Returning to Music
I spent most of 2025 working with Presidio Bitcoin, but on the side I found myself coming back to music and listening on a more personal level. Working with my friend Emily gave me a chance to bring music back into my design practice, which I’d started to really miss.
Emily White and I met through college radio, and later became close while we were both working in music in New York. She has written about music and technology for places like NPR, Billboard and Spotify.
For the launch of her Substack, she kicked things off with an essay about the next generation of independent music curators. I worked with her to develop the artwork for her inaugural post. She wanted to reference her purple iPod Nano from high school, a time when music discovery felt more intimate and self-directed, and that became the anchor for the visual direction.
I wanted the art to feel human, layered and nostalgic, the way it felt to burn a CD in high school or listen to a legendary artist for the first time at 17. I looked to editorial artwork from the early days of Rookie Magazine for inspiration. Do I wish we’d had a little more time to nail down the concept and clean up the execution? Yes. Do I think the way it ended up perfectly embodies the spirit of her writing? Also yes!
A few months later, we collaborated again. For her piece on AI music, Emily was clear about showing a cracked phone over a music streaming service. I carried over the color scheme and similar textures from her launch post, however I wanted this one to feel a bit more buttoned up and less cute given the more serious subject matter.
The Response
I recently found out that one of the artists I love and admire most, Hayley Williams, commented that she “loved the one about the next generation of music tastemakers.” Doesn’t get much better than that!
The tastemaker artwork was also featured in Music Ally’s Sandbox publication, which was a very nice surprise.
