Crafting to the Beat
SoundHound, Inc.
The Story
When I worked with Soundhound in the mid-2010s, they were still predominantly known for their music discovery app by the same name. Aside from allowing users to discover the music around them, the app also displayed charts ranking music’s popularity, among other secondary content. After producing a span of one-off designs for their seasonal content, I redesigned the app’s most highly trafficked collection of charts, creating distinct individual styles for each genre while maintaining a cohesive overarching aesthetic.
The Execution
I deviated from the vector graphics that dominated their social media posts and, instead, chose to bring the artists back to center stage. I referenced app data and online media press kits to arrive at a template that combined notable male and female artists from each genre with a unique color pairing that would define each genre. I extrapolated the brand’s complete secondary color wheel across the charts to create a seamless in-app experience.
With the individual palettes in place, we broke each genre into unique assets for implementation across the application. Beyond the app, we distilled the assets into ads tucked into other internal and external channels and platforms.
The style also influenced our redesign of one of their regular email series, Artist Born Today. As we refined these emails, the advertisements for the refreshed genre charts set a visual standard.
