Beyond Oblivion Music Service
Beyond Oblivion
The revolutionary music startup that almost was
April 2021-May 2022
You may not have heard of it, but in 2010 Beyond Oblivion was primed to be a real contender to the music service title. With over 600M in capital and Rupert Murdoch on its board, the CEO was orchestrating many moving pieces to create a music ecosystem intended to launch with a large splash. The vision was broad and compelling – this music system worked on most of your devices, it would work with the music you already owned (through musical thumbprint technology), and it would be an amazing user experience. To our CEO, the design and UX was very, very important.
I was brought on as Beyond Oblivion’s very first experience design hire. I established the design team and collaborated with world-class agencies. It was a wild ride.
Role
Director of Design
Team
Visual Designer
Interaction designer x2
Daedalus
frog design
The first round of design work came from an agency that I collaborated with.
Unfortunately this visual was beyond the capability of Android at the time. The desktop player also did not test as well as we had hoped.
The wood-sided visual style did not fully address the CEO’s darker, dystopian vision. With a growing internal team, we looked at alternate ways to incorporate this visual direction. At the same time we expanded our platform to address TV interfaces.
Close to launch we rebranded as boinc. Our new style was open, friendly and modern.
Our internal team worked with key brand partners to get our MVP skinned and ready
With the help of frog design we reworked the interface to realize the North Star vision of a socially-driven music service.
