Bandcamp

From 2017 to 2023, I worked at Bandcamp, an online marketplace for people who love independent music to equitably support the artists who make it. During my six and a half years there, I worked as Director of Design for Artists and Labels, Interim Head of Design, and Senior Designer. At Bandcamp, I found my voice as a confident, caring, effective leader and learned to bring my whole self to my work.

2021 - 2023
In my capacity as Director of Design for Artists and Labels, I defined and executed on strategic business priorities, collaborated with stakeholders across the company to create and drive roadmaps, coordinated cross-company product and platform efforts, and remained a key part of the design team. As Bandcamp became part of Epic Games, I undertook all regulatory and compliance efforts, removing millions of dollars of potential liability and, frankly, shielding the rest of the design team from incredibly tedious (but important!) work. I built out the Accessibility, Design System, and Brand Guidelines working groups, attending regular meetings and contributing to the mission and activity of each group.

2020 - 2021
I took up the role of Interim Head of Design overnight, in the midst of the pandemic. During my time in this role, I grew and led a thriving design organization, stepped into company leadership, and led a top-priority feature team. I managed a growing design organization, identifying team needs and making several hires. I familiarized myself with each designer’s working style, strengths, and opportunity areas, providing mentorship and support for individual growth. I ramped up quickly on each designer’s product area and features, gaining enough domain expertise to give regular, actionable, meaningful feedback.

I provided sensitive, empathetic leadership to my team both individually and as a whole, managing the ebb and flow of expectations and capacity during a supremely difficult time. I worked to receive, synthesize, and implement feedback to improve job satisfaction, working processes, stakeholder relationships, and to build pathways for growth at Bandcamp. This is exemplified by my formation of three working groups: Accessibility, Brand Guidelines, and Design System, each of which has delivered measurable impact across Bandcamp’s services.

I worked with the C-suite and the rest of Bandcamp’s leadership on long and short term planning strategies, prioritizing, estimating, and planning projects, forming and briefing teams, removing roadblocks as they arose, and communicating information between teams and leaders. When a company reorg was announced, I designed the newly-created Director of Design roles and reimagined the design organization in a way that supported the vision of the reorg.

I performed all of these duties while simultaneously leading the design of Bandcamp Live, Bandcamp’s live streaming offering. This was an essential lifeline for artists during the pandemic, from both a socioemotional and monetary perspective. During this time, I and my co-leads imagined the Listening Parties feature, which would launch in 2023 to much greater success than live streaming.

After my tenure in this role, it was split into four distinct full-time roles: a head of design, two directors, and a feature designer.

2017 - 2020
As a Senior Designer, I led the Discovery and Community feature team along with an engineering and product counterpart. I overhauled the fan onboarding experience, designed desktop messaging features, and advocated for and ultimately led design to unify the search, discover, and tags experiences across Bandcamp’s services.

I became a critical resource within the company. I was called on to tackle highly technical, mission-critical projects alongside between my core assignments, provided key insights to help refine our product development processes (e.g. championing the “product triad” model and stable feature team assignments), and fleshed out Bandcamp’s brand, creating company collateral, expressive touches such as product illustration, and pitching and co-designing a zine series that highlighted music scenes in several cities across the globe.

Additionally, I started Bandcamp’s design system, which grew into an essential, cross-functional team.

Details

In my capacity as Director of Design for Artists and Labels, I defined and executed on strategic business priorities, collaborated with stakeholders across the company to create and drive roadmaps, coordinated cross-company product and platform efforts, and remained a key part of the design team, leading feature design and providing design and creative direction to feature team leads. Highlights from my contributions as both a director and feature designer follow below.
Bandcamp Live

I led design for Bandcamp’s live streaming offering, a mission-critical project, on an extremely short timeline. This was a lifeline for artists during the pandemic, from both a socioemotional and monetary perspective. During this project, my co-leads and I imagined Bandcamp’s Listening Parties feature, which would eventually launch in 2023 to even greater success than live streaming.

