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[BRAND GUIDES]

The TRON DAO brand guidelines site on a desktop monitor

TRON DAO: a brand system that runs without me

From a fragmented, one-designer bottleneck to a guidelines system the US and global teams can use on their own.

[ROLE]
Brand Designer (contract)
[CLIENT]
TRON DAO
[YEAR]
2025–2026

[The problem]

I joined TRON DAO as a contract brand designer to help evolve the identity. Right as I started, a miscommunication between the US and China teams led the CN team to launch a micro-rebrand. The result was a piecemeal system that was hard to scale, and the whole US brand operation depended on one internal designer. Rather than wait it out, we used the moment to give the brand real structure.

[The audit]

Justin Yee, the lead US brand designer, and I pulled every asset, social post, deck and visual reference from both regions into one FigJam board. Side by side, the problem was clear. Individual graphics looked great, but the visual language had no shared rules. We took the board to leadership to show where the inconsistencies were slowing teams down, and agreed on a direction that kept the momentum of the recent update while adding the structure it was missing.

[Nine categories]

We distilled the guidelines into nine categories. The first, Brand Foundation & Strategy, sets the narrative pillars that every piece of work, from summit graphics to developer posts, anchors back to. The rest turn those pillars into rules a designer, vendor or agency can follow without asking.

The Personality & Voice page of the guidelines: tone principles and style rules
Personality & Voice. Be Visionary, Not Vague. Be Bold, Not Arrogant. Be Kinetic, Not Static. No jargon, emoji restraint, clarity over corporate fluff.
Logo clearspace and partner lockup diagrams
The color page: TRON Red, Charcoal and white with tints and usage ratios
Logo & Clearspace, with grid-based clearspace and partner lockups. Color, with usage ratios for TRON Red (PANTONE 185C, #DC062B), Charcoal (PANTONE Black 6C, #100000) and neutrals.
The typography page of the guidelines site, showing Inter weights
A grid of warm, candid photography with subtle TRON logo placements
Typography & Grids that scale across formats and image crops. Imagery: warm, human photography that grounds Web3 in real-world impact.
Data cards and charts in TRON red and charcoal
Data Visualization. Standard cards and charts for transaction volumes, active accounts and technical updates.
The brand scale: example assets arranged from functional to expressive
Brand Scale. Presentations and docs stay functional; campaign key art and social lean expressive.
The system overview: icons, 3D assets and templates on one page
System Cheat Sheet. A quick reference so designers, vendors and agencies can grab verified icons, 3D assets and templates.

[A living guidelines site]

A PDF goes out of date the moment it's exported, so we built the guidelines as an internal Figma Sites hub that updates in real time. Once leadership and legal signed off, we turned the rules into componentized Figma libraries: evergreen templates, assets and UI elements ready to use.

The imagery page of the guidelines site on a desktop monitor
The overview page of the guidelines site on a desktop monitor
The Figma Sites guidelines hub.

[The outcome]

The brand went from a fragmented, one-designer bottleneck to an organized system that scales. It's used well beyond design: events, dev and ops teams all build from it. A simplified, external-facing version gives brand partners and agencies the same rules without the internal detail.