Sonora
Sonora combines expert music instruction with technology to help intermediate guitar players quickly break through learning plateaus. I collaborated to rebrand the company, as well as led product design to launch Sonora’s MVP in 2020.
After Spencer Handley met All Turtles CEO Phil Libin in 2019, our team was challenged to scale and grow his successful product, Guitar Master Intensive.
During this process, I led the All Turtles team to define the vision, rename the company, craft a new brand identity, redesign the user experience, and ultimately launch the Sonora Guitar Intensive MVP in 2021.
Sonora Guitar Intensive is an e-learning platform that helps intermediate-to-advanced guitar players rapidly progress to fluency. With expert-developed curriculum, 1-on-1 feedback loops, mentorship from the world’s top musicians, and a supportive community, Sonora has successfully helped over a thousand students.
Product
The high level design challenge for Sonora was to update the product experience from a confusing and generic web-app, to an easy-to-use experience that felt delightfully premium. During our collaboration, I led the team in redesigning the web-app, and introduced new student features in 2-week sprints: more robust mentor interactions, helpful practice tools, updated curriculum architecture, and a timed rating system that would help students practice new skills.
“The new app is beautiful. I already like the “Task List” and the improved interleaving functionality of the 5-star system. I feel very fortunate to be a part of the [new] Sonora roll-out. Thanks to Spencer and his team.”
Matthew M.
Sonora Guitar Intensive student
Marketing
We collaborated with Spencer to improve the Sonora marketing funnel. With an already healthy top-of-funnel, our challenge was communicating value and generating enough excitement to help move a potential student from the interest phase to enrollment. I led design efforts to increase those conversions with a new marketing strategy, an updated marketing website, social media communications, and a new email campaign strategy.
Identity
The identity is based on the idea that ‘practice makes progress.’ Improving in any skill requires time and repetition, and we imbued that idea in the wordmark by representing intervals of time with color and texture. Sonora is abstracted from the word “sonorous,” defined as a sound imposingly deep and full.