What a hectic week! Complete with multiple lengthy trips to and from the office, repeatedly transforming from busy-body, day job guy, into full-throttle, international cryptoartist. The opposite could be said this past week about the land of NFTs. The sounds of silence make concept seeking extra difficult, leaving us without our cover idea until early Sunday afternoon. 🤯

Before we started panicking, Redlion had suggested a "Bus Stop" concept with two stops: one for old web2.0 where only a boomer, a Karen, and a bankster wait, and the second bus stop for all the cool web3.0 projects. (You can appreciate his cosmic drawing skills here on our Discord). The idea was not bad, but I knew it would need a lot of drawing which would have been impossible to complete in time.

Then I said we should try to focus on one strong symbol, make it shiny and glittery, and I mentioned the gamepad for GameStop NFT platform article reference. It sparked the chain reaction of thoughts that led to the idea of using custom branded gaming controllers to symbolize the difference between the new and fancy 3.0 web environment compared to the old tech of finance 2.0.

As a first step, I graphically recreated the package box of the latest Playstation controller and re-branded it with DEFI/Ethereum symbols. A bit of retouching was needed to alter the controller with custom buttons to reflect favorite 3.0 apps and other tiny details like the ETH symbol and GAS icon. (see below)

As for the old tech controller, we wanted to highlight the contrast and ridiculosity of the fiat dinosaur financial world, with it's limited functionality and user-unfriendly obstacles to achieve even simple financial operations. You have to deal with FEES and WAIT buttons as well as extensive KYC before using a FIAT Solution. 

I also took a different approach for the price tags. The modern uses an LED display with real-time ETH price adjustment and QR code (try it), while the old one is sold apparently for FIAT only. The lifeless label is self-explanatory.

As mentioned in the beginning, this cover was created in a record time of about 8 hours from beginning to final output. Technically it's just a combination of Photoshop retouching and vector graphic design in Illustrator. The post-production and simple animation were done in AfterEffects.

Although I would have loved to have more time to create an even more polished animated piece, the core concept and components came out pretty solid and fun IMO. Let's hope for more NFT drama to depict in the next week!