Details
BeatsFest
BeatsFest is a subscription music streaming service positioned for a Gen Z and millennial audience — founded by engineers, built on personalization and algorithmic discovery. I led the full visual identity: logo and logo system, type, color, imagery direction, tagline, and brand guidelines.
Services
Brand strategy
Logo design
Brand assets
Brand guidelines
Year
2025
ROLE
Brand Strategist, Designer - Self-Initiated
The Real Problem
The Real Problem
Streaming is one of the most visually homogenous spaces in tech — every player looks like the same gradient with a different accent color. The question I wanted to answer was simple: how do you walk into a category dominated by Apple and Spotify and look like you actually belong there, without looking like either of them?
The Challenge
The Challenge
Streaming brands have a default aesthetic. Dark UI, neon gradient, sans-serif wordmark, vaguely futuristic. It's a visual language built to feel like software — weightless, algorithmic, frictionless. Which is fine, except it's also why no one can tell any of these brands apart. The real challenge wasn't designing a streaming brand. It was designing one that didn't disappear into the category the second it launched.
The Approach
I started from a simple observation: every streaming brand has chosen futurism as its only mode. Sleek, weightless, algorithmic, frictionless. Nobody in the category is talking to the part of the listener who still likes the artifact — the sleeve, the object you hold before you press play. That gap was the position. BeatsFest could be the streaming service that didn't pretend the past didn't happen. Analog reverence with a futurist interface, tech-forward with a memory. The identity had to feel modern enough to belong on a phone in 2024 and substantial enough to carry the weight of a format that predates the phone by seventy years.
What Didn't Work
The first explorations leaned hard on what already worked in the category — Apple Music–style gradients, Spotify-coded imagery. It looked competent. It also looked like nothing. If the goal was differentiation, leaning on the leaders was the exact wrong instinct, and the work only started to come alive once I forced myself to stop borrowing from them. I also killed an early direction that pushed too far into festival energy — louder color, more youth-coded, more concert poster than streaming brand. It hit "youthful" but it lost "professional".
The Solution
The mark is a vinyl record. The most analog object in the history of recorded music, drawn with a gradient that gives it dimension and motion, like it's spinning. Old form, new finish. Past and future in one read. The logotype is set in LT Wave Black — heavy, modern, with just enough character in the curves to echo the circular geometry of the mark. Supporting type is DM Sans: clean, contemporary. The pairing was deliberate. A heavier display face alone would have tipped the brand toward editorial; a lighter face alone would have tipped it toward generic SaaS. Color and imagery extend the same logic — gradients that feel dimensional rather than flat. The whole system resolves into a single tagline: Streaming remembers. Two words doing the work the category forgot was possible. It names what streaming lost. It personifies the product, picks a fight with the category, and never raises its voice doing it. The full system was packaged into a brand guidelines document so the founders could extend it across channels.
The Result
BeatsFest walked out of the project with an identity that did the one thing the category makes hardest: it looked like itself. Not like Spotify, not like Apple Music, not like a student's first attempt at either. It carries the argument that music has a body, that streaming forgot, and that BeatsFest is the one bringing it back. And when copy was needed, two words covered it. The bigger lesson sat underneath the work. In a category where the obvious move is to mimic the leaders and hope for a slightly better gradient, the only real differentiation comes from having a position the leaders can't take. Apple and Spotify can't suddenly become analog. BeatsFest could.
