Context
“Ruby Red” is a collaborative artist project between myself and my childhood friend, Daniel Laner.
Role
I function as a co-writer and co-producer, as well as the 'creative director' of all things visual.
Having grown up together in a place as diverse as Oakland, Daniel and I connected over a shared appetite for a wide array of music and wanted to explore whether there was anything we could add to the mix––at first just for fun, but over time more seriously. Since forming Ruby Red, we’ve been lucky enough to tour around North America, accumulating millions of streams in the process, and have been featured in the likes of Billboard, Spotify’s Best of Indie, the San Francisco Chronicle, SXSW, as well as Elton John’s Apple Music Radio show.
I’ve always been interested in music not just as a medium, but also as a vehicle (an excuse, really) for more ambitious (read: not economically viable) design projects.
One example of this was the cover art for our 2025 EP, “SOLAR 9 FENDER”. Up until that point, all of our artworks had been made digitally, and with the influx of AI-generated cover art, I knew I wanted to challenge myself to create something more hands-on. I think I must’ve been feeling nostalgic for my undergrad days (and nights) in the lab because I eventually landed on petri dish art.
As we were wrapping up recording the songs, I swabbed our (apparently very dirty) studio in order to make what would become a palette. From there, I used q tips to draw the Ruby Red logo (a two pointed star) before transferring the dishes to a makeshift fume hood in my closet that consisted of a heater/fan, a camera, and a shoelace.
The result was something that was weird and alive and maybe even a little gross… much like the music itself!
Projects within projects
As Ruby Red’s de facto creative director, I’ve had the opportunity to explore a lot of different facets of visual design that I wouldn’t have otherwise, including designing flyers, making merch, directing music videos, programming light shows, and developing a custom font.
When we needed a website to showcase our music, I knew I wanted to do something creative and evocative––an extension of the music itself––and with 100,000 new songs uploaded to Spotify daily, I knew we weren’t going to stand out with a cookie-cutter, website-builder solution.
The idea with our music was to try and meet listeners where they’re at, to invite them to engage with the music not passively and behind a screen, but actively and in their real life. To illustrate this idea, I created a Three.js website that, by kindly requesting permission to access your phone camera and gyroscope, randomly placed our music throughout a user’s actual environment in 3D space. To navigate the site, you actually had to move and rotate your phone, turning music discovery from impersonal and algorithm-driven to something more contextual and tactile.
Projects like these have been critically important for me both as a creative outlet and as an entry point to design as a career; many clients I work with now I met through work I've done as part of Ruby Red.