Graphic designer Marlene Velasco joins the Cardano Foundation from sunny California

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bio_marlene_velasco

Hello Cardano community,

My name is Marlene Velasco, and I am excited to join the Cardano Foundation as a Graphic Designer and Social Media Specialist as part of the growing Marketing team.

I live in San Bernardino County in the State of California, which is around 50 miles east of Hollywood—at the foot of the beautiful San Gabriel Mountain range. California is a vibrant state known for its huge tech scene, including a whole host of blockchain technology companies.

I have been a graphic designer for 20 years, as well as an art director in the music industry for 15 years. In this time, I have had the pleasure of working across multiple diverse industries and sectors, including blockchain companies such as ConsenSys—the venture arm for the Ethereum blockchain.

My time at ConsenSys gave me valuable experience of working inside a new and rapidly growing blockchain company, and I will bring and apply this experience to the Cardano Foundation. I designed fun campaigns that helped draw developer talent from a diverse talent pool, and as Cardano transitions into Goguen, I hope I can help onboard a huge amount of new developer talent!

In my personal life, I am extremely passionate about animals and their welfare. I always try hard to provide care for them and be their voice, which is why I regularly volunteer at animal rescues. I also love attending art and horror conventions, which are regularly held in California.

I am joining the Cardano Foundation at a time of rapid growth, and I am really pleased to be the fifth member of the team to join the Foundation’s ranks in the last few months. This also reflects the changing needs and focus of the Cardano protocol itself, and it is a fantastic time to get involved with the Cardano community.

Cardano brings inspiration, innovation and equality enabling mass opportunity for the future, and I am delighted to be a part of this transformative technology. I look forward to learning alongside the community and getting to know you all.

Marlene

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Welcome Marlene! Having strong visuals will help the Cardano Product and Engineering teams tell their important story. As an :ada: holder, I’m excited to see your contributions.

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Good luck Marlene
…You have a hell of a job ahead to bring life to the dreadful Branding and identity work already created by Macann .
I have been in the design and branding industry for over 36 years and as a great fan of the Cardano concept I believe the work does not reflect the true values,potential and energy that the community need and the wider global market needs in order to be attracted to the Cardano potential.
So many future uses and applications and they will need a robust imaginative futuristic and engaging marketing,Branding and advertising communications strategy.
I would suggest that a complete refresh is in order in the approach to telling the real stories of the Cardano ecosystem.
It matters not that ideas are not fully formed,that all the technical Is and Ts are crossed .
The dream the vision the tangibility of Cardano and the real world benefits need to be told through simple clear and understandable media,…film annimation,Graphical marks and across all generations languages and cultures
A truly global vision crossing all continents and levels of understanding using every technique we have at our disposal
I’m sure you will shake things up and hopefully receive this message as constructive and supportive as a true believer in Cardano’s future should
Good luck
Take care
H

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Welcome! Do you have a portfolio of visual projects we can check out online?

Best!
Rocky Lewycky

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Welcome Marlene! It’s great to have you onboard, I hope you have great success at the Cardano Foundation. I was wondering though, what experience do you have that relates to your duties as a “Social Media Specialist” - social media is an extremely important aspect for any growing organization - from marketing and public-relations to content-syndication and community-engagement. Just wondering because you didn’t mention any experience in this area, and there is a HUGE need (full-time IMO) to disseminate the explosion of Cardano content from the community, the Foundation, IOG, Emurgo…plus 3rd-parties joining the project.
(BTW, I couldn’t find any information about you on the Cardano website, link was blank.)
Thanks - Wayne

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Agree…and the website sucks…and there’s currently little to zero effort given to social media, etc. e.g. last blog update/post on the foundation website was over a month ago,. :frowning:

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Warm welcome @Marlene_Velasco_CF, happy to have you. :wave:t2:

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Hey @WayneM, thanks for your feedback, it’s always good to hear the community’s thoughts. The Foundation website has largely been reserved for press release content, and with the recent redesign, there are still parts of the site being built out.

