Designing the Catalog Engine
A first look at a new collaboration with the team at Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) to build a brand new visual framework dedicated to systematizing one of music history's most sacred heritage legacies: the Jackson 5 catalog.
When managing assets of this cultural weight across a fragmented digital landscape, the job is about protecting the original history while making the production pipeline move incredibly fast.
The objective was to extract the raw visual DNA of archival 1970s print work and engineer a modular design system. By building a unified kit of custom illustrative iconography, bespoke typography, and an era-accurate color palette, we created a modular blueprint that houses raw archival photography inside responsive, era-accurate design containers—allowing historic assets to scale naturally into any digital platform without breaking aspect ratios.
A few of the tracks are officially live, marking the first widescreen deployment of this framework. This acts as the foundation for a larger, responsive system designed to handle the multi-format demands of a comprehensive catalog rollout.
This first look demonstrates the foundational aesthetics of the framework. As the system scales across streaming and social platforms later down the line, these individual components will dynamically shift to fit different screen formats.
By treating legacy art direction as a scalable system, historic catalogs can eliminate production friction, protect historical integrity, and streamline multi-format rollouts.
See the System in Action
Experience the framework live via the official Motown Channel. Structural component rollouts continuing dynamically throughout the year.
