Exploring the Design of Spotify 2019 Wrapped

The Spotify 2019 Wrapped is available both on the mobile app and the desktop filled with gorgeous animations and succinct data visualisation. In the mobile app, it offers an Instagram-Story like scrolling system whereas in the desktop, it is the traditional top-down scrolling.

Oh, the colours!

Traditional hues such as green, pink, yellow and red all carry certain emotions associated with them. Many people refer to this as Colour Psychology.

In my personal opinion, Colour Psychology is very derivative and contextual. Example, Red wishes to convey excitement, joy, and fun on a Coca-Cola can but on an ambulance, it conveys danger and emergency. I personally don’t think we can always give colour a standard and constant meaning.

Having said that, the widely believed Green equals Environment Friendly and such standard assumptions can’t be erased. BUT, fun fact: All these only apply to common hues.

Uncommon shades of the traditional colours are used to convey excess, fun, and frivolity. They carry no context except to steer someone’s attention towards the colour. The common usage of neon colours as road signs and vests for construction workers are some good examples.

In Spotify 2019 Wrapped’s colour palette, two colours — a green and a pink, take utmost prominence. These two uncommon colours almost look like neon shades. They also ensure that when you share something from the presentation(eg., on IG stories), or store it (eg., phone photo gallery), it’ll be a guaranteed attention-grabber.

Notice that the Spotify colours are somewhere nestled in between the commonly observed colours and the eye-disturbing neon colours. Just the right levels of uncommonness and sobriety.

Would you fancy a UI?

The UI of the entire presentation is stellar, fluid and minimal. By minimal, I mean to say each screen is carrying just the right amount of information. The fancy gimmicks are done just to the right levels leaving you with joy rather than confusion.

Having the perspective of the elements move along with my mouse is a pretty common occurrence throughout this year’s presentation but this particular screen is my favourite. Pairing the perspective change along with a file-cabinet like arrangement is just a fantastic idea!

The last screen on the Desktop enabling the user to share or change the image colours

The amount of data present as well as the placement is just so neat that your focus or attention isn’t all over the place.

Data Viz Wizardy

Saving the best for the last. I believe the task of presenting data in an effective manner with the right amount of information and content is a tough job. It requires skill, a thorough understanding of what is going to be presented and a tonne of creativity.

For example, this is a truly crazy way to present a bar graph. Bringing a 3d object into a 2d space while not confusing us with too many shadows is quite a hard task and they’ve done it pretty well.

Another favourite screen of mine is the presentation of the globe with the artists who I’ve listened to, and their respective countries. Usually geographical data is presented with a flatlay of the map and highlighted regions, but they’ve broken that in a beautiful way. I’d really urge you to check out this beautiful piece of work if possible.

Fun fact: the globe can be rotated by the clicking and scrolling on it!

Besides this, all the other screens carried some very interesting data points presented beautifully — things such as number of minutes listened to, my top songs, how much time I’ve spent listening to my most favourite artist alone. I’ve gathered some of them from my personal Spotify 2019 Wrapped below.