Permaweb publishing context, says Pascal in the blog.
This decision comes at a great time since the Akord Explorer is set to be released in the first quarter of 2023. The Akord Explorer allows media files uploaded to Arweave via Akord to be viewed in a more user-friendly way and offers a great incentive for companies to choose Akord for their publishing.
Getting companies to jump on board the Akord Publishing train is not just a vision, but an ongoing process, as many have put their faith into the Web3 company already – Genobank and FMD are already working with Akord to secure medical data through NFTs.
“Our new brand captures these ideas with the Mad Libs typography, split screen illustrations and the incomplete A of the logo. We’re inviting you to complete the picture, to be inspired and to add your own ideas.”
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