Understanding the role differentiation plays

In the real world, each person is unique with their own appearance, outlook, and aspirations. In the digital world, it’s possible for people to be represented by the same shape and form as others.

With NFTs, many PFP artists run into issues around their art not being distinct enough from each other for holders to be able to establish some kind of identity.

Art intended on being made to represent unique individuals simply can’t do a great job representing them when the underlying asset is too similar to one another.

I’ve seen this time and time again with artists trying to establish their PFP collections. Sometimes the only difference between one piece and the next may be a hat. More often the difference between pieces may be swapping colors.

In other cases, a PFP token may have multiple editions.

How is one able to establish an identity using art designed as a PFP when there are many possible owners out there?

Having artwork with subtle differences or having tokens be multi-editioned so that there are multiple owners can work as a PFP project. As you can see above, however, it can quickly become confusing and hard to stand out amongst the crowd with this setup.

Great PFP collections recognize that for someone to be able to identify with their art piece, the piece has to look distinct enough from others.

As an exercise, I went through a PFP collection that I know well, BWOPLE by Gengoya.

In a collection of over 250 pieces at the time of writing, no two pieces are alike. There may be some that are similar in the sense that they have a bucket hat or a blade, but each bucket hat and blade is also entirely unique.

Each piece in this collection has continuity in that you know each piece belongs within the Bwople collection. More importantly though, each Bwople stands on its own as wholly distinct from one another.

Any pair, even ones with similar background, look distinct enough that someone could establish an identity around it—in this case, myself with 0197 and Winterland with 0163.

On Making PFPs More Unique

Not every artist has a collection like Bwople, but that doesn’t mean that pieces can’t be unique still.

Handdrawn PFP Collections

For hand illustrated collections, many artists choose to have some kind of form to base their art on top of. This form can exist (and probably should for continuity sake), but the form used should probably err on the more basic side.

The more involved the base form is, the harder it is to create something unique on top of that structure.

One tip that was shared in a recent Twitter Space with Gengoya was using the color wheel as a means of choosing background colors. Though it may be useful to consider color as a means of bringing continuity to a collection, if a specific color palette isn’t needed, this can be a quick trick to adding a bit of uniqueness to pieces.

For the piece itself, resisting the urge to copy and paste assets can go a long way towards creating PFP art that is unique. Bwoples are completely hand drawn upon a very basic template, which inherently means that parts like hands will be entirely unique.

Generative PFP Collections

Generative PFP projects are a little different beast. Because, very basically, assets are being layered on top of one another to create a composite image, the general structure of the image is going to remain intact. This means that what you have to work with—to make pieces unique—are the various layers that make up the PFP.

In order to make sure that your generative PFP project is unique, you will need a lot of versions of each layer. If shirt is a layer, there will need to be a bunch of different shirts. If hair is a layer, there will need to be various hairstyles.

This video for Nifty Generator does a great job at conceptualizing layers and how they combine

The number of layers needed is made more complicated by the rarity expressed by these layers. For instance, you could have 100 different shirt types in a collection of 10,000 pieces, but if 90 of those shirt types only showed up 1 time each in the collection, 10 shirt types are showing amongst the collection of 99% of the time.

Balancing the numbers of layers with the rarity of those layers appearing in a collection will help increase the chance that pieces look unique. Multiplying this times a number of possible layers (hair, clothing, accessory 1, accessory 2, background color, etc.) increases the uniqueness.

Probably the biggest thing to consider here is quality control.

Spit out a ton of iterations and compare. Do pieces look distinct enough when placed side by side? Is there something in the smart contract that prevents the same iteration from occurring again?

Some collections neglect quality control here, resulting in pieces that are sometimes entirely the same. Though it can be a fun quirk, the more that this happens, the less people are going to be able to associate their own unique identity with a piece.

On Edition Size

For generative and hand-illustrated collections, it’s probably best to limit the number of editions available. Focusing on making PFPs that are 1 of 1 can quickly eliminate the issues of multiple people using the same image as their profile photo.

If you choose to make a PFP collection or have one, I hope this helps improve the quality of your collection. There are so many PFPs to choose from—may it be yours that a collector chooses to use.

If you’ve enjoyed this, feel free to follow me @cryptomoogle. As always, let me know your thoughts!