myo.radio. Mobile radio station app.

Joining a working engine with no paint

When I joined in August 2025, myo.radio existed as working code. The stress tests held up (10 stations, 100 listeners each, 48 hours straight, under three seconds to go live). The licensing deals were in place. The product didn't have a brand, a voice, a tone, or a cohesive user experience. I was hired to build all of that and run the design function alone, reporting into the CEO.

Building the brand before the product

Before touching the UI, I built the visual identity from scratch. Dark navy as the base, lime-yellow (#c5ff00) as the accent that signals "on air." A supporting palette in off-white, pink, and deep blue to give the system room to breathe across onboarding, studio, and marketing surfaces. The goal was a brand that reads serious to a professional and approachable to a first-timer.

I also built "Myo," the mascot, as the soft counterweight to the serious chrome. The initial plan was AI-generated UGC video, but it felt cheap next to the product. I pivoted the mascot strategy to Duolingo-style animation: flat, expressive, on-brand, and cheap to produce at volume.

Designing the mobile product

I designed the full mobile UX and UI: onboarding, the studio screen (where the broadcast actually happens), planning, the new channel flow, profile, settings, and the help and feedback loops. The brief underneath all of it was simple: the fewest taps between opening the app and being on air.

The studio screen was the hardest. A broadcaster needs to see what's playing, what's next, how long they've been live, what their audience is doing, and whether the signal is healthy, without the screen turning into a cockpit. I solved it with a layered hierarchy: the "on air" state dominates, the now-playing is secondary, and the controls collapse into accessible-but-quiet surfaces. Professional DJs test into the advanced controls naturally; first-timers never need to see them.

Running a design QA audit

As we moved toward shippable, I ran a full design QA pass across the product: 22 issues categorized (8 critical, 7 high, 7 medium), with a four-phase remediation plan (theme system, missing features, screen-specific fixes, polish). The audit gave engineering a prioritized backlog of visual and interaction debt instead of a vague "make it look right." It also surfaced the places where the product was still running on the old pre-rebrand theme, so we could sequence the cleanup without blocking feature work.

Working with investors and founders

Beyond product and brand, I worked closely with the CEO on the pitch materials: deck revisions, narrative structure, and the financial model presentation. I won't get into specifics here, but the work sharpened how the product story lands in a fundraising room and how the numbers are framed to match the ask. It was a good reminder that design leadership at this stage means writing the investor story as much as drawing the screens.

Handover

I wrapped in March 2026 with a full handover: brand guidelines, social asset library, design system documentation, Figma source files, and account credentials. The product is pre-public-launch at time of writing. The brand, the design system, and the mobile UX I shipped are the foundation they're launching on.