Strange Sounds From Beyond
TEAM
Christopher Sung, Kirsten Mercado, Reina Kim, Vito Fan
ROLES
Interface Design, Graphic Design, Interaction Design, User Research, Visual Design, Video Editor
Over the course of the five-week project, the team learned by studying works and graphic principles of other designers to ground our designs. The final goal was to create a new visual identity for our selected client, Strange Sounds From Beyond, that could be translated into different physical and digital mediums.
Strange Sounds From Beyond is a music festival held in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The festival brings together local music enthusiasts and emerging artists, offering a unique opportunity to revel in a wide array of musical styles, ranging from mainstream hits to avant-garde experiments.
CONTEXT
For this project, our group was tasked with analyzing Wolfgang Weingart’s designs to draw out design qualities he used in his works. In addition, we also selected design principles from Ellen Lupton’s book “Graphic Design: The New Basics”. By combining Weingart’s design qualities and Lupton’s principles, we were to ground our designs by using these fundamentals.
However, our group struggled with analyzing Weingart’s design qualities, as none of us were highly proficient in graphic design. Thus we struggled to understand the underlying qualities within Weingart’s works. We had spend four weeks framing and reframing our Weingart design qualities as shown below.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Based on our qualities and principles, we created new posters each week. However, many of our posters did not land, as we struggled to even understand our selected qualities and principles, we had an even harder time trying to apply them to the posters we designed.
INITIAL EXPLORATION
In our fourth week, we had scoped down our design qualities and principles to the following:
Weingart Quality
Using geometric shapes to frame elements for the purpose of separating content
Lupton Principle
Using patterns in order to create texture
With the mentioned quality and principle, we had landed on the following poster and created accompanying assets to test the strength of our design.
FINAL DIRECTION
To give our microsite direction, we first began by researching to try and understand the identity of Strange Sounds From Beyond and what kind of message they were trying to send to their audience. As a music festival, they incorporate artists of diverse musical backgrounds and talents, showcasing music that attendees may have never heard before, thus, the name of the festival. Based on our research we had come up with the following framing statement and user flow to guide our microsite.
MICROSITE: CONTENT STRAGETY
How might we provide a compelling experience with sound interaction in order to inspire site visitors unfamiliar with the festival to attend the festival in person?
PROBLEM FRAMING
We wanted to create an immersive environment where visitors would have to focus solely on the music their heard, before making any judgements on the artist. We achieved this by minimizing any artist names or song titles to allow free exploration based solely on sound.
MICROSITE: SOUND EXPLORATION
Within the artist’s page, 5 of their songs are available for visitors to listen to, giving them a better idea of that artist’s sound. Additional details about each song can also be shown for those interested.
MICROSITE: ARTIST EXPLORATION
After going through the different artist and their music, visitors interested in purchasing a ticket through the link in each artist’s song page. Visitors can also quickly purchase a ticket from the link in the navigation bar as well.
MICROSITE: TICKETING
Final Microsite
This project truly humbled me, but also boosted my confidence at the same time. In the first few weeks of this project, we struggled a lot with understanding the concepts. But through hard work and countless hours each week, we were able to break through and land our project. This project has shown me what my limits were, but also showed me how with great effort, we can learn just as much.
REFLECTION