This week I am featuring a talented digital designer Ashwini Deshpande, head of 3D Design and Production at Republiqe. You can follow her on Twitter @aforashwini_ and on Instagram @aforashwini.

What was your journey as a designer in the digital fashion space?

I started off studying fashion design in the traditional, physical sense at London College of Fashion. Slowly, I became interested in technology as a tool to help build a more circular, sustainable fashion industry. I began working with the Fashion Innovation Agency on certain projects and took a course in AI. I joined the Digital Maker Collective at University of the Arts London, I started to explore and learn to use different types of software on my own. All this eventually led me to discover digital fashion.

To someone who loves pattern cutting, technology and sustainable design, digital fashion felt like the perfect way to take my practice forward. I taught myself CLO3D through online videos and eventually made a fully digital fashion collection for my final university project. This ended up leading to me having a career in digital fashion!

What are your favourite things about the digital fashion space but also what do you feel are the biggest challenges?

My favourite thing about the digital fashion space is that because it’s such a new industry, everyone is very open to sharing their knowledge and views. There is also constant innovation and it’s exciting to see the ways in which people push boundaries every single day.

The biggest challenge is that there is no set curriculum at university to teach digital fashion yet and everyone in the industry forged their own unique path. So it’s sometimes difficult to see where you’re headed because there’s no linear path in such a new field.

Do you prefer designing digital fashion over physical fashion?

Yes, I definitely prefer designing digital fashion over physical fashion. It allows for greater experimentation without using many resources and creating waste, and without wasting time and energy as well. You can try out several drapes and colour ways with the click of a button. It also has several interesting applications, from being used for fashion sampling to being a vital part of the metaverse.

What do you think the fashion education is currently lacking?

It is lacking more fashion technology and innovation courses. Digital fashion is the direction the industry is headed in, but unfortunately there isn’t enough talent in the space because university curriculum is lagging behind in most of the world. Most designers are self taught.

Where do you see your work going in the future?

It feels like digital fashion in the metaverse today perhaps revolves very much around gaming. Personally, I’m not a gamer - as a customer I’m a regular fashion enthusiast. Therefore, with my work I want to push digital fashion in a direction that is relevant and aspirational to the non-techie shopper. I am also particularly excited about the potential digital fashion holds in branding and brand experiences.

This concludes yet another interesting Sub Thread Weekly exploration. Join the journey again next week and feel free to connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks or explore my realm @pro_progression

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAg

This week’s edition is dedicated to an exclusive Behind the Scenes story about Bancor x Alanatheweb3girl event, featuring Stella Achenbach.

Connect with @Bancor, @stellaachenbach and @alanatheweb3gi1 on Twitter for updates about upcoming events and exciting projects 😎

How did you first get in touch with the Bancor team and how did you approach organising the event?

We met at DCentral Miami - after ‘almost meeting’ a few times through mutual friends, I finally went over to the Bancor booth, met the team and not surprisingly we got along really well. We just hung out and went to different events there.

And at first I didn’t have any collaboration plans, it was lovely to just talk and exchange ideas… but at some point later on we got the idea to organise an educational event about the basics of DeFi and introduce Bancor to the designers in our community. This ended up being a Bancor walkthrough streamed by Mark Richardson (@MBRichardson87) and the emphasis was really on making it beginner friendly so that everyone would understand. I also came up with the reward-NFT idea, including some Easter eggs, because I really believe that willingness to learn should be incentivised. This also ended up bringing in a lot of other people, not just the loyal members from the Digitalax and Bancor communities.

What were the biggest challenges in the process?

The biggest challenge was actually starting to stream the event! Initially, around 20 people RSVPed for the event, but many more actually ended up attending. We tried all the servers on Discord, but we just kept reaching capacity at 25 people. We didn’t understand this at the time, but we now know it was because the Discord server caps any kind of video or screen sharing events at 25 people. Thankfully, the Bancor team were able to set up a YouTube live-stream really fast and rescued all of us (haha).

It is funny, because I was really hoping that enough people would show up because I know how busy the Bancor people are with preparing for version 3 launch and how they work crazy hours. And then what actually ended up being a challenge was that there were many more people than expected… So I really learnt not to underestimate the web3 community and the willingness to learn. I was pleasantly surprised that people didn’t just drop in and out for the free NFT, but actually stayed for the entire talk. I was really happy about that.

What do you think are the most important elements that designers in this community should learn about (regarding DeFi)?

I'm still learning about it myself and it’s always a continuous and challenging process. I think learning about web3 comes in levels, similar to a game - you cannot learn everything at once because it won't make sense to you.

