Introducing the Idea

When I started to think about the Life's a Pitch brief I considered how I could produce a more specified response/in sync with my interests that would be appropriate for a collective of creatives to focus on, appealing to a specific market. 

When approached by Dylan to produce a collective response related to the music industries I immediately realised and thought back to my PPP for last year - DesignersWhoDj - a collective concept I developed to create this link between various creatives across industries in order to celebrate and feature both design and music!

I didn't get the chance to push the idea last year so it was purely conceptual with the finished visual identity and social media pages..

 

I suggested this concept to our group - me, Tom, Dylan and Irfan (all have ties to DJing and design for music events/labels), and they loved the idea of building on this to actually create this platform, and build it into a site/app which helps match designers/musicians with eachother to provide freelancing opportunities. 

Wanted to develop that idea of a platform for designers and musicians to come together and easily communicate and advertise themselves as an online account, then enabling opportunities such as freelance design work for album arts and web-design, etc.

- Did not want to just limit it to just dance music

Idea Development 

We initially started to think about how other social media platforms approach their layouts and set up to be most effective...

- People follow/favourite your profile - you display/embed either your design portfolio or your music(singles, albums, etc embedded in off soundcloud perhaps)

- You have an image/sound based feed (2 separate feeds?) showing recent/featured works of who you follow - design or music. Can see what they're getting involved with - commenting on, favouriting, & rating.

- There is a rating system - similar to that of eBay or Uber were members can leave feedback/reviews on eachother about the projects they have collaborated on together. So your experience/references are clear to users who visit your page 

- Display the portfolios like Behance? like Soundcloud?

- Intro page like Match.com - different routes to set up your account and specify yourself/what you're looking for for suggestions/similar accounts

Outcomes 

- Page/group on Facebook

- An actual dedicated Website / social media platform

- Corresponding App version

- A monthly reflecting zine

- Opener Events

Names/Logo?

Developing the logo from my PPP, we chose to 

- keep the grid style 

- restrict to a contrasting black and white colour scheme initially

- use the waveform symbol (simply done by recording the audio when the name is spoken, then vectorising the waveforms)

- update the text to a more bold appropriate style

- Then could start to consider how we can adapt the name to be appropriate for not just djs but all musicians: DesignersWhoDj. (DWD), Designers4DJs (D4D), DBDMBN (Designers by day, Musicians by night), mix.com, Genre 

- like the concept of creating a snappy acronym to represent us?

Costings?

- We considered how the service would be purely digital, this cuts any unnecessary costs initially, but a bi-monthly zine response could be a nice touch to send out to valued members (with good ratings on-site?)

- The service would be funded through the related advertisements we would have to feature on our page/app - would ensure the algorithms were strict to design and music related ads to give back to the industry we are representing

- This is because we would want it to be a free service to use like Behance/Soundcloud (although to consider - Soundcloud have a free limited account, then charge monthly to upgrade that account for more capacity space for uploads, etc) - could generate more success? (have to have ambitions!)