LoFM

Lo.FM is a personal project of mine. My own little brain child from 2020 – 2021. After the first few months of lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, I had completed my contracts and had the summer to myself. I took this free time to think and reflect on where I wanted to go with my side projects. I had just formed an LLC to develop a brand for my personal projects. 

Listening to so much Lo-Fi music, I had developed a little curiosity, the Youtube platform did not have a very thought out way for the listeners to communicate. Being a person who loves metaphor, I painted the image of an internet coffee shop, a skin on the chatrooms of old, people come and go, greet you at the door and you bid farewell when you have to take off. Who controls the music, why guest DJs of course, you enter the cafe where you can find other like minded individuals who share the same music taste. 

Thus the seeds for LoFM were laid. Over the course of the next year, my cofounder and I were looking into how to make a blend of Spotify and Discord to have users create new groups or join channels and super-fan over some of their favorite artists, connecting artists more directly with their audiences and have a testing ground for sets and samples not ready for the general. 

With this I formed a design and business philosophy of not only user-focused, but privacy-focused software that would come to define much of my own startup, datFlo LLC.

Every week was a new part of the discovery and ideation phase, comparing the design to existing user flows and competitors in the space of streaming. A lot of the conventions were already set for chatrooms and checking online status, but this was more of a community building exercise, creating consistent and comprehensive icon language and the user experience of playful yet professional looking platform. 

I designed and developed all of the components and page layouts in Figma/CSS and then coded a storybook.js to allow for a single-source of truth for our component library. This programmatic approach was to ensure that any other developer who joined our team knew of the best practices and design approaches we had carved out. ReactJS is the framework that I know best and had the most extensible UI library so that is where I made my start. 

Unfortunately, LoFM was unsustainable with our company philosophy of no outside ads on our platforms, though we had a donation-based solution in place we sadly had to sunset LoFM in early 2022.