Bandcamp Live features high-quality audio and video, a simple setup with support for previewing and troubleshooting a live stream, a live chat with built-in safety features, the ability to send artists digital gifts as they perform, and critically, a merch table that sits just below the stream to encourage fans to support as they watch.

Credits
Design Lead: Zoe Minikes
Engineering Lead: Drew Harris
Product Manager: Max Mockett
Designer: Tom Clegg
Engineering: Bandcamp Live team

Testimonials
“During the livestream I felt really, really happy because I had just been by myself for so long in my apartment. Just making music and collaborating feels like normal, it’s my happy place. I think that’s the main thing, it just felt really fun. Especially because a lot of our friends from all over the world were watching. The surprise for me was to just see how organic it fell. And I think over other livestreams that I’ve done, I like this one the best.” — Mary Lattimore

“A huge plus was being able to use my same OBS setup from other livestreams on different platforms—all I had to do was plug in a different stream key. Also, the integrations such as the merch table make so much sense for this kind of stream. The ability to display and sell merch directly on the stream page is something that we’ve been missing before now.”
— Ryan Hover, Deerhoof

“I like the honesty of it. I mean, these are fans who are buying tickets. Fans are generally quite generous in their spirits. What I really loved about it was people said ‘greetings from…,’ and it was suddenly ‘greetings from New Zealand,’ ‘greetings from Seattle,’ ‘greetings from–’ and it was fantastic. Like the world was connected at this moment, and to me, that was really thrilling. I can’t deny it—that was one of the most exciting things.” — Robin Rimbaud, Scanner

Design & Creative Direction
I had the responsibility and privilege of providing design and creative direction for many of Bandcamp’s key features, working with several stellar designers from discovery to final implementation. These features include but are not limited to: Listening Parties, Vinyl Crowdfunding, Marketing & Brand, Playlists and Queueing in the Bandcamp app, Discover, and Seller Tools.

CreditsDesign Director: Zoe Minikes
Listening Parties Design Lead: Greg Wood
Vinyl Crowdfunding Design Leads: Tom Clegg & Devy Hobdy
Marketing & Brand Lead: Kelsey Legault
Playlists & Queueing Design Lead: Lydia Laitung
Discover Design Leads: Connie Nguyen & Tom Clegg
Seller Tools Design Leads: Nagi Argiriou

Bandcamp Community
I led design for the Bandcamp Community feature, which took the messaging functionality from the Bandcamp Artist App and brought it to desktop with key improvements, including a Community tab where followers can see and comment on all of an artist’s past messages.

This feature has made it infinitely easier for artists and fans to connect directly. It provides a central place for fans to see messages they might have missed via email and allows artists the ability to target the segment of their audience they really want to reach.

It has also solved an issue that caused frustration for both artists and fans: duplicate messages when an artist releases an album. Now, when an artist publishes an album, they can attach a release message to it, avoiding email spamminess for fans and extra work for artists.

Credits
Design Lead: Zoe Minikes
Engineering Lead: Drew Harris
Product Manager: Mark Hall
Engineering: Community & Discovery team

Brand & Collateral
I was a core collaborator on Bandcamp’s rebrand and rollout. My contributions include forming and participating in a brand guidelines working group, advocating for and ultimately succeeding in the creation of a permanent brand designer role, providing design direction and strategy from end to end of the rebrand process, refining concepts into final executable assets and guidelines, creating house illustration styles, and leading several aspects of brand extension and documentation.

Additionally, I was the go-to person for merchandise and visual assets for special projects, such as Bandcamp’s annual company gathering, artist and label meetups, and educational events.

Designer CreditsDesign Director: Zoe Minikes
Brand Designer: Kelsey Legault
Brand Guidelines Working Group: Kelsey Legault, Nagi Argiriou, Emma Shore
Additional Selector designer: Moni Orife