by Dan Fonseca
Knowing a graphic designer
When you are a DIY musician, it is imperative that you surround yourself with a powerful, dynamic group of individuals that will help move your music career forward. One of these critical relationships will be the one you have with your graphic designer. In essence, your graphic designer will be responsible for your branding image. He or she will create your album artwork, website graphics, tour posters, stickers, and anything else that will require retouching. Next to your music, your branding image is the most important thing to ensure is at the highest of standards.
Graphic designers come in all shapes in sizes. Most relationships start of as regular friendships. These friends do your graphic design work just to simply help out or as a favor. These individuals are great to start out with but hopefully sooner than later will have to upgrade (no offense to your buddy, we are sure he/she is a great person). Down the road your graphic design needs will increase and having a professional relationship with a graphic designer will be imperative.
So start networking and poke around a bit! See what resources you have at your disposal. You never know, maybe a friend has a talent you weren’t aware of! Here’s to productive friendships!
Tags: DIY Musician, graphic designer
Jul 07, 2010
I agree with that insight, but what if I’m my own graphic designer, artist, producer and I also can engineer. What’ll be a good guide for me to aim that to bettering my career?
Jul 07, 2010
Great question. I think the main take away here is that you need to fill the gaps within your career. You may be a great graphic designer, artist, producer and engineer, but maybe you need someone to run your finances, take your pictures, edit your videos etc. There’s no point in hiring someone to do something you can do until you don’t have enough time to do it yourself. However, if your music is your career (or if you want it to be) you need to treat it as such and hire professionals when necessary. Thanks for the comment!
Aug 17, 2010
I totally agree. The awesome thing is the hip hop artist I’m working with is our graphic designer and it really comes in handy. We collaborate, bounce ideas off of each other and he brings them to life. Not to mention how much money this has saved us.
Love what you guys are doing at hype-genius, keep up the good work.
Sep 12, 2010
Totally agree bands need a good Graphic Designer. My band has one… ME !