UI Sounds: Sound Design Inspiration

[Graeme]

Learn sound design for user interfaces by example

UI Sounds is a library of user interface sounds from popular apps to help you think and learn more about sound when designing and building products.

On the 30th of December, I launched a new section of Prototypr called UI Sounds over on Product Hunt and it finished #1 product of the day, which was amazing since I've never had that happen before:

I was also very excited to see Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt drop a comment:

Creating for passion

Here's a bit about the project and why I started it:

Since writing about sound visualisation a few years ago (e.g. see here), I was always interested in seeing sounds, but didn't see any career-related reason to pursue the interest so I just stopped!

I want to take this chance to encourage people to make time for what you're really interested in, as it's easy to think "I'll learn about that awesome stuff later"/"that won't pay the bills". But if you think like that, you might never get to do what you really like, and eventually that area of interest will be like a shadowy ghost of what could have been.

This project is for me to start re-exploring sounds. Last year I became interested in the sounds on UI of apps, and got recorded a library, as there isn't really a place to find them all. Here is that library!

Future todo: replace the YouTube sound visualisations a Web Audio API version, and add content about this area to teach more about it. That content will be premium to fund the site! That's the rough plan for this one.

What's next?

The feedback and opinions on the product have generally been very positive, and thousands of people have used the site already which is great feedback in itself:

It can't stay free

It was great to see the positive remarks around the project, but Vincent's thoughts, in particular, had me thinking about how to keep the project sustainable. The project is a free resource and being free it is very difficult to maintain.

Maybe giving out free content and work is sustainable if you have a 9-5 job that you're happy in, but for indie people like me, it's not. From my experience in the design industry, I've seen lots of freebies, and the promotion of free work for exposure.

I think this actually hurts the industry, and by not helping people sell and promote their own work keeps this cycle going. So clearly my next step is to generate revenue so the product can continue to live - or it will simply die!

The plan

My first step is to make a useful sound pack that can be used by designers and developers for both prototypes and end products. We've already started on it, check it out on Twitter:

I haven't decided on pricing yet, but any ideas will help. I'll keep this thread updated with progress.

Cheers!

[kelechi]

@Graeme creating for passion is great! Always a good place to begin. Keep going, Graeme!