Case study — Nocturne Studio
A nightcap of an interface
Nocturne had the catalog of a tastemaker and the interface of a spreadsheet. We made the product feel like the music.
- Client
- Nocturne Studio
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Design lead & writer
- Discipline
- Brand, Product, Web
- Read
- 3 min read
Nocturne licenses music for film, TV, and ads — the kind of catalog where every track has a story and every license has a lawyer. When we came in, the product shipped on time and paid its bills, but opening it at 2am felt less like listening to music and less like doing taxes.
The goal wasn’t a reinvention. It was a rephrasing. Keep the rigor, lose the grayscale.
“They ship like a crew twice their size — and somehow none of it looks rushed.
”
The brief
We were hired for a brand refresh and stayed for the product. Nocturne’s editorial team was already writing beautifully about the catalog in their newsletter; none of that voice had made it into the app. Our job was to close the gap without touching the parts of the interface music supervisors had built muscle memory around.
- A wordmark and type system that worked at trailer scale and thumbnail scale
- A product shell the editorial voice could breathe inside
- A marketing site that felt like an opening credit, not a landing page
The work
01/Discovery
Listening to the catalog
Two weeks with the editorial team — reading every newsletter, sitting in on three supervisor calls, finding the vocabulary that was already working.
02/Direction
Late, not dark
We resisted the obvious noir mood. The final direction is editorial and generous — near-black, bone paper, one confident accent.
03/Delivery
A system that reads
Wordmark, type stack, product shell, marketing site, and a short brand book that the team actually opens.
The single hardest decision was the accent color. We tested a deep green that felt clever, a warm amber that felt hotel-lobby, and the rose-wine that shipped — the only one that felt like a cocktail menu and a closing credit at the same time.
The results
Preview-to-license rate
first 90 days
Time to first shortlist
Press mentions
at launch
A quarter in, Nocturne’s team reported that supervisors had started forwarding specific tracks from the app rather than screenshotting the page — the small, humane sign that an interface has gotten out of the way.