Hip Hop Evolution

Secret Location

Illustration
Web design

Hip-Hop Evolution is an Emmy Award-winning documentary series tracing the origins and growth of hip-hop culture. To promote its premiere on HBO (following its Hot Docs debut), I helped design an interactive marketing experience: a Buzzfeed-style quiz that generated personalized trailers for users based on their artistic and musical taste.

The project merged entertainment, personalization, and social virality—and let me combine my passions for storytelling, UX, and illustration.

Summary

To support the launch of Hip-Hop Evolution, the team developed a shareable digital campaign that would reach new audiences through personal engagement. The result: a personality quiz that mapped user input to a custom trailer celebrating their taste and connection to hip-hop history. My role focused on UX and visual design, ensuring the interactive flow felt effortless while aligning closely with both creative direction and marketing objectives. I also had the joy of creating custom illustrations of legendary hip-hop artists featured in the series—one of the most personal and meaningful parts of the project for me.

Challenge

This was more than just a quiz—it was a gateway into the documentary, crafted to capture the spirit of hip-hop in just a few clicks. Key challenges included: Creating a smooth and engaging user flow that balanced brevity with impact Designing an experience that felt authentic to hip-hop while staying accessible to a broad audience Aligning UX goals with business KPIs—namely, shareability, reach, and premiere awareness Coordinating across disciplines: marketing, video editors, developers, and brand stakeholders We also needed to ensure that the results felt personalized, while still pointing viewers back to the doc's central themes.

Solutions

We created an interactive website where users took a short quiz, choosing from visual and audio cues tied to sub-genres, style preferences, and generational influences in hip-hop. Their choices triggered a curated video trailer, dynamically assembled from a content library.

Every result was:

Sharable, with customized thumbnails and captions
Visually unique, using user choice to influence mood and tone
Designed to lead viewers to the documentary via clear CTAs

The site married quiz logic with slick visuals, motion, and a little nostalgia—all while building hype for premiere week.

Process

This was a fast-moving, multi-phase build. Here’s how I contributed to the UX and design process:

Discovery
Worked with the marketing and brand teams to understand their primary goal: boosting organic shares and increasing HBO premiere awareness
Identified user motivations: fun, music identity, and curiosity
Audited similar social quiz campaigns (Buzzfeed, Spotify Wrapped, etc.) to learn what worked (and what didn’t)
UX Planning
Sketched initial user flows and wireframes, focusing on reducing friction while maximizing engagement
Prioritized clear progress indicators, friendly microcopy, and smooth transitions between quiz questions
Mapped quiz branches to specific trailer edits, ensuring that each result felt thoughtful and distinct
Design & Illustration
Designed mobile-first layouts with vibrant type, bold UI components, and hip-hop-inspired motifs
Created custom illustrations of hip-hop legends featured in the doc, adding visual soul to the experience
Styled each trailer thumbnail to match the quiz path—making sure results looked like they belonged to the user
QA & Handoff
Worked closely with developers and editors to test quiz logic, video triggers, and social sharing functions
Tweaked flows based on user testing and internal feedback to reduce drop-off before the trailer reveal

Results

Thousands of trailers were generated in the campaign’s first week, with strong organic share rates on Twitter and Facebook
The campaign helped boost day-of premiere awareness, especially among younger audiences
My illustrations were shared as part of teaser content, earning shoutouts from fans of the featured artists
Internal analytics showed a high quiz completion rate, indicating strong UX flow and user engagement