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Project Case Study

Olena (previously Olas): A website in motion for a protocol built on human judgement

Olena is an open protocol for trustworthy information, a verification and judgement layer for the internet, scaling human review in the age of abundant AI creations. The Complete Studio designed and developed its custom, animation-rich WordPress website: a playful, choreographed digital home for a serious idea.
How we Helped:
Industry:
  • Open Protocol / Trustworthy Information
Client Location:
  • London, UK & Ireland
Year:
  • 2023
The Stack:
  • Custom CSS, Elementor Pro, Figma, GoDaddy, Google Analytics, JavaScript Animation, WordPress, Yoast SEO

The brief

Olena, the team’s new venture is an open protocol for trustworthy information: a verification and judgement layer for the internet, designed to scale human review as AI makes publishing infinitely abundant, with no single entity in control. The concept is abstract by nature, which was precisely the problem. A protocol has no product photos, no office, no smiling team shots, its website is its first impression, and most protocol websites read like technical documentation that wandered into public. The brief: a custom website design that makes submitters, reviewers, and readers instantly understand their role in the network, with a level of animation, interaction, and visual craft that signals this project takes design as seriously as decentralisation. Strategy first, then choreography.

Three audiences, one orbit

The central design problem was translation: how does an abstract protocol become legible to a human in one scroll? Our answer was to structure the entire homepage around Olena’s three participants: submitters, reviewers, and readers, each given their own illustrated 3D scene, their own moment in the scroll, and their own plain-language explanation of what they do and what they get. The circular logo became the organising metaphor: information moving through a loop of judgement, with the orange “o” recurring through headings and navigation like a thread. Visitors don’t read about the network; they watch themselves enter it.
The circular logo establishes the metaphor – information moving through a loop of judgement. The first two audience sections begin immediately: telling submitters and reviewers exactly where they belong in the network. Three audiences, three illustrated 3D scenes, one scroll. Each participant arrives at their section, reads their role, and understands the system before clicking anything.
The same visual logic at mobile scale. The illustrated scenes, gradient transitions, and audience structure hold – even without the parallax depth that gives them weight on a larger screen.
The CMS the team publishes through independently – thinking pieces, protocol updates, forum announcements — all inheriting the visual language automatically, without a developer in the room.

A custom bespoke design

A website this bespoke could easily have become a beautiful prison, every future edit requiring a designer. We deliberately built against that. The custom theme was developed on WordPress with Elementor Pro, with the animation system, gradient treatments, and illustrated sections constructed as reusable, structured components rather than hand-coded one-offs. The blog, FAQ, and docs-facing pages run on editable templates that inherit the visual language automatically, so Olena’s team publishes thinking, peer prediction explainers, protocol updates, forum announcements, without touching the choreography. Custom CSS and JavaScript handle the motion layer; the CMS handles the words. The result is unusual: a highly experimental front-end that an ordinary human can maintain on an ordinary Tuesday.
Where most protocol sites collapse into documentation, Olena’s FAQ page stays inside the design language. Accordion clarity on the left; an interactive peer prediction experience on the right.
The CMS the team publishes through independently – thinking pieces, protocol updates, forum announcements — all inheriting the visual language automatically, without a developer in the room.
Six destinations. The zigzag entrance animation makes navigation memorable rather than merely functional – one of many moments where motion was given a reason to exist.

The results: A protocol that makes a first impression

The most important outcome is comprehension: visitors leave olena.xyz understanding what an open protocol for trustworthy information actually is and where they fit in it, as submitter, reviewer, or reader, which, for an abstract decentralised network, is the entire battle. The site gives Olena a distinctive presence in a category where most projects look like rendered documentation, signalling that human judgement and human craft belong together. Operationally, the team publishes blog posts, FAQs, and updates independently through the CMS. And as a partnership running since 2023, the site has evolved with the venture, including its own renaming, without ever needing a rebuild.
Design language

Distinctive

Custom illustration, animation, and motion in a category of template sameness
Concept clarity

Immediate

Three audiences understand their role within a single scroll
Partnership

Since 2023

The site has evolved with the venture, through its own rebrand, without a rebuild

Choreography with a frame budget

Animation-heavy websites usually pay for their charm in load time, jank, and motion-sick visitors. We treated motion as an engineering discipline with rules. Every animation had to serve comprehension or character, the orbiting logo establishes the brand’s circular metaphor; the zigzag menu entrance makes navigation memorable; parallax layers give the illustrated scenes depth as you scroll, and anything decorative-but-meaningless was cut in testing. Technically, motion runs on performance-friendly CSS transforms and carefully scoped JavaScript rather than heavyweight libraries, tested across browsers and devices, with graceful behaviour where reduced motion is preferred. The trade-off conversations were constant: every delightful entrance was weighed against the milliseconds it cost. Delight survived; bloat did not.
The animated logo settles. Three plain-language facts appear below: the verification layer, the scaling of human review, the censorship resistance. An abstract concept, made legible in a single viewport.
Eight questions a sceptic would ask, answered on a page that doesn’t read like a terms document. The design earns trust for the answers before the answers are read.
Four pieces challenging the problems Olena exists to solve – media failure, institutional rent-seeking, the erosion of reliable opinion. Each illustrated with custom artwork that matches the brand’s intellectual seriousness.

Making an abstract protocol findable

A decentralised protocol has an unusual SEO problem: nobody searches for it by name yet, and the concepts it lives among, information verification, human review, peer prediction, are abstract and contested. The copywriting and SEO work was built to solve exactly that: plain-language explanations of what Olena does for each audience, Yoast-managed metadata, clean heading structure beneath the animated surface, and content written so search engines and AI systems can accurately describe “an open protocol for trustworthy information” with Olena attached. Google Analytics closes the loop on what resonates. Crucially, the motion layer was kept out of the content layer, crawlers and AI assistants read a clear, semantic document while humans get the show.
The product and the questions about the product, side by side.
The motion layer was deliberately kept out of the semantic layer — crawlers and AI assistants read a clean document while humans get the show.

Conclusion

Olena needed its website to do what most protocol sites don’t even attempt: make a decentralised, abstract idea feel human, navigable, and worth joining. The answer was structure dressed as play, a homepage organised around the network’s three participants, a motion language with actual rules, and a CMS that lets an experimental design survive everyday publishing. The partnership has run since 2023, carrying the venture through its own evolution without a rebuild, which is its own quiet endorsement. We believe craft is an argument: a protocol about the value of human judgement should look like humans judged every pixel, and this one does.

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