Amazon Music playlist art
Flagship playlists
The flagship playlists on Amazon Music are high-profile and highly promoted—therefore their artwork was required to reach a particularly high beauty bar. I created the original art direction and design of several of these playlists by developing color palettes, type treatments, illustrative elements, and photo treatments based on audience research by our Label Relations team. These 3 are a few of my favorites:
Indigenous Canada: Music from indigenous peoples of Canada
Fuego Latino: Latin music's global pop hits
New North: Hip-hop from Canadian artists
MY ROLE
Lead designer and illustrator, Art direction, Logo design
RESULTS
The unique and precise style of the artwork spoke directly and authentically to the fans and artists of the genre—in fact, the playlist art was shared on social media by high-profile artists, such as Shakira and J Balvin, to millions of fans. The art also translated to a variety of placements and channels, including the Amazon.com hero banner, social media, customer emails, onsite graphics, and more.
CREATIVE DIRECTION
With the launch of each new marquee playlist, a music curator on the Programming team would reach out to the design team to kick off creating the artwork for it. They would be our main business partner for the project and would approve the final design as well.
Since the music curators were deeply knowledgable about a genre’s culture and audience, as a designer I relied on their expertise to gather inspiration that would help define the general creative direction. They would point me to sources such as certain album covers, concert posters, fashion, and other imagery that could be relevant or inspirational as a design direction. Then, I would create mood boards based on select images.
This is the mood board I developed for Fuego Latino, which includes Latin album covers, street art, and artist photos.
STYLE GUIDE
From this mood board I defined the creative direction as being bold, sleek, vibrant, and fashionable. I drew from the vivid colors, geometric patterns, and angular shapes to reflect this design direction in the playlist art in a simplified but effective way.
GRAPHIC IMPLEMENTATION
The playlist art needed to be flexible and able to translate to many different channels and allow for various artist photos. I created templates for these placements so that the artist photo could easily be updated as needed to refresh the artwork.
Hits playlists
The popular “Hits” playlists series on Amazon Music allows listeners to find new music under their favorite genres. I developed a scalable template that used pattern, illustration, color, and type treatment.
MY ROLE
Lead designer and illustrator, Art direction
RESULTS
The artwork created a consistent look to the series while having a unique feel for each genre. The template also allowed easy production for the many genre assets needed.