Building a new brand to represent what Marinade is all about

Why is the Marinade brand changing? Is the direction and vision of the platform evolving?

Our vision has always been focused on shifting everyday life to crypto by democratizing blockchain security. By providing our user with a simpler and more understandable interface and by reinforcing our efforts towards transparency and security, we aim to bridge the gap between people and finance.

And this remains intact.

What changes is merely the visual side of Marinade. From the strong community that has formed around Marinade in the short time we’ve been around, we feel a huge sense of diversity and want to support the idea that Marinade is for everyone.

We realized that our previous design did not match this vision. The overall style was sterile and not welcoming; we needed a redesign.

From novice newbies to seasoned crypto farmers, Marinade is for anyone who agrees with the idea of democratization and decentralization as the future of finance. And we want Marinade to reflect this inclusivity in its visual packaging.

Creating our new brand

We want the Marinade brand to represent who we are. Our vision, our goals, our product, and — most important of all — our engaged community and all the people helping to make Solana safer, resilient and more decentralized.

We also want the Marinade brand to both clearly be a part of the Solana universe but at the same time stand out. In order to get our message out there, we need to be memorable, inclusive and welcoming. We hope to create a warm community feeling that also shows the diversity in the space and among our contributors.

By providing the most intuitive and user-friendly experience for our users and being a bridge between beginners and the ecosystem, we believe we can get there. The Solana ecosystem is a wonderful place with many contributors from around the globe, and this is something we wish for our brand to represent.

We simply welcome anyone who would like to be a part of building the future of finance. It’s that simple.

A new logo

The chef hat, which is one of the most recognizable features of Marinade, has gotten an upgrade together with the wordmark, forming a new logo.

New icons

Our governance token MNDE got its own icon!

You might also notice that we swapped our old mSOL logo for a new one. We’re abandoning our original mSOL logo for a more vibrant one, which takes after the design of the Solana icon.

We’ve also updated the mSOL-SOL LP icon to match our new brand as well.

Color palette

We took a look at the familiar and well-known Solana color palette and added some Marinade to it. It is important for us that the brand both feels like an obvious part of the overall Solana ecosystem and also stands out, having its own identity.

Illustrations

Our main goal with the rebrand is to show who we really are, and illustrations have played a big part in that. These will help us show the unique, inclusive, and diverse community that is Marinade.

A brand new webpage

Marinade has evolved rapidly over the last few months, the webpage has not. It’s time to catch up. We have gathered everything you need to know about Marinade on our new webpage and aim to guide all types of people, beginners as well as seasoned users, into the depths of DeFi.

The most user-friendly UI

The app itself has gotten a facelift too and we’ve also made some small improvements to the UI to make staking with us even smoother. Stay tuned for the upgrade, we’ll let you know when it’s live.

“Marinade makes me feel…”

Our brand has been warmly received so far and we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to say a few words about it:

“New design makes staking my SOL into the Marinade even easier than before. Securing the Solana network by using mSOL is icing on the cake.” — vytick

“Marinade new UI/UX makes it much easier to understand and navigate through the staking process.” — Copycat

“Across the web I have always encountered people praising the simplistic design on Marinade’s website. This rebranding of the site made it even more clearer why I would continue staking and working for this project.” — Spaceman

“The design of Marinade is ‘tasty’. Like a meal cooked by a chef and served like in a Michelin restaurant.” — Cherry

“The web design is calming, well presented and the graphics adorably entertaining for all ages to navigate. A stress-free staking option that adds the extra ‘flavour’ we crave as investors.” — Jesse

The future is exciting

Marinade is evolving rapidly and our aim is for the brand to evolve with it. We have a lot of exciting things ahead of us, and these are a few of the ones that are particularly relevant for the evolution of the branding:

We will continue to tell the story of Marinade and spread it as far as we can, so we have decided to onboard people who can help us with that (are you one of these people? Reach out to us in Discord.).

We are growing our social media presence through Twitter, AMAs and more, to build connections with our users.

We are increasing community events for our active community and mDAO members.

Our NFT project is also making progress and we’re really excited to show you how it will tie into the governance of the DAO.

Keep up to date by reading our Marinade kitchen stories on Medium. Click here to read the latest update from the kitchen.

Download our Marinade kit and get creative!

Now it’s time to spread the brand!

Head over to our documentation and download the Marinade kit: https://docs.marinade.finance/partnerships/marinade-kit

There you will find all the new icons and logo variants.

Maybe you need a new profile picture until we’ve released our upcoming NFTs?

Look no further, the Marinade kit contains that too! All the stickers and a set of illustrations, free for anyone to use.

Want to add the stickers to your Telegram? Just follow this link: https://t.me/addstickers/MarinadeFinance

If you’re new to Marinade, we’ll tell you all about it

Marinade is a DAO that secures Solana. It allows users to stake their SOL to earn staking rewards, and at the same time, they can use their staked SOL token (mSOL) further in decentralized finance. It also helps the validators by attracting the stake for them, now delegating to more than 400 validators.

Here’s a list of great articles to learn more about what Marinade is all about:

The first liquid staking solution on Solana

Why we take it slow - Security first

Launching MNDE: How was it and what’s next?

And, of course you should head into our docs to dig deeper. Start here:

Welcome to Marinade https://docs.marinade.finance/

What is mSOL? https://docs.marinade.finance/getting-started/what-is-msol