Heerie App Design

Overview

As the lead designer for Heerie, a startup app on the Apple App Store and Google Play, I’ve helped shape its brand and user experience from the ground up. This project showcases my skills in branding, graphic design, and UX.

What is Heerie?

Heerie is the go-to app for discovering and listening to audio shows. With a growing collection of stories across different genres, Heerie brings these cinematic audio experiences straight to your ears. The app is free to download on the App Store and Google Play.

What’s an audio show?

Audio shows, also known as audio dramas or fiction podcasts, blend the storytelling of audiobooks with the episodic nature of TV shows—but in an audio-only format. They feature immersive sound design and talented voice actors, pulling listeners into rich, fully realized worlds.

Why the name?

The name "Heerie" was inspired by a love for the horror audio drama The Magnus Archives, which played a key role in the app’s creation. "Heerie" is a blend of the words "Hear" and "Eerie," capturing the essence of immersive, spine-chilling storytelling. While it started with a focus on eerie tales, Heerie has grown into a platform that offers a diverse selection of audio shows across multiple genres, making it a home for all kinds of captivating narratives.

Creating the Brand

When designing Heerie’s brand identity, I wanted to capture the essence of audio dramas—stories brought to life through voice, sound effects, and music. My research led me to the golden age of radio in the 1940s when audio dramas were a primary form of entertainment. This inspired me to incorporate vintage design elements while ensuring the brand still felt modern and mysterious.

Inspiration

Mood Board

To reflect Heerie’s eerie and immersive nature, I leaned into a dark, moody color palette.

I pulled inspiration from old radio advertisements, noir-style posters, and eerie film aesthetics to shape Heerie’s distinct look and feel.

Logo Ideation

First Brand Identity

This is the first brand identity I created for Heerie. It was used for a few months for a Heerie newsletter about audio shows and Heerie's social media pages

Current Brand Identity

I am going to jump ahead a little here and show Heerie's current branding. Though this part was not documented in this way until after the initial design and launch of the app.

Designing the App

How It Started

Heerie was founded by a software developer and because of this, the app development began right away. The goal was to launch an MVP as soon as possible. So to start only the features and pages most critical to the app were created and implemented.

Features the MVP had to have:

A place to see all shows
Show details, including a description and all of the episodes
Episode descriptions
A player to listen to the shows

Designs created by the founder while he was developing the app

My First Redesign

After my initial redesign, Heerie launched on the Apple App Store. To move fast, I built on familiar app patterns, ensuring usability while keeping Heerie’s branding consistent. The focus was on making audio shows the centerpiece for easy discovery and listening.

My First Redesign

Round two of design changes included a more simplified version of the player as well as the addition of an expanded player and search page.

The Current App

The app went through a more thorough redesign because of all of the added features and the updated branding document.

Features the MVP had to have:

Log in and sign up
Profile management
Heerie premium - Heerie premium is a subscription for content that is only available on Heerie. For this there needed to be a sign up flow as well as an indicator for which shows are premium.

Bigger Picture

Informational Website

For the App to be approved by the App Store there needed to be a website for Heerie. The website is purely informational. It is meant to give users and explanation of what Heerie is and links to download the app.

A few drafts ideas for the website I created in Figma: