Introducing Crypt Design: DarkNet Design Services!

Posted by: DeepDotWeb

June 4, 2014

11 Comments</span> </p>

This is one interesting service – while browsing Grams few months ago i saw a banner saying “Design services for the Dark Net” and i also saw that this service was used to design the Grams sub reddit, at the time i was looking for someone to redesign DDW so i contacted this service called Crypt – and as you can probably see we had the whole site redesigned from scratch.

The concept of this service Crypt is offering can be  very useful for DNM owners or deep web site owners in general, as we all know – in the onion land, user experience and design is a major flaw in most sites, and as this scene is growing larger by the day, it shouldn’t be like that. Since i had the pleasure of working with Crypt design and i found his service to be super professional and quick, i asked him to give me a short interview to introduce his service with the hope that other site owners will find it useful as i did –  Anonymous Design Services For Dark Net Sites:

Tell us a bit about yourself / service?</p>

Crypt Design is a design team for the deep web. We mostly produce graphics and code websites. Clients come to us saying they need a logo or they’ve built an ugly marketplace or need a WordPress theme created.

Our unique aspect is that thanks to modern crypto techniques we’re not just confidential — we don’t know who or where our clients are.

With Bootstrap (a popular HTML/CSS website framework), programmers whip up custom marketplaces quickly and they look OK out of the box, but of course they all look the same and have rough edges. We help with custom graphics and attention to detail in design, layout and user experience.

How is it different from “normal” design services?

We’ve designed for the clearnet for 15 years and we became fascinated with the wild west of Silk Road, Bitcoin, Wikileaks, Anon and so on.

We’re different from many design agencies in that we have a wide technical background too so we can jump in with developers and help turn their ideas into designs into front end code, rather than throwing a Photoshop file over the wall to the dev team and bailing out.

Also little things like using CSS3 instead of Javascript for animations and effects, being aware of exif data in files, tiny inline .svg files for slow TOR connections, anonymous project management. Little big things.

What made you come up with this idea?

What we noticed is that most of the darknet looks 90’s era shitty. A wall of text in Times New Roman does look more underground than a polished HTML5 website, but big markets and vendors are making money and they now have competitors, unlike the first wave Silk Road era. Markets have to stand out from each other and looking smart is no longer suspicious but a mark of having their shit together.

What Kind of interesting stuff (without naming names) have you had the chance to design on the DarkNet?

Aside from the recent overhaul of your DeepDotWeb site where we took your old site and gave it a modern, clean new face, we can’t reveal any commercial work. We have designed marketplaces, forums, WordPress themes, logos, banner adverts, subreddits and static HTML sites. We’re also big into open source projects and do a lot of bits and pieces for any worthy project that needs help.

Something we can happily talk about is Grams (http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion) which has been all over the news. We love the idea of Grams but we noticed they had a pretty weak version of the logo and their subreddit design so we quickly made some small but important improvements. We’re now collaborating with them on advert design and future features which are going to be really cool.

How do you market yourself on the deepweb?

It’s all referrals. Help someone out and do a solid job, discreetly, and someone will recommend you.

Sometimes, we see nice sites with really lame design and say ‘hey – great site but your header looks really crappy, we designed an improved version if you want it’. This often leads to a chat and they need something for X or their friends need Y.

We only launched our own site a couple of months ago and we’ve not really done much marketing apart from banner ads on DeepDotWeb and Grams (both have bought a great deal of traffic), but we’ve had a mailbox full of PGP enquiries every day since.

What is your privacy policy?

We only know what clients choose to share with us, and normally, that ain’t much.

We just need a design brief and we’re good to go. We take privacy very seriously, we use PGP email, TorChat, Jabber, BitMessage, TOR and i2p.

Ways to contact you?

The best way is to ping an email to [email protected]. You can find our public key at the bottom of cryptdesign.com / cryptdesign.i2p / v6mc3fd2lg5dv6uz.onion – please feel free to send us any questions directly.

Thanks DDW!

Updated: 2014-06-04