Fission has grown from a scrappy startup to a fully-fledged protocol research and development company, and we have a new and improved website and refreshed brand to match.
Website
Fission has evolved so much since 2019, and we needed an updated website to reflect our current protocol projects and grow with us as we develop our core product, ODD SDK (formerly known as Webnative SDK).
We started with our mission:
"Fission is building identity, data, and compute solutions for the future of the Internet."
We are a company with one foot in the present and one in the future, and we realized our website should reflect that. As a result, we created options for website visitors to sort by tech that is ready now and tech that will be ready later.
This will be especially handy as Fission takes on more challenges and continues to develop protocol solutions.
Next, we took a look at our company's values:
We prioritize agency.
We're ecosystem-obsessed.
We learn in public and share our knowledge freely with others.
We experiment relentlessly and discover for ourselves which path will lead us to success.
Starting with agency - we do a lot, and we want you to be able to "choose your own adventure" and find your way quickly to the projects most aligned with your interests. This meant using simple interactions, like radio buttons for filtering by topic, to help direct people to the right places throughout the site.
Next came our ecosystem obsession. Fission builds open-source protocols, then supports them as they leave the nest. As a result, we lead several working groups and consistently work with external teams adopting these tools into their tech stacks. We are also active in the PLN and in standards formation (For example, CASA and Secure/Design).
The ecosystem section of our site organizes all of these efforts into four categories according to how involved we are - Our Core Projects, Fission-Led Efforts, Places We Contribute, and Collaborators & Adopters.
We believe it's critical to learn and work in public. We hope that presenting our relationship to the ecosystem we're engaged in helps people find the best ways to get involved - without overwhelming them.
We share our knowledge via the Fission blog with twice-weekly blog posts.
We also wanted the site's back end to be approachable enough that anyone on the Fission team could contribute to it, regardless of their level of technical aptitude. That's why our design team coded up the rebrand themselves! This empowers all of us to experiment and iterate on the site now and in the future.
Our last big change is a more humane touch - we added our wonderful Fissioneers to the website! We are lucky to have so many talented engineers, designers, creators, and operators on our team - all with their unique skill sets and areas of expertise. We thought it would be nice for our community to get to know the friendly people behind the tech, so we included a team info page.
Brand
Finally, you may have noticed that we updated the Fission logo and fonts a few months ago. Our designers, Ryan and Bruno, did a stellar job!
We also want to thank Kasper Nordkvist, the designer of Uncut Sans and steward of the collection of open-source fonts at Uncut.wtf.
We did this brand refresh in preparation for the new website, but we also took this step knowing we'd be rolling out more brands as we expanded the Fissionverse. Causal Islands, ODD.DEV, and (coming soon!) Private Set have all received their brand treatments, but the Fission brand must be the central node connecting all the branches. We achieve this synchronicity through consistent color variations, style, and brand voice.
We hope you are as excited about the website update and brand refresh as we are. Share your feedback on social media or the Fission Discord!