Weekly Designer Spotlight 04 | Stella Achenbach

It’s the fourth week of the Designer Weekly Spotlight and for this edition we are featuring Stella Achenbach!

Many of you probably have interacted with Stella across the web3 fashion discord and twitter accounts without evening knowing it… because she doesn’t just take the form of Stella, but also, of an online identity and native digi-being… Alana the Web3 Girl! In fact, Alana just launched her very own designer realm (more on that below). Stella has a background across traditional fashion, as well as having been in the digital fashion and general 3D community for years. She is such an amazingly bubbly, passionate and well informed addition to the GDN and we couldn’t be more excited to be on this journey alongside her as she fully embraces web3 and charts an inspiring journey for everyone into this new world.

  • You can follow her on Twitter here.
  • Check out her full web3 fashion GDN profile here.

Treasury Web3 Fashion Vault Purchases

Under the designer spotlight, both the DIGITALAX + GDN Treasuries have purchased one each of Stella’s live pieces from the DIGITALAX web3 fashion marketplace which will be held in the treasury vaults.

DIGITALAX Vault Purchase

Item: Too the Mind that is Still


GDN Vault Purchase

Item: Green Glam


Autobiographical Entry from Stella

I can proudly say that web2 is behind me which is why I will keep the intro about that part quite short even though it stretches over a period of almost two decades.

I grew up in a 90ies household where computers were always present. My dad got me my first Atari when I was 7 or 8 and taught me a bunch of things about it. My mum joined the fascination of my dad and I shared in it a bit later. She is still a gamer until today joining forces with her best friend in GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and many others.

In retrospect, the only reason I never went into studying something more technology-driven at the time was that it wasn't necessarily connected with an aesthetically pleasing output. If game design would have been something to study during my time, I might have chosen that over fashion design. So I studied fashion design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna driven by my urge to create and ended up in an industry that shared literally none of my principle values. Like always these realizations take a while to set in because they are accompanied by the utter pain of failure and pure disorientation.

That phase was roughly three years ago. At that time I had already moved to Peru. I was traveling with friends to one of the most beautiful locations on our planet, the Amazon Rainforest. Surrounded by pure beauty and no digital noise I admitted my realization to someone for the first time. I started crying. My friend who lent me her ear had many years of experience listening to her employees, and she suggested a plan to me that is used in personal coaching. That helped a lot, and I set myself free from the depression Kitty.

After that experience, I restructured my office and decided it is never too late to change one's path, no matter the age or anything else. The only hindrance we face is often just ourselves. That said, I went to YouTube University intending to become a 3D generalist. I started by learning Blender but soon found a specific fascination for Substance Designer and visual scripting. Only recently, one of my new web3 frens brought to my attention that my saved "Blender Helper" YouTube Playlist contains around 800 videos (if it's saved on the list it means I did follow the tutorial to the end 😹)! In case you guys want to check out the videos that helped me a lot along the way, follow this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7EGSCo1YBI&list=PLh1Y8sECSz_9FaHaT0cTd-eHCJR7UbdP6

While 3D generalism is still the aim, a lot changed for me when an exceptionally inspiring girl in her twenties left a message on my IG account. Guess her name! Of course, it was Emma. And like so many others, I thought that it might be a scam, but I cannot tell you how grateful I am now that I listened to my gut feeling and followed her down the hole to Web3Land.

Even before, I had taken an interest in crypto but honestly lacked a deeper understanding. Now when I am in Emma's shoes explaining to someone from web2 what web3 is I realize it IS another world and potentially a much better one than we are in right now. The NFTs, the money in Crypto to me personally it is the cherry on top of the cake. In a way like fancy gadgets, you can appreciate and take in along the way. The actual cake and strong base of web3 is the potential to found a new form of society, make people independent and empowered by giving them the tools of web3 and the possibility of self-sovereignty and self-governance.

No worries these realizations took a while for me as well and while they might sound very political and maybe even strange to some of you I believe you will come to a very similar conclusion after taking in the knowledge of web3. During DCentral Miami I realized that so many more people are interested but lack the entry point since today the user interface of web3 is not the most user-friendly one. But believe me, everyone in this space is working incredibly hard to make it happen. For now, try to find your personal access point.

What excites you, makes you feel passionate, and is accessible to you? If it is fashion, like in my case, the DIGITALAX family and the Global Designer Network are great ways to get acquainted with web3 and gain your independence.

To finish my little story, I am still on my way to becoming a fully-fledged 3D generalist, but I think with Alanatheweb3girl, I have found my biggest challenge and passion in web3. She has already launched under the DIGITALAX Designer Realms, but now it is time to build out her world and ecosystem. While she is part of the digi models category and she is also modeling web3 fashion, to me she is more of an educator and face of web3 and De-Fi. I see her right now as the friendly user interface to bring more people into the space. This means I am looking forward to many more web3 fashion collaborations within the GDN but also actively joining hands with everything connected to De-Fi so we can educate more people on how to use it. If you are interested to become a collaborator, join Alana´s discord, twitter, medium and mirror.xyz (http://mirror.xyz/) publications:
https://discord.gg/8KvxKbvw
https://twitter.com/alanatheweb3gi1
https://alanatheweb3girl.medium.com/
(https://alanatheweb3girl.medium.com/)https://mirror.xyz/alanatheweb3girl.eth

Having said that, you now know my current stand on all of this and how I got here. I hope to see you soon out in Web3Land so we can all continue to explore and grow together!

Web3 Renaissance Patronage

Any patronage of the Weekly Designer Spotlight goes directly to the Global Designer Network Treasury, Spotlighted Designer and Core Writer (50/35/15), for further growing out the infrastructure, community and market of web3 fashion, the open metaverse and more. For this week, the core writer was GDN member Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee.

Join the Revolution with the Web3 Fashion Anarchists! Jump into the Global Designer Network Discord below:

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