So before starting to learn about DeFi, it is important to understand web3 values and what that actually means in practice, how that is different from web2 and web1. This is challenging because it means dismantling a lot of old beliefs and conditioning that we have been taught throughout our lives.

Regarding DeFi specifically, I think it's of fundamental importance to understand how the blockchain works and depending on the default protocol you're using you should also understand how the protocol works.

Finally, the topic of open source is very important and a crucial part of web3 values as well. But, again, it all comes in levels and layers.

How can creatives get involved as a potential collaborators with Bancor?

Making sure that your values are aligned with their values is the most important thing. Since the Bancor team recognise that their values align with those of the Digitalax community, I would think they're open to a lot of different projects. So if someone has an idea, approaching one of the team members is the way to go. For example Mark, @MBRichardson87, is always encouraging people to reach out. I think it's just a matter of taking initiative and finding common goals. I am currently working on something with them as well - we are in the brainstorming phase and it’s a very organic and fun process. We can learn from each other a lot. Their approach to solving problems is not much different from our (designers’) approach to solving problems. It's just a different form of output.

How specific does the idea need to be?

I think it can be a broad one, I wasn't under the impression that they need a whole pitch deck to be able to to grasp if your idea aligns with their values, which is actually the main priority for a collaboration - to make sure the values align.

I also defined three levels of project types: short-term, where Bancor has a specific need that the members of the Global Designer Network could help with, then medium-term, which can be a communication goal of some sort that is of creative-visual nature, and long-term would be a very committed project including both communities that could potentially touch on the voting process along the way.

Can you reveal any of your projects with them?

We're currently working on an NFT project including a group of collaborators from the GDN community. We also want to hold another event after the Bancor 3 launch to explain the new protocol and break down its benefits. With Alana I also have my own ideas regarding DeFi education but we will see more about that in the future…

To conclude, I think the important message is not just about getting involved with Bancor per se. Of course, anyone can. But it is crucial that you go out there and find people who see the world in a very similar way as you do and connect with them. Maybe it's a different protocol. Maybe it's a gaming community. Maybe it's other fashion people. Because it's not about getting involved with the same people as everyone else, hoping that it works out. Maybe it won't. It's more important to find the people who you genuinely connect with and then create projects together.

Join the Sub Thread Weekly journey again next week. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks or explore my realm @pro_progression

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAJ

This week I am exploring web3 media through an interview with Jason Nelson, a reporter at Decrypt with a passion for Bitcoin, blockchain, DeFi, Web 3.0, and DAO communities. Decrypt is a media platform focused on ‘demystifying Bitcoin, Ethereum and the decentralised web.’

You can connect with @dragonwolftech and follow @decryptmedia on Twitter. I hope you enjoy the interview.

What is your experience of creating content as part of Decrypt’s PubDAO?

While Decrypt is a founding member of PubDAO, the DAO is not just about Decrypt. It’s about and for its members and also about the audience the DAO’s content creators are trying to reach. In other words, it’s a two-way street: we want to source ideas for content from the DAO members, but also create content that the PubDAO members appreciate and find valuable so that they keep coming back.

And that’s the challenge for all DAOs: they all have founders who are the most passionate about it at first, but can they progressively decentralise by attracting a large number of people who can become equally passionate and active?

My experience writing for Decrypt has been very educational. There is so much going on in blockchain technology and so many exciting people and projects to meet, learn and write about that it keeps me very busy. Decrypt has a great team of writers, editors, and content creators. I’m fortunate to work with people who complement each other, work well together and understand our duty is to our readers.

Before joining Decrypt full-time Jason hosted a YouTube channel and podcast called Crypto Insights Journal.

What are the biggest challenges or differences when writing to web3 style audiences compared to traditional media?

When I started making Web3 content on my YouTube channel, I wanted to focus on newcomers and make material geared towards people who have no idea what this stuff (Crypto, DeFi, DAOs, NFTs) is and would be easy to understand. I try to keep and bring that same mindset into my work with Decrypt.

The challenge has been bridging the content to be digestible for newcomers and veterans alike. Give detailed news coverage but use as little tech jargon as possible so everyone can understand and grasp Web3 concepts.

This week’s interview focused on the general web3 media landscape and it uncovered some of the challenges related to member engagement and content creation that many DAOs may face.

