Table Of Content
Our design reference group could check on the site progress and leave feedback whenever they wanted. To share downloadable resources and create an open-source repository of design goodies that other organizations can dive into. The redesign was an opportunity to create a joyful pedestal on which to showcase our designers’ best work. And we wanted designers to have their say about what pedestal characteristics they desired most. Designing to bring our Desktop and Web listener experience to life. He's an Australian living in Stockholm and enjoys good food with good company.
Content provided by Spotify
Here are a few things we figured out and wanted to share with you—fellow design ops or design teams who are thinking of forming a design ops function. Note that we still have a long way to go to establish our practice, so I’m eager to meet my peers to exchange experiences and grow together. Reach out to me with your questions and comments through the link at the bottom of this article. When designing personalized experiences like these, we must think “content first,” knowing people come to Spotify for the content. Design ultimately makes it feel simple and human and creates experiences that users love.
Breaking Down Spotify’s Design Principles: Simplicity, Personalization, and Accessibility
Executive Producer and Head of Fiction at Spotify Mimi O’Donnel joined the Monkeypaw Productions creator in Spotify’s surround-sound screening room for a conversation on the new production’s unique space as a horror podcast. In conjunction with the LA school system, we hosted LA Beats, which brought approximately 250 students from 5th grade through 12th grade to the Spotify studios for a musical experience like no other. Then, the participants celebrated with a contest and artists including Lil Nas X. The kids had a great time. The project came at the tail end of a two-year growth period that saw global employee headcount grow by 52%, from 3,813 people to 5,779, with new office spaces being added in rapid succession. It was a pace that left little time to determine a unified workplace-experience strategy.
Attribute with the Spotify logo

The Spotify green logo should only be used on a black or white background, for any other background you should use a monochrome logo. Our logo is the combination of a simple, modern wordmark with the icon. When the user tries to perform a restricted action you may display this messaging. “People are really engaged with the fact that it’s not just a kind of quiet room or a space to work,” she says. Spotify fully opened its offices globally in May 2022, giving most of its employees a choice of hybrid, remote, or in-person working modes through its Work from Anywhere initiative.
Browsing Spotify content
As a refresher, last month, Apple was hit with a $2 billion fine in the EU for “abusive” App Store rules for music streaming services. Along with the fine, the European Commission also said Apple must relax its anti-steering rules. Keep up with the undrafted rookie free-agent signings with a team-by-team list of player acquisitions following the 2023 NFL Draft. Keep up with the undrafted rookie free-agent signings with a team-by-team list of player acquisitions following the 2024 NFL Draft. Dig into audience, playlist, and music data to help you reach your goals.
Tour Spotify’s New Office Space in Milan, Casa Spotify
Spotify’s Former VP of Design Dan Sormaz Joins Fubo - Variety
Spotify’s Former VP of Design Dan Sormaz Joins Fubo.
Posted: Thu, 06 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
We hope our focus on playfulness can be felt in the final site design. We lucked out with timing here, because our Figma Ways of Working were newly minted during the website building process. Figma was an invaluable tool for onboarding Stink Studios, and it meant we didn’t have to worry about versioning, special software, or the pain of sending large files back and forth. Using Figma’s prototyping abilities, we moved from wireframes to functional UI quickly. We found Stink Studio’s willingness to share our tools helped immensely with visibility.
Gerrit’s design systems thinking got out of hand when he started serving deconstructed Swedish meatballs laid out on a grid. Right now we have two local systems, but we don’t think this is the final set. With Encore, we can add extra local systems if needed—for example, in the future we may add local systems for stand-alone apps like Spotify Kids and Stations. The key is that they stay connected, and that they’re all available in the same place (the Encore website). The framework is new, but Encore actually reuses a lot of the great that went into our previous design systems.

‘I love when we get crazy’: Swifties revel in the ‘joy’ of Taylor Swift’s album release and their avid fan culture
Another strength of Spotify is its “Offline Mode” feature, which enables users to download songs, playlists, and podcasts to listen to offline. This feature is particularly useful for users with limited or unreliable internet access, such as when traveling or in areas with poor connectivity. Our design ops team supports hundreds of designers in five locations around the world. Not only are we separated by oceans, designers also often work solo in squads. We still believe design works best within cross-discipline teams to help infuse all parts of the Spotify business with user-centred thinking.
Our goal was to unify Spotify Design with the Spotify brand at large, while maintaining the avant-garde approach we loved in Albin’s early explorations. We were experimenting with a lesser used version of Spotify’s standard typeface, but we couldn’t make the brand feel sufficiently Spotify without our trusty Spotify Circular Book. Photography-wise, we wanted to do away with stoic, “I am a very serious designer” headshots. By combining color photography with bright backgrounds and the fun highlights, we were better able to capture who we are as humans. Looking back, the rollout should have had more swag, like posters, stickers, or other goodies. It takes time to internalize new ideas, and external reminders would have helped.
We could see that our designers craved a more flexible, playful system that would allow them to tell stories, explore big ideas, and energize our community. But we hope that “relevant, human, and unified” convey what we aspire to achieve in our products—and that these principles serve as constant reminders to do better. The team refreshed Spotify’s look and feel, standardized many of our components across mobile and desktop, and grew from a handful of people to 30+ full-time engineers and designers. On a platform where Spotify already exists.If you have built an integration on a platform where the Spotify client exists (mobile and desktop integrations), always link to the Spotify app. For full access to Spotify functionality, users should be directed to the Spotify application installed on the partner platform. If the app is not installed, the user should be directed to the app store so that they can install Spotify.
During Stream On, we’ll share new developments to help creators continue to chart pathways to success and build a truly global audience. There will be more follows of various speeds, and more new features. We’ve just brought a whole new crew of designers onto the Editorial Board, and part of their remit is to push Spotify.Design forward. Our dream is for Spotify.Design to be a wellspring of creative inspiration for the global design community. We hoped that refreshing the site with our playful new brand might take us some distance toward achieving our goal. Shahin is a senior art director on the Editorial Design team where he focuses on branding music and culture and is the link between Design Platform and Brand & Creative.
Of course designers need all the serious stuff (such as tools, design systems, and working printers) to operate effectively, but the human, joyful part is just as important. Having a supportive community, a design culture, and continuous inspiration from the world of design, art, and music is also vital to fuel their creative brains. There are several design systems inside Encore, each managed by a different team around the company. And while these teams maintain the different systems, anyone who builds products at Spotify can contribute. Encore is the family of design systems that has everything teams need to build beautiful, scalable Spotify apps.
But the defining feature is the abundance of artwork that visualizes the music and podcasts that make Spotify unique. To bring its vision to life, Spotify turned to Acrylicize, which had previously created standalone projects for Spotify’s London and Stockholm offices. To that end, the Acrylicize and Spotify teams looked for ways to involve employees in the design process at each stage, through video updates and Blank Canvas, a company-wide magazine distributed physically and virtually. Long before the offices reopened for hybrid and in-person work, workers received an introduction to their new space. Cli has supported designers and guided the creative process throughout her PM career where she picked up agile, lean, user-centred design and product thinking and now applies the tools to the world of design ops.
If you’re a designer, engineer, or writer at Spotify, you’d just pick the Encore design system that’s relevant to you, then dive into the shared resources. The different systems stay connected because they’re all built using design tokens, and they live on the same website, following a similar structure defined by the Encore framework. Before, we had 22 disconnected design systems; now, we still have multiple systems, but they’re all connected and under the same umbrella. Spotify really needed a useful, unified design system—but we knew that a centralized team like GLUE probably wouldn’t work. So, in 2018, we kicked off a new effort to create a design system for the company.
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