Amazon was launching a first of its kind product into the music streaming category. An app that democratized radio and allowed anyone to pick up the mic, start their own radio channel and recommend songs from the massive Amazon Music catalog to their listeners. With such a revolutionary product being released for the first time with no brand identity or awareness, we had to build it from the ground up. That included a design identity along with a brand launch film that had to attract music fans while educating them on how the platform works and giving them a reason to add it to their lives. Our work also had to make an impact with two different audiences. We needed to excite music fans to become listeners on the platform and attract the want to be creators/DJs in culture to jump on and start shows themselves.

To capture the freeform, improvisation and fun that existed within a live mic open format, we turned to the world of Jazz to find design inspiration. Jazz embodies the same innovation and rebellious spirit that exists with our hosts and personalities of our listeners.

Like vintage Jazz album covers, we created bespoke type treatments for all of our headlines that have a fun and rhythmic quality. This is meant to visually represent the content users are creating in-app. We limited ourselves to their brand font “Degular” and used only one weight and scale for each layout to make the focus all about how the type is expressed.

That expressive type is then woven into the negative space of the composition through the “wavelength” asset, creating interesting and playful interactions with the imagery.

Within the first two months, 250,000 new users joined the platform, started listening and creating on the platform. Brand awareness and relevance increased 135% during the time our film and OOH campaign ran.