To delve deeper into other challenges in this space, join the Sub Thread Weekly journey again next week. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks or explore my realm @pro_progression

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAg

This week I am interviewing Tania Viegas, who has previously created a bespoke metaverse outfit for me! The process of working with her was smooth-sailing and very inspiring. As she is one of the first web3 made-to-order designers, this interview delves deeper into her journey as a designer in this space and into her made-to-order design process.

Connect with @taniaviegas_ on Twitter and enjoy the interview:

How do you feel about designing custom garments compared to creating your own designs for the market?

It’s a rather new thing for me to do as I’m so used to creating my own ideas, but it allows me to grow as a designer! Since it’s a different way of approaching design, you have to have good communication with the client. It’s also a fun process because you learn about the other person’s creative process and thoughts behind the project. If you resonate with that, you will try your best to represent the design features and details to capture the attention of buyers and collectors.

What is your experience with collaborations in this space?

I love collaborating with the wonderful creatives we have in the GDN community! Sometimes I look back and am truly amazed by the amount of trust we have in each other while doing various collaborations without even knowing each other in person. Before this community I had a “fashion school” mentality which in my opinion makes it difficult to have trust in another person who’s literally on the other side of the planet! I feel so grateful to have been discovered by this community. With every collaboration I learn so much and grow not just as a designer but as a person.

What is your advice for designers just starting out in this space?

The best advice someone once told me, which we can apply to everything we do in life is never lose the student mentality!

Sometimes we hear something familiar and think ‘ok I already know this’ and then we don’t pay attention to it, but in this case we may lose a chance to learn more or share knowledge with someone else. So remember to keep an open mind and always keep yourself in the student mindset - you will grow faster than you think.

What is your biggest future goal as a designer?

I hope and believe that in the future I will be able to fully sustain myself doing web3 projects. So essentially embracing that way of working 100% without thinking I need an IRL job to support my lifestyle! I am currently working on it 💪🏻😁

This is also a sneak peek of Tania’s current project in progress:

It seems like there is a need to find strategic ways for creatives and enthusiasts to work in web3 full time. GDN is already creating an ecosystem that enables taking steps towards that. The way forward is to facilitate collaborations and connections for anyone to bring their creative ideas to life in web3. Be it through custom designs, runway events, or even fully interactive dreamworlds…

Join the Sub Thread Weekly journey again next week and connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks or explore my realm @pro_progression

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAg

This week’s Sub Thread features @sillytuna regarding his experience of helping organise a real life NFT event in London. You can have a peak at his strategy, challenges and thoughts regarding the event that was organised in an extremely short amount of time of around one week. The event was meant to ‘supplement’ NFT New York City when the flights from UK to US were stopped due to covid.

Sillytuna is a self-proclaimed OG crypto and NFT enthusiast and an active digital artist. He has been talking about NFTs since 2015, as he believes they will play a fundamental part in the future of digital property and our day to day lives. You can read his blog here: https://sillytuna.medium.com and follow him on Twitter @sillytuna.

When talking to Sillytuna about the experience organising NFT London this is what he has to say about it:

I never planned to organise the event, I only suggested an event would be worthwhile, on Twitter. In the end I was only one of the many people who all did an amazing job putting the event together.

However there were some challenges. For example the event was extremely last minute - we had to deal with venue, fundraising, equipment, staffing, panels and talks. All of that while covid was going on.

Also, there were two tasks that were among the most difficult. Firstly, curating the artwork. And secondly dealing with tickets, especially when taking into consideration limited venue capacity.

It was really unexpectedly positive that the event ended up going so well!

In a nutshell, what is interesting here are the organic, sometimes messy and unpredictable ways of approaching events through collaboration, while merging the physical and the digital elements, as well as combining the dreamed-up ideals with realistic execution.

• Currently, Sillytuna plays an important part in the Soulcast team, which emerged from a digital fashion project idea that he had earlier this year. Soulcast is an NFT art platform for 2D and 3D artists to collaborate, and where collectors can personalise and trade NFTs in a whole new way.

• Sillytuna’s other projects include Sploot, which is a role-playing sports metaverse imagined, owned, and played by Splooters using 10,000 on-chain Sploots.

• and Claymatic Games, a top-motion multiplayer brawling with Clodhoppers, perhaps soon to be an NFT.

• As well as a gen art project called Apophenia.

This concludes the Sub Thread Weekly, so join the journey again next week and connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks :)

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAg

This time we host an Interview with @NatalieCrue, an energetic community-creator in the booming web3 music and media space.

“We really went hardcore grassroots and we found out that it just felt better than doing any paid kind of marketing or ads or anything like that.”

