Timeline: 4 weeks

Roles: Branding Designer, Product Designer

The Inspiration

Fig. 1: screencaps from the 8Tracks interface, circa 2018.

8Tracks was a playlist-sharing service where users shared themed playlists with unskippable songs based on genres, vibes, or, more commonly as the user base expanded, fandoms.


I loved 8Tracks. As a music-loving teenager in the early 2010s, 8Tracks broadened my music tastes in the absence of an institution like a local record shop, and as I developed my illustration skills through interfacing with fandom, I found myself being drawn by those communities to the service over and over again.


Through my experience and knowledge of online fandom culture and my love of music, I wanted to develop a web player that would carry that tradition while also allowing for more multimedia capabilities to reflect current trends in fan work creation, which resulted in Weave: a music player for themed and narrative playlists with timed visual components like art or writing  to create shareable audio-visual experiences.

Validating the Concept

Fig. 2: An example of a web-weaving work on Tumblr.

While the experience justifying the concept is largely anecdotal, it is created from an understanding of fan work traditions that span at least twenty years. Everything from aesthetic boards, to alternate music videos, to themed playlists, points to a larger trend of using new media to communicate admiration for works with fan followings.

The name Weave itself comes from a tradition started on Tumblr in the 2010s called Web-Weaving: a derivative practice in which a creator takes samples of work like illustrations and poetry to ‘weave’ a concept together, often in an analytic or metatextual manner.

Takeaways

Weave was, above anything else, an exercise in unapologetically wearing my passions on my sleeve and incorporating them into my design practice. Weave is a niche product: while it has many broad applications, its primary target is a very small community of online creators. However, while the community of fan creatives is small, they are also loud and dedicated. Weave is, thus, an assertion that a product can start from a niche purpose and expand on itself later.

I love fandom culture, warts and all: fandom was where I first honed my skills as a writer and artist, and set me up for the creative career I would later develop. I conceptualized this product because I see fandom culture not as a barely-exploited target market needing an insider to correctly cater to it; I see it as a thriving creative culture that is constantly transforming itself in new and imaginative ways to celebrate the works that fans build themselves around. Weave is indulgent, but it’s indulgent for the sake of other creatives.