Disco sucks (sometimes)

A lot of people looked at their phone screens last week and did a double-take at the half-inch square that used to contain Spotify’s logo. The simple green circle with three dark, radiating sound waves overlaid on top of it was replaced with a disco ball, or some interpretation of a Spotify-branded disco ball, which was only evident to me after looking at it for a while, tilting my head slightly, and squinting to make it all out. 

The reasoning behind the (temporary) move is to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and help unveil the customized playlists that were created and delivered to its users. It’s par for the course at this point for Spotify to repurpose its plethora of data collection and package them as distinct moments to be celebrated and shared, so we’re used to the fanfare. What we’re not used to is the sudden departure of our entryway. Imagine coming home and your front door was replaced with another door that was a different color and had a new door handle. 

I’m not here to tell you whether or not the icon is good or bad, (or that it’s kind of a ripoff of Big Thief’s latest album cover). It's a choice, like many other choices that brands need to make to show up in the world. But the composition of it was fundamentally flawed and objectively disorienting, especially in the way that it would be experienced by like 98% of people. 

Here’s the full-scale concept:

and here's how most people experienced it:

So two reasons why it technically doesn't work: 

1. It's too small to appreciate. 

It looked like my phone was stuck in the middle of an update, or that my screen inadvertently cracked without me knowing. A lot of people experienced this. Some people allegedly were prepared to end their subscriptions (although kinda funny if that's what really put you over the edge). In any case, people were confused, perplexed, and experiencing a new friction that was never even there in the first place. Certainly not where you wanna be as a brand. 

2. More intention was required. 

Designing for small-scale environments is its own craft, requiring a unique set of guardrails and principles. I often think about the five principles of flag design, which pertains well in this scenario. Keep it simple, no complicated imagery, keep colors limited – if this was a rubric, the disco ball icon wouldn't quite check those boxes. Any intricate detail immediately gets lost no matter how pristine or impressive the image is. Glance your eyes up and take a look at your browser tabs right now, the favicons (hopefully) all adhere to those flag design tenets. Small-scale design needs large amounts of intention.

But here's why it kinda does work: 

The concept of the campaign is a 20-year anniversary party. The UI in the app as you navigate through your playlist shows confetti, glitter, shiny mirrorball backgrounds. All makes sense, all demonstrates a comprehensive experience, and on the surface, the disco ball icon ladders up. I'll even make the charitable case that, hey, it really made you take a good hard look at the app, and that it's only temporary (so chill out, everyone!). 

However, the choice in this specific icon design signals one very important thing to me, something that has been unavoidable in the design world of late: the impetus to make the digital world more tangible. 

A lot has been written about this topic – the exhaustion of clean, flat, highly-digital aesthetics, the desire for more human brand experiences, the 'wabi-sabi' principle of celebrating imperfection. All of this is a real, shared sentiment we have to grab the wheel and steer away from all the permeations of the machines that make decisions for us these days. The full-sized rendering of the icon looks like a real, physical object, something that Spotify would ostensibly make for a company event, a real disco ball for a real party. 

This choice tells me that Spotify positions themselves as a bona fide industry leader in design, and that they are not willing to take any chances being written off as some tech company of yesteryear. Their brand aesthetic gets exponentially more maximalist each year, as colorful and loud and bewildering as a Bass Boosted playlist for your Friday evening. What is a disco ball if there isn't real, physical light bouncing off it, does it even exist? This campaign is declaring that they are simply more than an app on your phone. What I described above as "technically" not working is ultimately a sunk cost in relation to how Spotify wants to show up as a brand. Or hey, maybe we're too precious with app icons? Why not change them up once a month? Who really cares! 

Anyway, I assume it'll revert back to its original form in the next few days and everyone will most likely forget about all of this. But I anticipate more of these micro-disruptions to occur, where brands uncover more ingenuities in lots of different non-traditional formats, all for the goal of creating a distinct system of ideas, not just image assets.