Hi Reader,

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I decided to skip last week's Monday newsletter as I figured your inbox would be overflowing with promos and deals (and also, in full honesty, I didn't get myself organised in time to write it over the weekend). But here I am, back in your inbox, this week with a review of the design & strategy behind Spotify's annual end-of-year wrap-up campaign.

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Marketing design deep dive - Spotify Wrapped

I'm such a nerd that I literally said "OMG, yesss!" out loud when I checked Twitter on Wednesday and saw it was Spotify Wrapped day: the day every Spotify user gets a personalized report on their listening habits for the year. I swear, this feature/marketing campaign (because it's both!) is a big reason why I keep using Spotify despite having easy access to Apple Music through our family plan. It makes no sense, and is a terrible reason to use a product, but that is part of the genius of Spotify Wrapped.

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This year the team at Spotify embraced the ‘Stories’ format we’re oh-so-familiar with to present the data. Where usually the Wrapped report is a customized web page you scroll through, this format mixed video, audio (of course), still images and motion graphics to showcase your year in listening (though there’s a website for the main overview report on the world’s listening data).

Just as the three lines of a hamburger menu came to be recognisable as the place to click to get access to navigation, we as users have been trained to understand that those broken lines at the top of the screen represent slides in a ‘story’, and we instinctively know to click on the right to ‘fast forward’ to the next slide.

It was smart of Spotify to utilise this format, and I’d guess they chose it after looking at last years user data and noting that the majority of Spotify Wrapped views happen on mobile. In fact it seems you can only view your 2020 Wrapped on mobile, so perhaps this campaign is also aiming to get more people to install the app on their phone (there’s probably data to show that increases retention).

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Someone on the Spotify team had fun with the design language of 2020's Wrapped. While we're used to Spotify's dark black/gray interface with splashes of green, Wrapped stands out with an explosion of color. It's... a lot. The whole website is a lot. The colors clash, everything moves when you move your mouse, the rainbow gradient doesn't match with anything, and yet... it works. It's brutalist design, and it's fun to see brands explore outside of their usual design language for projects like this.

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Visual design aside, there are some smart UX features of Spotify Wrapped. It includes a quiz element that asks you to guess what your top artist or podcast was, and of course at the end of your 'story' there's a CTA for you to share your results where you get to choose the color your summary graphic appears in. I don't know about you but on Wednesday my timeline was full of people sharing their results.

As a data nerd, my one gripe with Wrapped is that it doesn't actually encompass the whole years worth of data. Come on Spotify, I still have the whole of December to listen to BLACKPINK on repeat and get them a spot on my top artists list! Still, it's clear this was yet another highly successful campaign for Spotify. It had interesting design, personalization & was highly shareable. I can only hope to achieve this level of success with a campaign I run for ConvertKit someday!

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Dribbble follow - Janna Hagan​

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I love seeing Janna's web & graphic design shots in my Dribbble feed. Not only does she she do beautiful marketing design work, but she presents it all in beautifully composed shots that definitely give me ideas for making my own Dribbble posts more engaging. Follow Janna to add some web & graphic design inspo to your Dribbble feed.

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How to have productive meetings - Design Life podcast

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In case you didn’t know, I’m the cohost of the show Design Life. It’s a podcast about design and side projects and we’ve had really great feedback on our recent episode about getting the most out of meeting times.

Meetings can be a huge time-suck and can detract from your ability to be productive. But they don’t have to be. In this episode we give tips for making the most out of meetings. Have a listen!

Listen to the episode

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