Melody Jams
Melody Jams is an educational music app I created and launched in 2016.
It’s currently a side project that I run with my friends at Arbitrary in San Francisco with the help of some very talented musicians. It's a project that means a lot to me and one I hope to grow over the years. Animating silly characters rocking out to introduce kids to music. What's better than that! Music by Nathan W. Mckee & Hani Zahra.
4 unique jams with over 60 custom character Loops
As the sole designer/animator on this project, I spent a lot of time with these characters. So far I've animated dozens and dozens of loops for the apps averaging around 450 seconds of animation.
The Melody Jams Family
It was a great experience designing the Melody Jams characters and getting to bring them to life. Through the process I tried to give each character it’s own personality to make getting to know the group as engaging as possible. The animated characters are linked to their own original melodies, hopefully keeping kids engaged visually while recreating the intimacy of creating music with friends.
FeatureS And Awards
Melody Jams has been featured multiple times on the app store and even won some awards. Receiving this kind of exposure has been an amazing surreal experience. Above is a feature from September 2016. A big part of Melody Jams is that you get to join in and jam along. We believe that exposing young kids to creative improvisation early on can be extremely beneficial.
Expanding the universe
After launch, we followed up with multiple unique jams. Each with an original theme offering new art, music, and interactive instruments. The team created 3 unique jams for the Melody Jams app.
Ui And Layouts
I took on a lot of roles in this project that were very new to me, especially since I was working in an area I knew very little about. Being the designer on the project was definitely out of my comfort zone. I had to become more decisive as we had to move quickly with limited time and funds. Although it was a self-started personal project, I eventually had a lot of my friends involved, and I didn’t want to let them down.
Luckily, it takes a very long time to build an app so I was able to keep reworking my designs as I grew and gained confidence.
I also had to continue to wrap my head around all the proper ways to create assets for devices. Everything shows up differently on each device, so there’s a lot of trial and error to get it perfect across the board. Learning to deal with all the different sizes involved with iPhones and iPhones is a really complicated thing, but it’s important to have a good grasp of it all to become an effective designer in the interactive space. For example, I had to start seeing my designs like this.
FOLLOWING UP WITH MORE JAMS
After our success with Melody Jams we launched a themed version. By leveraging the existing frameworks, we went through the whole process in 4 weeks.
App Icon Design
If this seems like something you’d like to toy with yourself, please check us out at the app store. Below are our app store app icons that I designed for each app.