Wolfgang’s Vault
One design assignment became creative direction across a parent brand, four acquired music brands, a store of more than 10,000 products, and an award-winning app, in the App Store’s second year.
Industry
Music media and e-commerce
Partnership
Embedded creative engagement, 2008 to 2009
Relationship
Design and creative direction across brand, web, commerce, mobile, and campaigns
Status
Completed engagement. Shown here as designed and shipped, 2008 to 2009.
Scope
Brand integration, website design and development, e-commerce creative, mobile app UI, partner campaigns, apparel design, photography processing, sales and marketing support
The assignment was design. The work kept widening.
Keeks began working with Wolfgang’s Vault in 2008. The company was the digital home of one of the largest live concert recording archives in the world: audio, video, photography, poster art, and memorabilia from decades of music history. What started as design became creative direction across the parent brand, four acquired sub-brands, the store, partner campaigns, and the product work that followed. Hired for one thing, trusted with more.
Four acquired brands had to become one company.
Wolfgang’s Vault had grown by acquisition. Concert Vault streamed the recordings. Daytrotter recorded new sessions. Crawdaddy carried the editorial voice. Mojam listed the shows. Each arrived with its own identity, audience, and interface. We led the visual and strategic integration of all four into the Wolfgang’s Vault parent identity, so a listener could move from a 1971 Fillmore recording to a new Daytrotter session without leaving one coherent company.
The store ran on the same identity.
The commerce side of Wolfgang’s Vault spanned more than 10,000 products: vintage and retro apparel, fine art photography prints, poster art, and concert memorabilia. We carried the brand through the store’s design, merchandising creative, and the campaign banners that moved the catalog, from Led Zeppelin apparel to the Bill Graham archives.
Partner campaigns paid for the attention.
The audience Wolfgang’s Vault gathered became inventory for brand partners. We designed and pitched custom advertising campaigns for major partners, including Hollywood studios promoting film releases, Comcast, Microsoft’s Zune, Seagate, and Bacardi. Over a 14-month period, every RFP we answered converted. The work also left the screen: with the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Wolfgang’s Vault presented The Art of Change, a multimedia exhibit on rock music, art, and social change at San Francisco City Hall. We designed the commemorative poster for the exhibit, drawn from the art the archive holds.
Then the archive went in your pocket.
In 2009, the App Store was a year old and apps were still hard to make. We designed the UI for Concert Vault for iPhone, which put thousands of live recordings on a phone for free streaming. MacWorld UK named it Best iPhone App of 2009, in a finalist field that included Google Earth. Rolling Stone named it one of the best music apps. The interface had to make a fifty-year archive feel as simple as a playlist, on a platform nobody had design conventions for yet.
The oldest proof of the same pattern.
The Wolfgang’s Vault engagement ended in 2009, and the interfaces here look like the years they shipped in. That is the point. Design trends age. The pattern underneath this work has not: one assignment, then the brand, the store, the campaigns, and the product around it, carried by the same two people who still run every Keeks engagement today.