However, I am pleased to let you know that we have had multiple blogs over the past month, released both here and on our Medium. In fact, we have actually had more than one blog post a week, and this will be increasing going forward. Here are a few you may like to read:

Next week, we will have a detailed deep-dive into digital identities, as well as some news regarding our regulatory initiatives in Europe. So do stay tuned for that. We recognize that the Forum moves fast and it can be difficult to find the latest content, which is why we are encouraging our community to follow our Medium channel. All of our content will be released here going forward.

We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding the rebrand. Ultimately, these things are very much down to personal tastes, and it’s a difficult and complex task to create a brand that everyone loves instantly! We do hope it will grow on you, and I’m pleased to share that our branding exercise was recently nominated the second-best rebrand in the blockchain industry, which we are really proud of and we hope we can get more recognition and grow our brand in the future :slight_smile:

Thank you for your feedback it helps us continuously improve. Now I will leave the floor open to @Marlene_Velasco_CF and stop hijacking her intro! Have a great weekend.

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I completely disagree with this statement and it shows how little you understand about Branding…It’s not about Style or taste it’s fundamentally about projecting the vision Mission and identity of the company in the market place and in the minds of the community existing and future
Branding isn’t just about colour and logo type,it’s about character ,characteristics and ideas that company/community want to project.
Branding is reflected and should be consistent across all media ,websites,Language,Tone of voice,Presentation consistency,relevance in application,and above all memorable enough in the minds of many to trigger the messages and reinforce the messages and ideas whenever and however one encounter’s it
I suspect the CF really didn’t understand the repercussions of the decision and were led a merry dance by the agency who are equally responsible for promoting these standards and objectives
The work is weak and ineffective
I hope that you take heed of this message as an experienced brand development creative director with 36 yrs of experience with multinational companies I feel that you must seriously review the work and reappraise it in light of the frequent criticisms from many within and outside the community
I want ADA Cardano to become the preeminent Blockchain ecosystem in the world
The gold standard which others can aspire to
Please listen and take heed

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Hi @Gib_Guy. I won’t comment further on our branding exercise as I am a copywriter at the Foundation - I just thought I would drop by and let Wayne know we have plenty of interesting content coming up.

Totally agree with your sentiment about Cardano becoming the leading blockchain - nothing we do is a single one-off event, we are constantly changing and evolving and everything we do reflects this, thank you for your passion and commitment, it is very much appreciated I assure you :slight_smile:

Let us instead focus this post on the great news of Marlene joining us, an experienced creative like yourself who will bring her passion and experience to the Cardano Foundation! :slight_smile: We are growing week on week.

Wishing you a fantastic weekend,

Elliot

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@Gib_Guy I totally agree with you and it’s great to see another professional with experience in the industry who understands that McCann have failed to produce work that matches Cardano’s core brand USPs. @Marlene_Velasco_CF has a huge task on her hands. Welcome to Cardano!

I alerted the community to the problems on June 20 this year and posted further alarm bells in the official Cardano Forum a few weeks ago. The result of my post was a suggestion to add a Strategic Brand Review to the community Road Map to give some guidance to CF who as you state above have obviously led CF a ‘merry dance’. This is so obvious to design and industry professionals and I’ve identified some of the ‘Rookie Mistakes’ in my review as part of the review. [Link Below].

McCann should have had the integrity to protect CF from these fundamental mistakes and going down this branding path. The work they produced has clearly been produced by amateur designers and in Henry Coelho’s words, another professional, is ‘Embarrassing’. I’m not sure that anyone else really understands the importance of this issue and what urgently needs to be done.

Rebranding needs to be harmonised across all media channels and communications and it takes time to do it correctly so action must be taken now to capitalise on the golden ‘trump card’ that the launch of Goguen presents to us. Currently we have a hotchpotch of confusing branding that is watering down the strength of the brand.

@Gib_Guy I welcome your input to the document as you clearly understand the enormity and urgency of the problem.

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Delighted to contribute ,I only want the best for Cardano .
Will be in touch
Kind regards

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@Gib_Guy … You can add public comments to the document… I’m also interested in adding links to design excellence… examples of benchmarks for WEB 3.0 design.