Overview
Propellerhead Software, now Reason Studios, made Reason, music software used by everyone from bedroom producers to Grammy winners. It was my first professional job, and it shaped everything after. At 22 I designed interfaces for hundreds of thousands of musicians who cared about every pixel. They were passionate, opinionated and technical, the best audience I could have learned from.
My Role
Scope
Process
As interface designer I turned complex audio concepts into clear interfaces, and designed UI elements, product pages and the company website.
Decisions
Work next to the people who make the sound
I worked every day with the engineers and sound designers who had built the tools.
Design for users who notice everything
A user base that noticed everything checked every decision. That is where I learned that craft is the baseline.
Outcome
The website I helped build served the Reason community, hundreds of thousands of musicians around the world. The job also gave me the principles I still work by: care about the details, respect the users and make the interface disappear.
A tribute
Music has been a burning interest for as long as I can remember, and it still is. I had a Roland 303 as a kid and made music until the gear got too expensive. Reason was more or less my first real job as a designer, and I am still as proud of it.
So the last part is a tribute, not my design: the bass line Propellerhead first put in software, as ReBirth in 1997, built in code and mounted in the Reason 14 rack. It works like the original. Press Run/Stop for one of eight lines and turn the knobs, or write your own: Pitch takes the notes, Time takes the rhythm, and each note lands where the rhythm puts it. That quirk is half of acid. Your keyboard plays it too, from A to K.
- Forward
- Reverse
- Fwd&Rev
- Invert
- Random
Only works on desktop and tablet
Tools for experts
Powerful software should reward expertise.
I make deep creative tools easier to understand without taking away the control professionals depend on.