Above shows the original Chic-Teak mood board

Air Vinyl is a best selling IOS app and part of a suite I am currently designing for the Air Entertainment Group (AEG). Running on both iPad and iPhone, it simulates the sound and experience of playing vinyl using your MP3 collection.Strategically developed apps, employing user-centered design principles that deliver experiences and services complimentary to a brand’s core values and personality, are rapidly becoming one of the most effective ways of engaging audiences in a world where traditional marketing is fast becoming obsolete.

Apps have the ability to facilitate bothdirect and regular engagement that generates brand awareness, recognition and, if positioned properly, revenue. Done well they can also emulate society’s continuing desire for tailor-made products for which we all happily pay a (small) fee.

If we can design services and experiences that are either fun or useful (and ideallyboth), we facilitate and nurture direct and meaningful relationships that are built on trust rather than hype.

What follows is a brief case study of Air Vinyl, an app I recently designed that aims to just this.

What is it?

Air Vinyl is a bestselling iOS app and part of a suite I am currently designing for the Air Entertainment Group [AEG]. Running on both iPad and iPhone it recreates the sound and experience of playing vinyl through your MP3 collection.

About Air

AEG is a group of companies comprising world renown recording studios; Air and Strongroom, mastering and post-production facilities as well as a club, bar and restaurant.

Air studios was founded by Sir George Martin in 1969 and merged with Strongroom in 2006 by MD Richard Boote. Together they boast a plethora of top selling artistsas clients including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Professor Green and Coldplay.

AEG's Marketing Director Dan Kellard states the company's plans for growth are, "To develop our Air & Strongroom businesses into consumer facing brands via content creation and IP ownership." Apps offer a great way of achieving this as they provide: "…a perfect way of showcasing our creative and technical abilities, whilst creating brand fans in line with our vision."

Idea generation

A series of workshops with key stakeholders helped ascertain what kind of apps AEG could and should be producing as well as generating ideas for products. Three simple criteria helped us decide which of the many ideas were best. We decided that all the apps must:

1. Share an affinity with AEG’s brands, services and history.
2. Quickly become self-funding and ultimately profitable.
3. Be fun and/or useful

Air Vinyl was chosen as our flagship product as it epitomised the Air brand and history whilst promoting the current revival of vinyl, championed at special evenings hosted at Lyndhurst Hall, the historic North London location of Air studios.

Design

I set about designing how the product should look and work using mood boards, sketches and a fully mocked-up concept to present back to AEG’s board.

User experience

We wanted our user experience to mimic the real experience of playing vinyl and tape in order to create an authentic feel, whilst keeping the UI as intuitive as possible. However this was not always possible and whenever a compromise had to be made we opted for simplicity over replication.

Early sketched overview of user journey and basic functionality

Art direction

After trying out a few different styles, I decided that 1970’s chic was the direction we should launch with. To me, this is the heyday of vinyl, long before CDs were even a twinkle in Sony’s eye. It also beautifully frames the functionality of the product, evoking both emotion and aesthetic desire.

Looking for an ultra-realistic look, we turned to Studio 3D to render the final design. This gave us a finish that was beyond the capability of Photoshop alone. Although it required many hours of retouching to complete, the final spectacle made it worth the effort.

As excellent as the 3D proved, it did present us with a dilemma. The amount of shadows and reflection overburdened the OS and had a detrimental effect on performance. We worked around this by sacrificing some of the finer detail and used animation instead to add some extra sparkle.

Air Vinyl record deck

Performance restricted our choice of fonts. We had originally chosen several carefully suited to the app’s style, but with memory running short we had to replace these with ones that would run as iOS system fonts. Finally we found two that fitted the bill perfectly: TeX Gyre Adventor, used for interface and model copy, and Permanent Marker, used for the cassette box labels.

Early version of Air Vinyl tape deck and cassette selector

Launch

Released initially for Christmas 2011, both the iPad and iPhone versions have topped the bestseller lists on iTunes and charted at No1 within the Music category. Our next step is to produce a series of new skins and modules to complement the original, as well as extending the social capabilities via Facebook.

Through focusing on the core values of Air’s brand and understanding how apps work best, we have developed a commercially sustainable product that is in effect a new brand in its own right. This product has been extremely well received and has created a strong emotional response and following from audiences. Air Vinyl is the first of many such products planned by AEG and has proved to them that taking a strategic and guided approach can generate exposure, recognition and income.