Creating a music discovery experience for emerging artists
Designed an immersive digital experience for Red Bull Music’s Noirwave initiative, blending editorial storytelling, artist culture, and interactive design into a visually rich platform that reflected the energy and atmosphere of the music scene. The experience balanced expressive art direction with usability, creating a destination that felt both experimental and accessible.
The Opportunity
Red Bull Music sought to create a digital experience that extended beyond traditional promotional content and instead felt deeply connected to underground music culture, artist identity, and visual storytelling. The challenge was to build an experience that captured the dark, cinematic atmosphere of the Noirwave brand while remaining performant, intuitive, and engaging across devices.
The platform needed to balance editorial storytelling, artist discovery, and immersive visual expression without sacrificing usability or accessibility.
My Role
As Design Director, I led the creative and experience design efforts for the project, guiding both the visual direction and interaction strategy from concept through execution.
I collaborated closely with creative teams, developers, strategists, and content stakeholders to define the overall experience framework, ensuring the platform maintained a cohesive identity while supporting evolving content and artist features. I also helped establish the motion, typography, layout, and visual systems that shaped the final experience.
Approach
The experience was intentionally designed to feel atmospheric and emotionally driven — drawing inspiration from nightlife culture, analog textures, editorial fashion layouts, underground music publications, and cinematic pacing.
Rather than relying on conventional content structures, the platform embraced layered imagery, bold typography, immersive transitions, and experimental composition techniques to create a sense of mood and movement throughout the experience.
Key areas of focus included:
Developing immersive storytelling patterns for music and artist content
Creating a visually expressive yet scalable design language
Balancing artistic experimentation with usability and navigation clarity
Ensuring strong responsiveness and performance across screen sizes
Using motion and interaction design to reinforce tone and atmosphere
The result was a digital experience that felt curated and intentional while still supporting discoverability and user engagement.
Outcome
The final platform successfully translated the Noirwave identity into an immersive digital experience that stood apart from traditional music marketing websites. By combining editorial storytelling with expressive interaction design, the experience strengthened audience engagement while reinforcing Red Bull Music’s reputation for innovative digital culture initiatives.
Week one saw 600,000 unique views with an average visit time of 15 minutes
Within one month, the music video had 1.8+ million views
The project demonstrated how branded digital experiences can move beyond utility alone and become emotionally resonant extensions of music, art, and culture.
