Personal product design project
DROHNE
DROHNE grew out of something I struggled with while learning music, understanding modes and harmony beyond memorised fretboard shapes. I designed an interactive music tool to explore those ideas through sound, and the underlying key and how the notes you play harmonise relative to it.
Over two rainy weekends, I developed its interface and visual direction in Figma, then used Claude and Replit to help build it. Vintage music hardware, pixel displays and an alien(!!) were used to make the interface feel familiar but new.
- Time
- 2 rainy weekends
- Role
- Everything
- Team size
- 1 absolute shred head
The Interface
UX/UI
Inspired heavily by ‘groove boxes’ of the 80s and 90s. I wanted the tool to have a nostalgic and brutalist look about it.
The controls needed to be simple and intuitive with the understanding that if someone has reached this part of theory in their musical journey, that they would have seen similar interfaces and words before.
The interface was designed by me in Figma, and then built with Claude/Replit
Character Design - ChatGPT
Dr.One, the all hearing deity of harmony.
A droning note is such a strange thing to hear. For me it’s always been strangely spiritual sounding, its lack of complexity or chordal changes can take the brain to some strange places as you subconsciously drown it out in the search for new and novel sounds.
I wanted to have a character on the site, just to give it some personality.
I tried to create something that was ugly, pretty, creepy and kind looking all at once. Knowing I planned on bitmapping the final image to adhere to the brutalist/ASCII theme - I chose to make the character from materials that were high contrast, shiny, but also somewhat organic looking.
The creature was created in ChatGPT, with the change of expression (on state) edited with nanobanana. The final bitmapping and grading was done in Photoshop.
Art style inspiration
mood boarding
ASCII art, 8 bit mono and brutalism were my main inspiration for the style of this piece. Pulling heavily from vintage music hardware and early computers/DOS.
ROLAND 808
The most famous drum sequencer ever
The use of dark colours, sliders and knobs accompanied with bright contrasting labels was massively inspiring for the colour scheme.
90s multi-fx screens.
Charming Pixel-art
My beloved ZOOM multifx pedal I’ve had since I was 18 years old has a UI that to this day outperforms any of my new-age LCD screen devices. Something about sending a message or information with such a limited grid has always stood out as being very cool to me.
Probably paddle boarding or rocking out somewhere in Brisbane, Australia.
Let’s work together to make something nice.