Small Grants: makenouns.wtf | a mix and match playground for nouns

[akashk.eth]

The Story

When i first started exploring about nouns, i wanted to try out most of the noun traits and make a noun that suites my personality and aligns with the part i want to play in this community. but to explore the noun traits my options where limited, the nouns.wtf playground was pretty nice, but it either generated a random noun, or i had to know all the traits and how they look without seeming their image realtime. a little overwhelming for someone just coming to the nounish ecosystem.

So i wondered why not build a visual playground and started ideating makenouns.wtf.

WTF is makenouns.wtf

makenouns.wtf is a playground where you can mix and match noun traits visually to build your favourite noun.

Features

Explore noun traits and make your most favourite noun ever.

1. Try out all the heads and find a perfect head
2. Browse through all the bodies and find that dream nounish body,
3. Try out all the different glasses,
4. Choose an accessory that matches your vibe
5. Choose a background
6. And finally hit that big red download button to download your noun

See this quick demo

make nouns

Favourite traits and save them for later

1. You scrolled through all the traits, and now you have some favourites. that’s exactly why you need a favourite button
2. You can use the heart icon on the traits to add them to your favourites
3. If you want to add an entire noun to your favourites, just use the favourite button below your noun
4. You can find all these favourited items in your favourites tab.
5. Your favourited items will be persisted in your browser

See this quick demo

favoriting traits and nouns

Usable on all devices

Whether you’re on your mobile, tablet, laptop it doesnt matter, makenouns.wtf will work for every screen size.

Laptops/Desktops

Mobile Devices

Tablets

you can try out MakeNouns at makenouns.wtf

Offer

1. The Current Version Of makenouns.wtf ( most of the initial features i’ve intented are already completed )

2. Add Search For Traits

3. Make the app a PWA ( you can use it offline without internet, will act kinda like an standalone app )

4. Add support for SVG downloads, so artists can quickly download and use layered svgs.

ASK - 5 ETH

Future

I want to build lasting value on the nouns ecosystem. the idea is to ,

1. Build tools that nounish people use often
2. The tools become a place to communicate to these people
3. Release another tool that adds value to them
4. repeat

Quick thoughts on where this project can go in the future, ( super random thoughts )

1. User Generated Traits from artists, custom trait packs, custom backgrounds etc.
2. Analytics - we can keep track of most favourited noun traits and get an idea about what are the most loved traits by the community.
3. Load nouns with special significance with just a url (eg: makenouns.wtf/merge ( note: this wont work now. ) should load up merge themed noun, so anyone can add their own small changes to it)

About Me

i work as a frontend engineer at an opensource devtools company.

i’ve been funded by prop house previously to build nounbricks.netlify.app ( Every single trait/noun on makenouns.wtf is added using nounbricks, also makenouns.wtf has given immense feedback to me that is useful for nounbricks.netlify.app ( eg: rendering a lot of svgs caused performance issues, that made me introduce a renderType prop which allowed to render the noun artwork as imgs, instead of svgs) )

twitter: https://twitter.com/amkdev

[AndrewLaddusaw]

Wow, this is awesome! Great job. It’s one of those things I didn’t know I wanted until I went and played with it. If you built in a randomizer, it could replace playground on the website imo. Thanks for sharing!

[akashk.eth]

thank you. the randomizer is a great idea . need to find a way to incorporate that into the UI

[bradq]

Hey, I saw this when you released it on Twitter and played around with it. I like it a lot. I think you did a great job and it’s a great idea.

On your NSFW prop and request, if you are looking for feedback to strengthen it two things come to mind:

1. I think you could focus and explain a bit how this helps proliferate Nouns…give some use cases. For example, this now allows anyone to make their own Noun pfp that they love without having to own one or pick an existing one that doesn’t feel like theirs. They can be a part of the community on Twitter etc with a pfp that reflects them. A second use case, people could give a Noun to a friend that they think represents them and help them get into the community. I think the more use cases you can explain up front the easier it will be for nouners to see how this can help proliferate and onboard new people.

2. Your ask of 5ETH and explanation of the future is a little unclear to me. I’d encourage you to clean that section up a little bit…is the 5 ETH retro for this makenouns? Is it for continuing to build makenouns? or is it for this and for the future ideas? If it includes the future ideas, then that’s all a bit vague and hard to quantify. Talking about “nounish tools” is probably a bit vague for a request. My suggestion would be to make your ask clear for makenouns and then if you are asking for future projects, make those clearer or ask for them when they are clear. Obviously you are a good builder and have good ideas, just be clear about what you are asking for and I hope things go well! Great work. Hope this helps.

[akashk.eth]

Thank you for the feedback and for mentioning the two usecases.

Usecases

the biggest usecase for makenouns is to be a playground to explore the noun traits visually without any prior knowledge about the traits.

My hypothesis ( for playground, not for nfts ) is that people are more likely to use a profile picture that they have generated themselves, according to their own liking, rather than a randomly generated one.

for eg: I would probably want a turing head, or a robot head, considering i’m a developer.

i really didn’t knew these heads existed before using makenouns, if you can’t remember how those head traits look, visit these urls to customize a noun with those heads,

https://makenouns.wtf/?head=head-turing
https://makenouns.wtf/?head=head-robot

another thing that popped up with this, i remember 4156 posting the merge noun and traits on twitter, so other people to can customize and use it,

so inorder for this to work smoothly,

1. He had to mention the traits in the post
2. People had to take note of those traits
3. go to the playground on the nouns website, select the traits
4. customize the glasses without seeing them visually or generate random glasses ( glasses were the only trait that remained, the other three was fixed )

with this sharable url on makenouns, people could have easily selected their glasses trait visually.
https://makenouns.wtf/?head=head-panda&body=body-blue-sky&accessory=accessory-eth

I have got a question on discord comparing makenouns to nouns website playground. i’ll use this reply to add some points, here is what i think about this.

nouns website playground v/s makenouns

1. Nouns website playground is more useful to demonstrate how the random onchain noun generation works, but offline.
   makenouns is more useful to explore the noun traits and to find your favourite traits.

2. on nouns website playground, you need to know the names of traits and how they look to make a noun you want, or you can generate a random noun.
   on makenouns, what you see is what you get. you can see all the traits and choose.

3. in nouns website playground people come knowing what they want. In makenouns they are expected to find what they want.

The clarification about the 5 ETH Ask,

I’m asking 5 Eth as a retro funding for makenouns, also this will cover a few more features i want to add to makenouns listed below,

1. The Current Version of makenouns
2. Adding Support For SVG Exports ( this will make the tool, the easiest way to generate a custom nouns svg, useful for artists, or anyone making nouns graphics. svg support also helps developers, if they want to quickly grab and go a custom noun for their app. ( svg adds a lot of flexibility to developers than a png image. ) )
3. make this a PWA ( the app will work like a native app, also it will work without internet )
4. make traits searchable
5. add a share button that helps to share the noun/traits from makenouns

depending on the usage and feedback, i’ll be removing features that are not useful and adding feature requests that makes sense.