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Aesthetics is a kind of talent.
Written by: Eric, Foresight News
At 3 AM Beijing time on March 26, former Base design director Benji Taylor announced he is joining Musk's X and will lead the design work.
Personnel changes in the Web3 industry are never big news, but this post's nearly 15 million views tell me things are not so simple.
After a deeper understanding, the author realized this person is anything but a simple Base design director.
Rebellion and Talent
Benji Taylor is only about 26 years old this year, possibly a typical '00s kid'.
Unlike most lives that follow a set path, Benji Taylor gained some fame at the age of 16. In 2016, this 16-year-old 'creative director' from London was interviewed by the renowned British fashion culture magazine (Dazed).
At an age when many are still furiously writing in high school classrooms, Benji Taylor has already stirred up huge waves across the Atlantic. Numerous artists, including Ram Riddlz and A$AP Ant, have collaborated with him. Not only that, he also took the time to develop applications, design his own playing cards, and founded his own design company, Next Exit.
This is not something he started at 16 years old, but rather something he has already completed. According to the interview, Next Exit has been operating for at least 1 year.
"To be honest, I'm not good at art; I just have a lot of ideas and then decide to put them into practice."
In Benji Taylor's view, the monotonous design style makes him nauseous. As someone who considers himself not good at art, he feels that his work surpasses many others.
In this interview from 10 years ago, Benji Taylor displayed a maturity beyond his years. In addition to expressing dissatisfaction with homogenized education, he also mentioned when asked for advice for other young creative workers:
"Be more self-aware and understand that things won't happen out of thin air. Going to school does not guarantee you a job, nor does it guarantee you a happy and stable life. You are still young, perhaps still living with your parents and not having to pay rent; make good use of this point. Every penny you earn is profit, so why wait for reality to crush you?"
From Honk to Aave
Around 2020, Benji Taylor came to the United States. Shortly after, the company Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), named after the first community he lived in after coming to America, was established.
The first product launched by this company is nothing short of explosive.
In December 2020, Honk made its debut. The application was initially promoted on TikTok, with a single video garnering over 140,000 likes.
Honk's design is unique: the application does not have a send button; the content typed during a chat is displayed to the other party word by word, allowing you to see what the person you are chatting with is modifying or deleting, just like 'live chat'. Additionally, the application has no chat history; once you leave the chat room, all past chat content is permanently deleted.
If you want to pull someone into the chat room, you can send a 'Honk', and the other party will receive a conspicuous notification, knowing that someone is 'calling' them. This innovative way of moving the offline chat experience online through mechanism design is very novel.
In 2021, Honk expanded from familiar social interactions to stranger social interactions, allowing users to randomly match with strangers through a feature similar to WeChat's shake. At its peak, Honk's open rate even surpassed Instagram. When it was taken offline, Honk accumulated 2.6 billion characters of input, 170 million 'Honk' sent, as well as hundreds of millions of images, audio, and video exchanges. It gained many loyal users in fashion, technology, and other fields.
Indeed, this application was taken offline a few years ago. Although it was highly praised among users, and many product people and designers still reminisce about its 'honkish' style even today, the product's PMF (Product-Market Fit) faced real challenges.
The core reason is that this application requires both parties to be online at the same time. Additionally, Honk does not have group chats and has never released an Android version.
Perhaps this application is a god-like existence in some niche circles, but a social application seems destined to fail if it does not have enough people.
In 2022, the LFE team began developing the self-custody cryptocurrency wallet Family that focuses on design.
If the wallet application you see has a shadow of the page in the above image, it may have drawn inspiration from Benji Taylor's design. This wallet product has also received high praise in the industry, with many users calling it 'the best experience in crypto wallets'. Of course, you might not have heard of this wallet because they did not perform well in market promotion.
Perhaps because he felt that good products were never recognized by the market, Benji Taylor decided to leverage the platform's strength. In 2023, LFE was acquired by Aave Labs, while Honk was taken offline, and the Family wallet continued to operate. Unfortunately, this wallet was also abandoned in February of this year, with Aave explaining that the focus was on DeFi business, believing that Web3 needs to design based on purpose to attract users, rather than being a generic wallet.
Suji, the founder of Mask Network who acquired Lens, also stated today on X that the Family wallet is the most admirable consumer-grade wallet product in terms of design language and depth, and it is also the foundation of the Aave App.
In October 2025, Benji Taylor left Aave and joined Base as the head of design. If you pay attention, you will notice that the now well-known mobile apps in the Web3 industry definitely include Aave and Base. An industry investor once told me that the mobile app experience of Web3 products is mostly terrible; currently, the number of mobile users worldwide far exceeds that of PCs, but having only a decent PC experience is one of the obstacles to Web3 expanding its user base.
There are certainly issues with inadequate infrastructure and many processes brought about by decentralization that cannot be simplified. However, it is precisely because of this that only designers like Benji Taylor can create mobile applications for Web3 that might barely pass in Web2.
The man chosen by Musk
The fact that the extremely discerning Musk personally tweeted to welcome his joining speaks volumes.
There are many speculations about his joining X; some believe that product head Nikita Bier, who has served as an advisor at Solana Labs, along with the former head of design at Base, indicates Musk's intention to add more cryptocurrency-related features to X.
Some speculate that his experience in social applications and cryptocurrency wallets could help X's encrypted communication application X Chat and payment products.
In response, Benji Taylor provided his own answer:
In the past, this talented young man made many astonishing designs, but from a purely commercial perspective, they seemed to be too highbrow. After experiencing several ups and downs, it is believed that in this company that integrates social application X, AI large model xAI, and SpaceX aiming for Mars colonization, Benji Taylor can fully unleash his talents.
AI's design capabilities are not weak, but the top-level aesthetics do not come from parameters in the tens or hundreds of billions; they come from the innate talents of geniuses