Composed
Pardon the rough edges! This is a quick-and-dirty export from Behance.
The content will get a proper rewrite soon. For now, it’s just migrated as-is.
The brief
This work was created in 48 hours for Bending Spoons’s Designflows 2019 challenge. Bending Spoons provided a memo at the beginning of the challenge describing the overall app concept into details alongside some constraints for the material to be designed.
- The app is for listening to and learning about classical music.
- The app monetizes through subscriptions. Some of the content and features are free for all users, while some are reserved to subscribers.
- The target customers are the newbie with curiosity for the topic, but that so far has lacked a convenient opportunity to educate themselves on it; and the long-standing aficionado that’s looking for a high-quality, comprehensive library of classical music and related content to enjoy on the go.
- There are four sections: Discover (here users are recommended content), Search (here they can search for content), Learn (this is where users can follow an educational track and test their knowledge), and Profile (this includes their history of content consumption, their favorites, their achievements, and some settings).
- The main navigation between sections may happen through a tab bar UI, or whatever other system of your liking.
The requirements were to design a poster containing the app icon and one version of the Discover, Learn and Paywall screens for iOS or Android in portrait orientation.
Research
Engage, Investigate, Act
In 48 hours, there is no time for an extended prototyping phase or user experience research. I decided still not to open Sketch for the first 24 hours and to use the CBL framework.
Friday night was dedicated to engaging with the topic: research, documentation, competitors, needs, why is classical music different from other genres, etc. Saturday was all about pen and paper: the investigation phase. And finally Sunday was the time to act with Sketch and getting the deliverables ready for submission!
Making classical music sexy
It is all about the content more than the app itself, being only a medium organizing the content. Classical music is full of young talents constantly creating contemporary compositions, still the genre is seen as old and boring by most of the people. I tried to convey through the aesthetics of the app and the artworks a more modern feeling with content giving a tribute to great composers of the past while still highlighting classical music made in our century!
Why Composed?
While investigating to find a name for the app, I stumbled upon this Medium article from 2016 named “Classical Music Needs a New Name”.
The point of the author was that the word ‘classical’ has been given to classical music as a default choice because we had no name to describe it better.
So what’s wrong with this word? It actually doesn’t describe anything! It even had contributed to classify the genre as ‘very old music from the past’. What about Michael Jackson, isn’t he doing classic pop? And Elvis Presley classic rock’n’roll? You don’t know this song? It’s a jazz classic!
And thinking about it, ‘composed’ music, it makes sense to me…
“To grasp and feel Composed Music, the audience has to compose itself, and it’s nice to be reminded of that.”
And as a side effect, using a big ‘C’ as logo still reminds of the word ‘classical’, which can be handy to let the brain grasp the concept!