After some apparently unavoidable technical difficulties getting my wifi and sound settings in order 🤦‍♀️🙄 I finally managed to get the call going, with much gratitude for Natalie’s patience. The conversation was RICH with useful insights for every designer and brand-builder in the web3 space and it quite frankly BLEW MY MIND. I love to see how traditional and rigid approaches can be DISRUPTED… So let’s take a deep dive into this interview:

What was your Metaverse Music Festival (MVMF) experience like?

Beautiful insanity. Myself and two friends of mine who have a show in the vibrant Token Smart community, we were talking about wanting to do a festival and there were people in our community wanting to do the same thing, so even though we didn’t exactly know how it would look like, everyone was super excited about it. But it's totally web3 in terms of interesting coordination efforts. And so within a span of days, we got into Discord and it actually took us a few months to wrap our heads around what it actually meant to co-produce a decentralised music festival. We were figuring out what it looks like to build a festival from the ground up with our community, bringing micro-communities together into this space, bringing the wearable makers, designers, fashion folks and musicians together to build this collectively. So it was a massive effort to put this together and we did a 72-hour Music Festival, it was actually insane. But it was incredible!

How did you manage to bring together and coordinate many separate communities?

Everyone who worked on this project had previous experience in the festival space, but nobody had done anything to that magnitude before, especially not with actual communities in the way that we approached our project. We had a massive amount of channels on Discord and so I and the crew became like a weaving centre to put all these pieces together. Even something seemly simple like the schedule was probably one of the hardest parts - to make sure to equitably stream events and make sure that we're hosting space and have equal streaming time for everybody. There were times when we had to figure out how to make a decision on behalf of each other and not just according to our respective agendas, so there was a few necessary hair pulling sessions to coordinate everything, but it worked out.

How were you able to build such a strong unified community in a short amount of time?

Well the core crew came from Token Smart, which is its own community within the web3 space and we all knew each other and most other creatives we connected with also knew each other. This familiarity was super helpful for building the bridges to manoeuvre between so many communities and we became a kind of web between communities, connecting all these people together that were eager to contribute.

We also discussed in meetings how to nurture people in the space and make sure that we're sharing work equitably and that we are holding space for difference of opinions, even if that means that we argue for the next eight hours. And so by collectively laying down those frameworks for the community we began to foster a sort of collective community of communities.

Did you do any paid media to spread awareness?

The way that we got people into the festival was just word of mouth. We were on Twitter all the time and most of us have a lot of social capital in different communities so we were just inviting people to hang out at our festival, live tweeting and streaming on Twitch. We put a lot of stuff on the event calendars at Decentraland and Cryptovoxels, but we also had non-web3 people that came to us with a lot of pull in their respective communities. We really went hardcore grassroots and we found out that it just felt better than doing any paid kind of marketing or ads or anything like that. Many people would put up banners and create little art installations or projects to show that they're participating and people did that on their own, we didn't ask them to do it. And that's essentially how the word out for what we were doing.

What kind of messaging did you use to connect with your audience and convey the ‘brand’ on Twitter?

We have some people in our community that are very brand-designer and brand-management focused, while others in the community are really rebellious towards that idea. So we did eventually have a branded website, flyers, and design for the festival, but some people in the community just did their own thing, creating their own flyers for their event, but also a lot of memes, gifs, other funny graphics and theme songs to add their own splash to the identity of the festival. And that just got all over Twitter. So in many ways there's a collective identity and also an intentionally branded identity.

Upon the end of this week’s deep dive it seems like authenticity, speed and organic nature of communications is at the forefront of web3 communities. They behave almost like living organisms where members are proactive in contributing their vision, values, and skills.

Feel free to join a new Sub Thread Weekly journey next week and connect with me on Twitter @alma_almaks 🧐

Any patronage of The Thread Weekly goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury and core GDN member writer for the week (70/30), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member AlmaKS.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below: https://discord.com/invite/rzFbc9ZmAg

Projects:

• LONG-TERM PASSION: implementing circular fashion systems by seamlessly integrating digital and physical value chains to eventually create a more mindful and responsible consumption culture.

• SIDE PROJECT - For the Love of Design: Understanding the digital design and NFT creation process, by sharing my own design journey. Lacemaking craft idea translated into 3D-printed, modular, zero-waste garment and then again imported into the digital context as an NFT.

• TOOLKIT-BUILDING: web3 media, business strategy, marketing and branding, web3-native community-building.

As a highly sensitive individual with many ideas and goals, I often oscillate between being bored and being overwhelmed by myself.