Designing a Spotify Original Podcast with Dissect

“I feel like we’re in such a unique position to really create evolution…Spotify can take it to the next level and incorporate a lot of creative things—it just seems to make way too much sense,” says Cole Cuchna, creator of Dissect, a Spotify Original podcast that spends a complete season breaking down the lyrics, which means, and music of a selected album.

Podcasting as we all know it at the moment actually took off within the early 2000s when transportable audio gamers adopted the MP3 format and had been capable of share these information for broader listening. Now, a long time later, podcasts are experiencing a growth in reputation. In this 12 months’s annual Infinite Dial research, 2020 podcast statistics boast file numbers: 75% of the U.S. inhabitants is conversant in the time period “podcasting.” Since 2017, month-to-month podcast listeners have grown 54%. And for the primary time ever, greater than 100 million Americans hearken to no less than one podcast a month.

To sustain with that development, extra individuals than ever are creating podcasts. But with such a excessive quantity of podcasts being launched daily, it may be straightforward to neglect how a lot work goes into designing a podcast expertise from begin to end. For Cole, a giant a part of producing Dissect is the preliminary background work: He’ll spend months digging by means of album after album to seek out the appropriate file to research earlier than he begins diving into analysis round its making. (The podcast has beforehand lined Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange and Blonde, and Beyonce’s Lemonade.)

“Choosing the artist/album is the most important part, obviously, since that’s what I’ll be dedicating the whole season to. Personally, it’s like 6 months out of my life,” Cole says. “I take my own personal interest in the music, incorporate what people are asking for, and then try to find that balance. It’s been strategic in terms of finding albums that have enough thematic, interesting, and important things to say, but then also exist in the popular realm of some sort.”

After deciding on an album, Cole approaches his analysis very similar to he did when he studied music composition in school: He’ll research the artist, undergo artist interviews concerning the work, and collect context across the album’s content material and setting. Now, after becoming a member of Spotify in 2017, Cole nonetheless scripts the line-by-line evaluation of the album himself—it’s certainly one of his favourite elements of manufacturing Dissect—however he’ll usher in a bigger workforce for different elements of the method, like analysis and visible branding.

Creating the visible id of a Spotify Original podcast is strictly what the Studios Design workforce makes a speciality of. The workforce is co-led by Sarah Gainer and Jessie Harte and accomplished by designers Haelee You, Elise Harven, and Talia Rochmann. (Jessie, Elise, and Talia had been initially a part of the Gimlet design workforce earlier than becoming a member of Spotify in 2019. Sarah and Jessie are actually working to streamline processes throughout studios now that the groups have merged into one.)

“For podcast show art, the most important thing is being legible at small scale, connection to the content—is it provocative?—and some thumb-stopping quality because on [a mobile] platform, which is how the art is going to be seen most of the time, it’s so small that one just needs to be able to scroll, stop, and decide that the content is interesting,” Talia says.

“We have conversations about this all the time though,” Elise provides. “If actually picking a podcast is the same as picking up a bottle of wine in the store, where you pick it [based] on the label.”

Despite the concentrate on the present’s thumbnail, also referred to as “the square,” creating present artwork is a complete design course of: Designers obtain a short, go right into a undertaking kickoff, brainstorming and exploration, and a number of iterations in a particular path. Jessie Harte describes the preliminary work her workforce dives into earlier than beginning any type of design.

“We do a lot of writing—which is probably unexpected for what we do, but it really helps us ground everything conceptually,” Jessie explains. “We [also] come up with mood boards, which are really our bread and butter. They help us figure out where the show belongs in terms of category before we’ve taken the time to really do a full-blown articulation of the concept. It’s a process that really works for us.”

But with podcasting’s current rise in reputation, exhibits now have extra advertising and marketing assist—permitting designers like Haelee, Talia, and Elise to be extra experimental and suppose past simply the thumbnail when telling a cohesive podcast story. Designers aren’t simply making squares; they’re creating property for a number of social platforms, rollout plans, and experimenting with extra immersive methods to current podcasts on Spotify (just like the newly-launched video podcasts).

Visual cues play a core half in Dissect’s rollout plan for example, as Cole will drop small hints on social media main as much as every season’s launch. To introduce Season 6, which analyzed Beyonce’s visible album Lemonade, the workforce posted close-ups of Beyonce’s well-known yellow costume from her “Hold Up” video. The yellow costume was a key symbolic determine within the album and Cole’s evaluation—so it solely is smart that the design workforce would convey it to life as the first artwork for the season.

Focusing on one symbolic determine is a standard theme in Dissect’s cowl artwork—and that’s intentional. It was a call the workforce made in Season 4, which mentioned Tyler, the Creator’s Flower Boy. Haelee explains that they “wanted to give Dissect a system that was consistent throughout the seasons, and having an enlarged single subject matter works both conceptually and technically. If we’re using different illustrations every season, this concept seemed like the thread that would tie everything together.”

Accurately representing the album’s message, really feel, and id are on the core of Dissect’s present artwork. But Cole additionally leans into his personal aesthetic and value rules from his background as an internet designer: “I definitely lean towards minimalism, simplicity. I love black and white—those are my favorite colors—eastern art, zen art. If you look at the first Dissect logo in Season 1, it was just the white logo on a plain black background. We’ve stayed true to that but also tried to make each one unique,” he shares. “We’ve changed the artwork each season to…[make it] easy to tell where seasons start and end by just the color of the icon. That’s more functional, but also a strategy in the design itself.”

Sarah, who’s labored with Haelee on present artwork for the final 5 seasons, dives into how they’ve developed the podcast’s visible id through the years: “While Dissect already had a logo [when it joined Spotify in 2016], we started to expand the visual identity to speak to each season individually. This began with revisions to the logo type treatment and with simple color palette differentiation that reflected colors shown or discussed in each season’s album: For Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, we chose red and yellow, which mimicked the cover of Kanye’s actual album. Our choice of yellow and white for Season 3 was chosen as a play on Frank Ocean’s album title, Blonde.”

Today, technological growth and rising demand for podcasts are creating quite a few alternatives for designers to take the podcast expertise even additional. From animated present artwork to immersive podcast movies, there are countless potentialities to experiment and outline what the way forward for podcasting actually may be.

“Originally podcasts didn’t have a lot of marketing support behind them—now we’re all trying to figure out what best practices are for marketing podcasts,” Elise says. “You’re not just hearing about it for the first time on the platform. You’re seeing campaigns. You’re hearing it in other places. You’re seeing it on social [media]. It’s a really interesting time to be working in podcasts because there’s so much change happening.”

Check out Season 7 of Dissect, which dives into Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet, or flick through previous seasons right here. Follow Dissect on Instagram to listen to about new releases and extra.