hum.fm

Web Design/Data Visualization/UIUX

My Team

Jonathan Back

The Project

What started as a passion project of mine, my partner and I are working together to conceive and design our vision of revolutionary music discovery platform that bridges the gap between artists and listeners through an immersive, data-driven experience.

  • ARCHIVE
  • ARCHIVE
  • ARCHIVE

The Project

Beginning our project, my partner and I sat down and discussed every feature we wanted. We want a music platform that wasn't like any others, that learned from the mistakes of the past 20 years of music streaming.

From there we narrowed down those ideas into ones that were the most essential to our brand. We want to outline the problem we were addressing and every feature that specially solved this issue. We set out to create more than a website, we want to create an old fashion town square where music is seen and proudly shared by all being embowered by data.

  • DESIGN
  • DESIGN
  • DESIGN

Designing with Data in Mind

We learned from many rounds of feedback what worked and what didn't.

After multiple iterations, I landed on a visual design that was simple but could be filled in with data, music, and user photos. The 'nodes' in the middle of each page are for the modular design where users can customize their data and show off the relevant statistics they are most proud of.

Unlike other websites or apps, I took an approach of almost total modularity, where things like followers or likes are optional to show. Small artists can focus on showing off their local following, show off their most loyal fans, and even promote their favorite songs. Not their most popular.
Users can generate data and tags like "OG listener", which can determine if they were genuine first fans. This encourages users to seek out and interact with newer or niche artists/genres so they can show off their tags and music they adopted early, helping both small artists and users discover them.

  • DATA
  • DATA
  • DATA

Working with Data

We needed help, as we didn't want a limited education of coding stop of from designing exactly what we wanted. We worked with data wizards like Glen McDonald (creator of Every Noise at Once) and Ben Tanen (A data visualization specialist at Spotify) to create now a 3D node network of music.

We designed our site this way to evolve the way we listen to music. Now without the limitation of scrolling lists to display hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of data points like Spotify does, users can see every song, genre, and artist available.

  • BRANDING
  • BRANDING
  • BRANDING

The Branding

A fascination of mine is brands that can shift swiftly and discovery with the modern attention span. For me this looks less like what your brand should do, and more what the brand shouldn't do. While hum as a brand has a logo, typeface, and brand colors, these were chosen specifically to be neutral and moldable.

hum most importantly doesn't have limitations to its brand font, we often utalize many fonts to convey different genres, countries, and people that music originates from.