Byte was a short-form video app and a spiritual successor to Vine.
The project was led by Dom Hofmann, and launched in January of 2020 for iOS and Android.
I was the only designer for the first year of development and designed most of the app interface, iconography, and brand materials.
The first screen users see when opening the app. I wanted it to feel magical.
Bytes were 8 seconds long, later extended to 16, and looped seamlessly. Creators could post their bytes to categories called Channels, with new channels added regularly for emerging communities.
70 of Byte's channels, such as Comedy, Pets, Food, and Dance.
Large channel tiles were used for algorithmic feeds or events.
I made all of the 3D channel icons for Byte initially. Eventually, we had to change to a different system because the demand for new channels far exceeded my capacity to make icons for them. It also just didn't make sense for my art to represent every community.
The explore feed, a few months after launch
Looking back, I should have tried to make the icons a lot simpler, but at the time I just wanted to make them look as cool and as flashy as possible.
User profiles had customizable color schemes using a two-color system. Tap a color scheme twice to invert it.
Choosing a color scheme for your profile immediately made it feel so much more personal. You immediately got a sense of the vibe of the user. My eventual plan was to have a reorderable list of your social media handles, links, pronouns, star sign, college, and more.
Outside of profiles, the colors I picked for the UI used a palette of 8 foreground and 8 background colors on black. The background colors are intentionally picked, not just the foreground color faded out. This ensures that there's always a dark background against the icons, since they could appear over video. I wanted the UI to fade into the background when viewing content, but feel vibrant and lively when using the app elsewhere.
Some of the icons I designed for the app.
The styling of the app changed a lot during development as we figured out exactly what we were making, so the icons weren't as consistent as they could be. I ended up going for a pretty chunky style, with sharp edges big rounded corners since icons would often need to be over video. I try to make my icons have "weight" by using big shaded areas, as opposed to using icons made of thin lines which tend to feel more complex.
Designs for the camera and camera tools menu
Much of my work on Byte was focused on experimenting with what new features could be interesting to have in a video based social network.
Concepts for a "tag map" within the explore tab, where you could explode one tag into related tags and see how they connect. Swipe up to view the feed for the currently expanded tag.
I explored new ways to browse, record, share bytes, collaborate, customize profiles, apply effects, and just make the app generally better and more fun to use.
Concepts for a looping camera interface. I wanted to try designing a camera specifically for creating loops in a set time frame.
Few of these ideas were built because it takes a long time to build a social network and the dev team was really busy just keeping the app running.
Concepts for ByteChat: send fully graphic messages using customizable bubbles, text, effects, colors, and more. My favorite idea from this was "finger painting" text.
I was encouraged to be very exploratory with new features, but the reality was it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and everyone was using TikTok instead. This led the app down a path of pursuing feature parity with TikTok and eventually fizzling out.
I'll close this out with one last concept: a character creator for making 2D characters to cast in bytes.
Concepts for ByteMoji: the byte character creator
There's a whole group of people who want to make videos but don't want to be on camera (especially while quarantined). I felt treating those users more like voice actors would be a cool way to bring them into making videos.
Some examples of characters you could build with the various head shapes, hair, and facial features
Users would be able to make a custom character and bring it to life using head tracking and syncing the microphone input to the mouth.
You could also let users use photos as the base and add puppeted features on top.
While recording you'd have a "soundboard" of emotions you can trigger.
The best part of Byte wasn't something I could have designed: the community. To everyone who used our app and made videos for it, thank you. Watching the creativity of the community emerge over the course of just a year was a remarkable experience.
I left Byte at the end of 2020. The original app no longer exists. It was acquired by another company and ultimately shut down. Thanks so much to everyone who made Byte possible, especially Dom and the Byte team. It was an amazing ride! RIP.
