NanoHertz
A personal project focused on promising musical projects.
One of my favourite hobbies is finding hidden-gem songs and sharing them with my friends. However, I felt like sharing them with my social circle wasn’t enough. That’s when the idea of starting NanoHertz came out; a virtual space where I could freely talk about what I love and make it public on the internet.
Starting a blog can be challenging in the Tiktok age. Our average attention span has decreased significantly, and writing lengthy posts is against the current. That sums up our essential question: how might we design a blog for the 60-seconds-timespan generation?
The best way to start a project is by looking at what has been done to solve this problem — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Going through a brief competitive analysis of some popular music blogs in Brazil (and abroad), it was clear that most blogs were so ad-focused that the content would get lost in the middle of a call-to-action jungle.
To sum it all up:
It’s essential to have a solid visual identity to design a coherent online space. NanoHertz’s logo and elements were designed to be simple and resilient to change, as it’d have to adapt to different screen formats. The idea was based on sound waves, the most basic and raw form music can get.
Once I got some key concepts clear in my mind, I translated them into drawings. The low-fidelity prototypes are always rough but clear enough to get the overall feel of the idea. It made it easy and quick to test a few solutions for the same problem and see which would work best.
The next step was creating an interactive prototype on Figma and running a couple of tests to see beforehand whether the idea would work. Finally, the high-fidelity prototype was translated to HTML and CSS pages, keeping in mind that WordPress’ PHP scripts would power the content.
The website stayed live for about a year before I put this project on hold. However, during this short duration, the project fulfilled its initial goals and reached more readers than I imagined, going far beyond my social circle.
The blog has been no longer online since mid-2019. Going back to analogue was a great solution to keep a record of the posts that had already been published — keeping them as a memory for myself.
During this project, I got much more used to Figma’s workflow. It didn’t take long for it to become my favourite prototyping app.
Since I had to do everything myself, I also learned the basics of front-end development to make my prototypes come to life. I tackled a bit of back-end development (PHP) to create the custom dynamic pages on WordPress.
The responsive design lessons I had at University helped a lot when working on the prototypes. However, I only truly understood it when I had to build the blog from an HTML/CSS point of view.
At the final stage of the project, I noticed the lack of initial in-depth research. I believe my design choices would’ve been much faster (and assertive) if I had a clearer picture of my end-users. What do they like? What is their personality? What sort of content do they consume? Is it really relevant to them?
