Aprender Design

Jul 22, 2025

Aprender Design x Yung Studio for Lady Gaga

Aprender Design

Aprender Design

School

Meet Yung Studio, the creative minds behind Lady Gaga’s digital universe for MAYHEM. What began as a website redesign became a deep collaboration. It blends strategy, emotion, and fan energy into an experience that lives onstage and online.

We spoke with Melody Yung, founder of Yung Studio, who shared how designing for Gaga meant listening closely. Not just to the songs, but to the artist, her team, and the fans who bring every era to life.

1) Can you tell us what it was like to work on a project for Lady Gaga? How the collaboration came about and what it felt like to design for such an icon.

It’s been one of the most creatively rewarding experiences of my career. I was first brought on to redesign ladygaga.com ahead of the MAYHEM album drop. That initial launch set the tone—cinematic, emotional, immersive—and quickly evolved into a broader collaboration that’s still unfolding.

We worked closely with Stefani (Lady Gaga) and her fiancé Michael, who plays a major role behind the scenes. Michael brings a rare blend of strategic clarity and creative instinct—he’s deeply involved in shaping how Gaga’s digital presence connects with fans in meaningful ways. Stefani is equally hands-on. She reviews reference decks, sketches ideas, and gives notes that are as emotionally precise as they are conceptual.

Alongside our partners—Commerce-UI on e-commerce development and Viso Haus on creative coding—we’ve launched a homepage takeover, a limited-edition merch drop, and a series of album related reveals timed to the MAYHEM rollout. As we head toward The MAYHEM Ball kicking off July 16, more creative layers are still unfolding—designed to turn the tour into something that lives just as powerfully online as it does IRL.

Designing for Gaga isn’t just about style. It’s about worldbuilding with care—and creating space for every fan to see themselves in it.

2) Designing for fans means stepping into a world that’s already rich with meaning. What’s it like to create for a fan audience that cares so deeply?

It’s incredibly energizing—and a little sacred. Gaga’s fans, the Little Monsters, don’t just consume her work—they live in it. Every post, lyric, and look becomes part of a shared mythology. So before we designed anything, we spent time listening: reading comments, watching reaction videos, tracking how fans talked about her music and performance. That learning shaped everything we built.

Ahead of the MAYHEM album drop, we launched the Infinite Fan Content Broadcast—an interactive homepage takeover that turned the spotlight onto the fans themselves. Inspired by the album’s retro VHS aesthetic, the grid showcases an evolving stream of fan-made creations: dance videos, artwork, covers, remixes, reactions. It’s a love letter to the collective chaos, creativity, and joy the fandom brings to every Gaga era.

Even smaller moments, like the soundtrack reveals on Instagram and TikTok, were designed as tributes to how fans interact online—each one layered with references, anticipation, and space for interpretation.

Designing for this audience means honoring the world they’ve already built—and giving them new ways to see themselves inside it.

3) We’d love to hear more about your studio! How do you collaborate, and how do you choose the projects you take on?

Yung Studio is small by design—we like to go deep with the teams we work with. We partner with cultural brands, artists, and ambitious companies looking to take creative risks. Internally, we work more like a lab than an agency: lots of prototyping, writing, sketching, breaking things and starting again.

We choose projects based on energy. Is there a story that needs telling? A world that hasn’t been built yet? We look for ideas that make us feel something—then we figure out how to make others feel it too.

4) As a design school, we have many students who dream of working on projects like yours. What advice would you give to someone just starting out? What should they focus on now, and what helped you in the beginning?

Start small, and make every project personal. The work that helped me grow early on wasn’t perfect—it was experimental. I still remember branding one of our first startup clients. They had no name, no product—just a blurry idea. We had to invent the whole world from nothing. That process taught me how to find form in ambiguity, and how powerful design can be when it’s treated as a tool for clarity and belief.

That spirit lives on in how we work at Yung Studio. We think of ourselves as a design lab—not just a design studio. We prototype constantly. We sketch before we polish. We ask, What if? as often as we ask, What’s next?

My advice: build that mindset early. Don’t worry about trends or perfect outcomes. Focus on curiosity, experimentation, and care. Make things that reflect what you feel, not just what you’ve seen. The best work doesn’t come from chasing what’s popular—it comes from shaping what’s possible.

Follow Yung Studio on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit their website.

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