Nothing is a British consumer electronics manufacturer based in London. Founded by Carl Pei, they are building a world where tech is fun again.
Since its inception, I have always been fascinated by Nothing's aesthetic, so industrial, so captivating, so me.
When I was 17 years old then - I am now 18 - I wanted to experience Nothing's identity, be part of its enthusiastic community.
However, Nothing's products are not available in my country, so the only way to access Nothing's app ecosystem was to install apks, such as the first beta for Nothing Launcher, and other apps like Nothing Weather, Recorder, and Glyph Composer.
But that was not enough for me.
Nothing is relatively new in the mobile market, and its OS lacks several native applications, in the likes of a gallery app or music player, etc. I felt I could contribute with different UI/UX design concepts and share them in Nothing Discord's 'Community projects' section. This was also an opportunity to practice my design and creative thinking skills.
In this blog post, I will chronologically showcase (bear with me here) my contributions to the Nothing community, and how some of my concepts have piqued the interest of some passionate developers, who took these UI designs and turned them into real products.
5 January '23 - Nothing Gallery
This was my very first attempt at designing a Nothing application, directly on my smartphone, using PixelLab - definitely not the app's use case. I took cues from Nothing Weather and Samsung Gallery to create a simple 'Albums' interface, with a bottom navigation bar and 3 chunky buttons for the 'Recent', 'Videos' and 'Favourites' categories.
Later on, this concept turned out to be the most influential, but more on that later.
also 5 January '23 - Nothing Music
As I was still feeling in the mood, later that day I worked on another app concept, the Nothing Music. Inspired by Nothing Recorder's flat skeuomorphic approach, I designed the music player to feel like you are using a real vinyl record player.
As you can see in the Community post screenshot, the title suggests that an app is being developed, and we'll find out more about this by the end of this blog post.
17 January '23 - One-handed mode
Browsing through chats and YouTube comments, I noticed that one-handed mode was a highly requested feature, and I thought of designing a proper implementation for it, following Nothing's design language.
Impressed with my post, a commenter asked if I could improve the one-hand reachability for the quick settings panel, and you can see the result in the second image. →
13 February '23 − Volume slider - easy audio switching
As the title suggests, I simply designed my take on the volume slider, adding a new functionality that would allow the users to effortlessly switch their preferred audio output right from the volume slider.
11 months later, another designer, Rahul Janardhanan, posted on X his own interpretation of this concept: twitter.com/raonehere/status/1731346689150140712
July '23 - now − Nothing Gallery (app)
Developer Daniel Choi had shown interest since the very first day I posted my concept on Discord. On July 2nd, to the community's surprise, he posted a very early prototype of the app he was independently developing.
After a couple of months, we have a functional version of the app, published on GitHub.
Since the Nothing team is working on their official app, this project has come to a halt from Daniel, but anybody can contribute even further.
*also this project was featured on the Read.cv's Front Page, and I felt really proud of that.
23 December '23 - Nothing Music (app)
Again, to my surprise, another developer, Polyák Kristóf, posted under my community post a working prototype of my Nothing Music concept.
The app is still in its very early development stages, but you can find it published on GitHub as well if you want to contribute.
26 December '23 - Nothing Music v2
Inspired by the sudden interest in the community for a Nothing Music app, I decided to revise my old concept and come up with something fresh.
For this interface, I was influenced by the beautifully crafted Teenage Engineering TP-7 device.
In concept, this app would not only be able to play local music files, but also play music from other music streaming services, under one seamless connected experience.
So, this was my 2023 as part of the Nothing community!
Even if this post doesn't get much attention (I will be sharing it on X too), I still feel fulfilled by what I've achieved so far.
Huge thank you to the Discord and Reddit community who have supported my projects, congratulated and given feedback!
For sure I won't be stopping here, let's see what 2024 has reserved, I'll keep you updated.
Signing out,
Alkid. ✌🏻