I like music as much as the next person. But I didn’t like
how complicated most music apps were. I wanted something
that
just played music. I wanted it so bad, I decided to
make it myself.
After roughly three months of designing, building and
documenting the process, It Plays Music launched and is available in the
App Store.
The entire ethos of this app is to focus on the
music. So the aesthetic is kept
restrained—using only 4 colors, 6 font sizes
and 3 font weights.
That restrained aesthetic ensures the interface
remains clear while not visually clashing with album
art.
The library is intended to harken back to a music
store (remember those?) where people navigated
through music by album covers. The idea was to
maximize the display of covers and remove
everything unessential. Album art
encompasses 80% of the library’s screen space.
I initially hoped to omit any sorting or
searching in the app, but it quickly became clear
they would be needed. I chose to hide them by
default but make them quickly available by swiping
up. This was my best solution towards balancing
simplicity and availability of core features.
The album layout is kept extremely minimal with a
single alignment anchor to maintain visual order.
Only the bare essential metadata was added.
The album view prominently displays album art, which
has the unfortunate side-effect of pushing down
album tracks. The app has a hidden feature to toggle
between full/srimmed view of album art via
long-press. This allows people to choose how they
want to engage with albums—and persisting
across sessions.
To help draw focus to album tracks upon scroll, the
album art is blurred and scaled to help it further
recede into the background.
The mini player is the heart of the app. The goal
was to have a persistent affordance for playback
control that provided access to all critical
functions. This meant a slightly larger mini player
than other apps, but with the benefit of not having
to navigate to specific areas to seek or move
back/forth through tracks.
Instead of showing incredible small timestamps at
all times, I chose to show incredibly large
timestamps only while seeking.
After three months of work, It Plays Music made it to the
App Store. I aimed to create a mobile app that simply focused on
playing music—and that was accomplished. While far
from perfect, it’s my personal music player of choice.
