Cadence Music

Cadence Music is a design concept. It is a music player built around programmatic color extraction where the color of the interface changes to match the currently playing song. It was inspired by design demos shown at Google I/O 2014.

Client
Personal Project

My Role
Visual, Motion Design

Team
Individual Contribution

Timeline
12 Weeks in December 2016

Inspiration

Cadence Music was inspired by two demos presented at Google I/O 2014. The first was a music player made with Material Design. The second was of a real-time color extraction API called Palette.

My goal was to combine the concepts from the demos into a modern music player with standard features such as shuffle, repeat, lyrics, and queue management. 

Concept inspiration. From left to right, Music Player concept by Google, Palette API illustration by Romain Guy.

Early Sketches

I sketched out a few concepts on paper to nail down the information hierarchy of the Now Playing screen.

Early Sketches to explore different layouts and information hierarchies. 

Next, I tried using every popular music app I could think of on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It was instrumental in defining a visual aesthetic.

Visual design inspiration. From left to right, UberMusic, iOS 9 Music, PowerAmp Music, Phonograph Music, Shuttle Music.

I explored the different visual styles I'd cataloged with the information hierarchy I had created earlier.

Intermediate mockups exploring different layouts and aesthetics. 

Final Design

Immersion and simplicity were a strong focus for the final design. I found that duotone colors worked best for the interface and captured the essence of the album art and music.

Starboy

Starboy is a dark and edgy exploration of The Weekend’s rise to fame and is captured perfectly in the deep blue and vibrant red.

Disco Yes

A collection of somber jazz and punchy pop tunes, Disco Yes's wide range of sounds are in sharp contrast to each other, just like the dark grey and bright yellow.

Songs About Jane

And finally, the loving, but somber tone of Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane is reflected deeply in the bright and dull shades of red.