The NBA is an unlikely way to acquaint people with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but Top Shot Moments exploded in early 2021 as digital versions of old-school basketball cards.
Instead of a two dimensional rectangle made out of cardboard, a Top Shot Moment is a three dimensional cube that loops a clip of a basketball player in action—unique items that wouldn’t be possible in the physical world. There are four collectible tiers—Common, Rare, Legendary, and Ultimate—and they can be purchased as packs or as standalone Moments. You can buy a Moment for as little as $6, but some can set you back six figures, like a Legendary Tier LeBron James Moment for $250,000. The site now has over 800,000 registered users and has done more than $500 million in sales as of March 2021.
For the uninitiated, an NFT is a permanent token on the blockchain. It’s minted as one thing, and one thing only. Maybe it’s a piece of art, a song, a house deed, or even a tweet. But its unique position on the blockchain creates scarcity, which assigns value where it might not previously have existed.
But is a video clip that’s accessible to anyone on the internet really that scarce? That’s where the design element comes in. Moments are the work of Dapper Labs, which spent the last few years working on the look and feel of these digital keepsakes.
“Keeping the player as the focus and the star of the Moment, being central to the design was really important and something that’s unique about this product,” said Courtney McNeil, Design Director at Dapper Labs. “That was one of the challenges with even showing a lot of the early concepts because it’s not just encapsulating a player themselves but this specific moment.”
In the Beginning
When initial partnership talks started between Dapper Labs and the NBA, it was clear the league already had a partner it was happy with for basketball cards. It wasn’t interested in pitting companies against each other. The task was then to create an entirely new digital product that was still accessible to basketball fans.
“We did a lot of experimentation, initially, which was looking at a lot of different forms of what the collectible could take,” said McNeil. “A lot of sketching and 3D work was done along with…looking at the shape language, whether it’s rounded or squared or how dimensional.”
Top Shot Moments began as sketches. The design team polled NBA fans who signed up at nbatopshot.com before it went live in 2020, in addition to the usual back and forth with external stakeholders.
“We had an organic and really great relationship with the NBA and Players Association through the process,” said McNeil. “We had weekly meetings where we’re like, ‘This is sort of what we’re exploring, these are some of the different shape forms, this is some of the data that we’re displaying, this is how we’re thinking about using imagery and these are some mood boards.’ It was a way to bounce ideas back and forth with them and hear their early thoughts as we were building out the initial Moment shape.”
The design team spent time considering the collectible experience, how they fit into a forthcoming game, how they interact with blockchain technology, and how to design the blockchain smart contracts. One early design challenge was visually communicating rarity and the different tiers, and the video game industry was instructive there.
“In some of our initial compositions that we shared with fans, there was a LeBron Moment, but it was colored green to signify a certain rarity tier, and they were just appalled that we would use green to tie it to something that should very clearly be purple,” said McNeil.
Designing a Moment
Bringing a Moment to life is a multi-step process that also involves creating a full model, which was only partially accessible as of March 2021.
“We do a lot of initial sketching and pulling things together and then build it out in Cinema 4D because it just has the most beautiful kind of polish, lighting, and effects that we can add in,” said McNeil. “From there, we bring it into Unity to set a visual benchmark. Then we try to match that visual benchmark, which can sometimes be a bit of a challenge when we were working with holographic effects.“
“We do create those pre-rendered videos and also screenshots of like, ‘Here’s what the collectible looks like at these standard angles, but we’re actually working with this interactive 3D model,” added Alan Carr, a Game and Systems Designer at Dapper Labs. “We’re just presenting it in a certain way.”
This means that in a Top Shot game or in a future app displaying Moments, collectors could manipulate them with their fingers, spinning them in different directions.
The Current State of Moments
While Dapper Labs struggled to get feedback in the early days of Moments, they are now inundated with suggestions, as collectors new and old throw in their two cents. Naturally, there is some negative sentiment, but the design team has also heard new ideas that could make their way into the visual identity of future Moments.
“We actually hear from a lot of artists that want to be a part of this and contribute to this,” said Carr. “That’s one of the things that we’re kind of exploring and seeing what the possibilities are. It’s gotten the wheels turning.”
Carr declined to elaborate, but in the meantime, the #NBATopShotThis hashtag has been a popular way for fans to highlight notable plays in real time. Even announcers are calling out possible Top Shot contenders during broadcasts.
This urgency plays into what Moments are created and how long that takes. “The team is capable of being very flexible and moving fast if we see an opportunity for something,” explained Carr. Some Moments can be out the door in a matter of days, “but of course we try to anticipate what’s coming down the pipeline,” he said.
Moving quick does have its benefits. As Carr told us, Top Shot was the first place to get an officially licensed LaMelo Ball collectible. “All the other collectibles have this really long process with physical components or other restrictions, but we’re able to see LaMelo Ball have his very first game in the NBA and then that week we’re releasing it as a collectible. That’s a first in the NBA, especially at a worldwide scale.“
Going forward, you might be able to interact with your Moment beyond the confines of your smartphone display. The cube design of a Moment, for example, was used in part for how it might look and function in augmented reality or virtual reality.
“We wanted something that has a trading card sort of timeless quality, where it can grow and evolve, but it can always be iconic, and I think we really managed to hit that,” said Carr. “We do these little subtle changes as we move from series to series, little design elements within the collectible that can get updated to signify what you’re looking at, but we wanted to make sure that we left ourselves the right design space to be able to do that for decades and decades. And I think we’ve got some cool stuff lined up there.”
