Dibbs

A market that moves with the moment.

Dibbs is a platform for owning and trading fractional shares of sports trading cards and other collectible items. I helped them with a brand refresh as they set out to make the sports card industry more approachable and accessible to a broader audience.

Role Freelancer

Year 2021

Length 10 weeks

The sports card market is as dynamic as sports themselves, fluctuating with the performance of its players. The Dibbs founders wanted to let fans in on the action and become the go-to platform for investing, buying, and selling sports trading cards in real time. Their web3 technology allows sports fans to invest in shares of their favorite player’s cards, and watch the value increase as the player’s stock price rises.

A week or 2 before starting the project, a rare Luka Doncic rookie card was sold at auction for $4.6 million, the second highest price for a sports trading card in history. I was also just finishing some cover art for a podcast about the sports card market, so this was feeling like a trend. I accepted the project and planned to design a new logo, brand guidelines, and brand expressions like a web landing page, mobile product UI, and social media graphics.

Research

I started the project with an audit of the current branding, and talked to the founders to understand their goals, target audience, and differentiators. I looked into competitors in the collectibles/web3 space, and comparable examples in the sports and fintech industries. We aligned on brand keywords - approachable, secure, professional, alive, fun, social. After all that I presented 3 moodboards to the Dibbs team to start talking about high level design directions for the brand.

Concepting

Early sketches for the logo focused on the value of the collectibles. The “gemstone” concept felt premium and familiar for the sports card industry - cards are stored in “jewel cases” and “Gem Mint 10” is the highest quality rating for a card. A second concept used a heroic card and the letter D to form a simple recognizable mark that users could rally around. A third direction tried to capture the excitement of sports branding with some aggressive italic all-caps text.

After reviewing the concepts we aligned on the D/card combo and the sport-inspired type from the 3rd direction. The logo mark combines concepts around valuable collectibles, speed & excitement, and fractional ownership. The D stands alone or combines with the logotype. The negative space of the D contains an abstract shining card shape representing the valuable collectibles. The fragmented pieces of the D also hint at the fractional ownership that is a key product differentiator.

The D mark combined with the logotype allowed for some flexibility with the logo suite.

A green was chosen for the primary brand color that felt at home on the playing field or in financial charts.

I used Knockout as the primary font for its retro sport-inspired look and variety of weights that allow for some contrasting type layouts.

I showed how the type and color would work in the product UI with some mockups of a card details screen.

The card details screen I chose to focus on is like a stock page you'd find on a stock trading app.

The website became its own side project, with a landing page aiming to quickly explain the benefits of the platform and get people into the application.

The player’s social media-like avatars became an important part of branded graphics.

Explorations of social graphics focused on promoting and objectifying individual cards.

I delivered a new logo suite and a brand guidelines package including website and product mockups, social templates, and other branded graphics.

Dibbs eventually shifted the direction of the business towards tokenization as a service and collectibles beyond sports, so this brand didn’t have a long shelf life. The project was still a fun exercise in branding for an evolving niche market.

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