With guidance from our friends at Venture Studio, the mission was to create the first ever generative art NFT project for Northwestern Mutual, an established company looking to stay ahead of the curve. As an internal project for employees, we sought to educate and build excitement around the potential of tokenized ownership while demystifying cryptocurrencies and web3 technology.

This project started with a simple idea: transform the mural featuring maps of both Milwaukee and Manhattan on display in the NYC office into 5,000 unique pieces of art and make them free for employees to mint with their own crypto wallets.

Before getting started, research was done on other NFT collections, landing pages, and the minting process in general. We looked at onboarding, artwork, storytelling, and much more.

Turning Generative Art into an NFT

By breaking down the flattened map structure into individual components, we were able to get creative with the layers by adjusting the color of land masses and the water, and then adding different styles of map markers for the two office locations. Experimenting with textures, mosaics, and multi-colored roadways ultimately felt too complicated, and the muted color palette didn't feel like it captured the web3 transformation of the artwork.

Moving to a bolder color palette and reducing the layers was done in Figma, where the NFT was created using a series of nested components before exporting all of the layers and their variants into Bueno, an NFT creation platform used to generate all 5,000 unique pieces of art.

Launching in Milwaukee

Beyond the artwork and NFT generation, we helped create the website for minting, assisted with the UX of the minting process, and provided all the collateral for the in-office launch of this project at Northwestern Mutual's Milwaukee headquarters.

There were stickers, retractable banners, postcards, digital assets for email, and this looping explainer video that played at the launch booth. Over the course of a few hours, nearly 100 NFTs were minted by Northwestern Mutual employees as they passed by, and several more have been minted since.

Want to know more?

Check out the full MKE NYC case study on AGNT's website.