Pavia Games

NFT land assets and metaverse UI design

NFT's Digital Assets UI Design

Pavia is a metaverse, a digital world where people can buy, own and explore virtual land through ownership of a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). Each parcel of land is represented by an NFT, a kind of digital deed that proves who owns it, permanently recorded so it can’t be copied or faked. We worked on two separate projects for Pavia, the land assets that built the metaverse map, and the interface for the platform’s soft launch, and we’re telling them as one story here because of how closely the two are tied together. The map gave Pavia its landscape, and the interface gave people a way to actually get into it.

The Pavia map was built to feel like a real world, made up of land, sea, desert, mountains and forest, with each terrain needing its own NFT design.

We kept the designs deliberately simple, working in Illustrator to find the essential shapes that made each terrain instantly recognisable, then bringing them into Photoshop to give them depth and dimension as 3D visuals.

The brief was to keep it simple from the start, an isometric, voxel-style look in the same family as Minecraft’s blocky world, where every shape is built from clean geometric forms rather than fine detail. The hard part wasn’t designing one nice-looking terrain, it was designing a handful that all had to sit next to each other on a map with 100,000 land parcels, including a deeper sea variant for the ocean floor, and still read clearly at a glance. Anything too detailed or too clever would have made the map harder to navigate, not easier, so we stripped each terrain back to its simplest recognisable shape before we built the depth back in.

That scale mattered because Pavia didn’t hand its land out slowly. All 100,000 parcels went out across three public drops between October 2021 and February 2022, the first of those sold through its 29,000 parcels almost immediately at 39 ADA each. The second drop that November was oversubscribed so heavily that nearly $7 million in failed orders had to be refunded, and the final drop in February 2022 released the remaining 40,000 parcels to complete the map. Every one of those 100,000 plots needed an asset that held up whether someone was looking at their own land or looking at the whole world at once.

Once the land parcels had a map to live on, Pavia needed a way for people to actually step into that world, starting with a soft launch aimed at a select group of early users.

The Metaverse UI

With the map in place, Pavia needed an interface for that soft launch, the first proper look a select group of users would get at the platform. We led the UI design in Figma, working through every screen so the experience felt as thought-through as the world behind it.

The problem was that Pavia had a lot going on under the surface, blockchain, ownership, multiple sections and ways to explore, and none of that could be allowed to get in a user’s way. People needed to focus on exploring the platform, not on understanding how it worked underneath, so we started with research into user preferences, design trends, and what competitors were doing. From there we worked closely with the Pavia team through several rounds of feedback, and made sure the interface held up just as well on a phone as it did on a desktop screen.

Both projects came from the same brief, really: make a complicated digital world feel simple to use.

The land assets gave Pavia its landscape, and the interface gave people a way to explore it, and neither one would have worked as well without the other. A map with no way in is just as much use as an interface with nothing to explore, so we made sure the two felt like one product, not two pieces of work bolted together at the end.

The soft launch landed well, with early users responding to how easy the interface was to find their way around, and how polished it felt to use. Between the map and the UI, we helped build a world that felt considered from the ground up, and we’re proud of how the two pieces hold together.

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