Phil’s own line, and the reason none of this was decoration. A hardware wallet holds the only copy of something that cannot be reset, so every decision on this page was made against that one fact.
The marketing assets came first, and they had to, because there was nothing to photograph. Prototype renderings in 3D, plus the logo and the product design handling around them. You render a device that does not exist yet so that people can decide whether to build it, and so the people funding it can see what they are funding.
The renderings are the part Phil is proudest of, and they were made before there was a product.
That is a particular kind of work. Photography of a real object is documentation. A rendering of an object that does not exist yet is an argument, and every surface, radius and material on it is a decision somebody will later have to honour in a factory.
This is not a brand engagement with a logo at the end of it. The work went into the device and the app.
More tokens, because something had to go and find them.
We helped develop the indexing services behind the app, which is what expanded the range of assets the wallet could actually hold. A hardware wallet supports what its software can see. Widening that list is an indexing problem long before it is a product announcement, and it was an interesting one to scope and to build.
The part of the device that cannot be wrong twice.
We worked on cryptography and key handling within the KeepKey hardware itself. That is the narrowest, least forgiving surface in the whole product, and it is the one the headline at the top of this page is about.
This section is from Phil’s own account of the engagement rather than from a surviving file. The drive kept the brand book and the QA sheets; it did not keep the development.
The 2017 style guide locks the lockups on white and on dark, a four colour palette anchored on Pantone 382 C, Raleway for print and digital, and hard minimum sizes so the mark never gets crushed. The back page credits Ideas By Nature as the brand and artwork authors.
Then the white label spec, which is a manufacturing document and not a mood board: a device back of 38.0mm by 93.5mm, 79.5mm of width for a partner’s logo across three approved placements depending on how long their name is, and the KeepKey mark at 8.5mm by 10.51mm, sitting 3.5mm off the bottom right corner. Two decimal places on a hardware wallet.
Minimum sizes written as numbers, not as “adequate clearance.”
Logo at 40px digital and 0.3 inches in print, symbol at 75px and half an inch. A number is a rule a printer can be held to. The other version is a wish.
“KeepKey Review, Ideas By Nature 2018” is four documents in one: a proposed user survey, a usability study design, an expert review walking every basic task, and a competitive review of TREZOR and Ledger with user comment analysis. It opens with a sentence about a product we had just branded and were helping to build.
Users struggle navigating the software.
KeepKey Review · Ideas By Nature, 2018
It flags accessibility as a failure rather than a nice to have, and names where every task hurts. What came out of it is the next section: the six step verification check, which is that review answered rather than filed.
A check that runs automatically the first time somebody sets up their wallet, shown in sync on the desktop client and on the device’s own single colour screen. Eighteen screen designs and a flow diagram.
Technical explanations of each step confused even technical users. The plain language versions did not land either. What shipped was a hybrid, a short technical line plus a sentence of plain English, identical on both screens, because the two audiences turned out to be the same person at different moments.
The failure path was designed, because on this device the failure path is the product.
The honest answer to a failed verification is to stop using the wallet, so the screens say that, with a next step.
ShapeShift acquired KeepKey, and we helped with the transition to marketability — taking a brand, a product and a set of assets built for one company and making them work as part of another. We were already on both sides of that, which is most of why it was us.
About a year, end to end.
Brand, 3D renderings, product design, indexing services, cryptography and key handling, a usability review, a manufacturing spec, a security check, and then an acquisition to carry the whole thing through. The relationship kept running afterwards: an integration exploration dated October 2020 covers BEP2 support, firmware updates, the Midgard API and a KeepKey signing library, three years after the style guide.
Brand · 3D product renderings · indexing services · cryptography and key handling · usability review · manufacturing spec · security UX · acquisition transition · engagement type: BRAND + PRODUCT
Dates on this page are file dates, July 2017 to October 2020. The work ran alongside ShapeShift and is drawn from the same project folder. The documents behind it are the 2017 style guide, “KeepKey Review, Ideas By Nature 2018”, the white label design specs, and the device verification set dated 2019-06-14. The style guide’s back page credits Ideas By Nature as the brand and artwork authors, which is the client’s own book saying who drew it.
What the drive did not keep. The renderings, the indexing services and the cryptography and key handling are from Phil’s own account of the engagement, not from a surviving file. The archive kept the brand book and the QA sheets and kept almost nothing of what was built. We are labelling which is which rather than letting the archive decide what we did.
Proposed rather than performed. The 2018 review contains a proposed user survey and a usability study design — five to ten participants across a spread of usage behaviour. Nothing in the folder establishes that the larger study ran, so this page does not say it did. The expert review and the competitive review are the parts that were written, and they are the parts quoted here.
No client images are local. The diagram at the top of this page is our own schematic, not an artifact. The eighteen verification designs, the flow diagram and the source file are in the project drive and have not been exported. A rebrand landed in June 2019 in two PDFs that are image-only and have never been read; it is not described here, because we do not describe files we have not opened.
Everything above this line is in a file somebody can open. Nothing below it is. This is how we would run the same engagement today, with AI in the work — written as an opinion, because that is what it is.
The 2018 review is the piece AI changes most. A competitive teardown of TREZOR and Ledger, a walk through every task in the client, a pass over user comments looking for the same complaint said six ways — that is weeks of work that now takes days, and the eighteen verification screens would draft faster too.
It would not have written the sentence that lost us friends.
“Users struggle navigating the software” is a thing you say about a client’s product, in writing, having just been paid to make that product look good. A model asked to review a product it was also asked to brand will find a way to be encouraging. The value in that document was not the analysis. It was being willing to hand it over.
The question was what the device should look like before there was a device. We answered it in renderings, and the engagement ran about a year from there — all the way to the review that said the software was hard to use. An assessment finds out what holds before you fund the whole thing. Two days, no charge, answered in writing.
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