Experience Design · Brand · Activations
I went to Serotone's 2016 Party as just another person in the room. The turnout was real, the place was packed, but something didn't line up. The parties were good. The way they showed up online and the way they actually felt in person weren't saying the same thing. I knew I could close that gap, so I joined the team as art & experience designer: the room, the graphics, the website, the activations, all one job instead of four separate ones.
That's most of my design philosophy in one story. I'm less interested in prestige projects than I am in taking something that's already working and making it work better.
Serotone is a UMD DJ collective started by three students, Arden Lawson, Ritvik Sawhney, and Dean Haynes, out of Startup Shell after they got tired of College Park's bar-centric social scene. It runs on three groups that keep circulating back into each other: people learning to DJ, DJs performing, and the party-goers who show up. Designing for one means designing for how it feeds the other two.
The idea I'm proudest of came from watching where people already were: standing in line outside the popular bars downtown, bored, with nothing to do but wait. So we brought the DJ tour straight to them, setting a live set up right outside the line. It gave people something to actually experience instead of standing there, and it put our DJs in front of exactly the crowd we wanted reaching us. I didn't stage the first one until Serotone already had a following, since it needed people who trusted us to make it land instead of just look strange. A few of the bars noticed. Some liked what they saw enough to reach out directly, which turned a sidewalk set into a real relationship with the venues themselves.
The first Serotone party I went to had good energy, but the room itself kept getting in the way of it. None of what was wrong was a music problem. It was a room problem, and I treated it like one.
Before I joined, Serotone's DJ tours ran off folded tables set up in random spots around campus. The setups were messy, and there was nothing on them that said Serotone. So even when the music was genuinely good, people just walked past. Nobody could tell who was playing or why they should stop.
I wanted to amplify what my DJs were already doing well, so I built out an actual marketing suite for tabling: a tablecloth, a large banner, handout flyers, something consistent enough that a table read as Serotone from twenty feet away. The point wasn't decoration. It was making sure their work actually reached the people it was for instead of getting lost at a folding table nobody looked twice at.
The name comes from serotonin, the feel-good hormone, with “tone” doing double duty for music and for the idea that everyone, whatever their background, is showing up for the same thing. Closing the gap I noticed at that first party meant getting the website, the Instagram, and the graphics all pulling in that same direction. I rebuilt the Instagram presence, designed the site, and put together the branding moodboard that everything else got checked against, so a flyer, a story post, and the actual website all felt like they came from the same place.
Club Café is the clearest example of what I actually do. It was our first event on campus and our first time stepping outside the house party format, a collab with Coffee Club held in Startup Shell where they served matcha lattes and breakfast off the griddle while Lawson and Haynes DJ'd to keep the room's energy moving. I set up cameras around the space to capture it for social, because the whole point was making sure the night that happened in the room was the same night that showed up online afterward. Afrofusion After Dark, the 2016 Party, and our collab with Cultoure Magazine all got the same treatment: the room, the graphics, and the content working as one thing instead of three.
Serotone was profiled by The Black Explosion, which covered what we're trying to change about how College Park parties.
Most nights were smaller, iterative work, but two events turned into full case studies of their own.
