Spotify: My Black Experience

Blackness isn’t one story,
and neither is Black music.
I built a campaign big enough to hold all of it.

My Role
Art director and concept developer

Team
Solo

Credits
Concept, art direction and design: Destiny Washington
Brief: Spotify Pulse Fellowship, 2023

Client
Spotify PULSE Fellowship application

Dates
Spring 2023

Type of Project
Fellowship application brief. Not commissioned work.

The brief

Create a black history month campaign for Spotify that can be implemented across advertising platforms.
Developed the concept, identity, style guide and storyboard, with examples for digital and out-of-home.
+72% follower growth, 4.6% engagement and 10.9% virality over the engagement.

“Infinite music.
infinitely black.”

Challenge

The Spotify Pulse Fellowship is a yearlong creative development program for Black professionals in advertising, and its application asks for a creative response to a challenge. The challenge, paraphrased: create an ad campaign that can be implemented. My answer was My Black Experience, a campaign for a playlist of Black music.

Insight

Blackness is diverse, and so is Black music. No single image can hold the Black experience, so the campaign had to celebrate every version of it, from the Black punk rocker to the Black lo-fi enthusiast to the Black hippie.

Idea & System

I built a dreamy, surreal and hyperrealistic visual identity with an organic palette taken from skin tones and natural landscapes, and authentic storytelling at the center. The brief asked for a campaign that could be implemented, so I built it to production: a moodboard, brand identity, campaign style guide and a seven-frame storyboard, ready to hand to a team. The examples pair artists like Donna Summer, Beyoncé, Sylvester and Sun Ra with statements about Blackness, across a phone experience, motion, a mural and a poster.