Lori Steele

How about creating an online presence!

I’m sure you’ve had that Myspace for ages and can get lost in the numerous amounts of music sites available that it’s hard to keep everything updated and looking fresh…and fresh is the key to having fans return.  But here I am getting ahead of myself.  Let’s start with your BASIC, easiest to set up “website” – Myspace.

True, Myspace is being replaced by multitudes of social networking sites BUT it still holds it’s value an amazingly easy way to secure a professional looking online presence without having to hire a web designer.

Here are the key items to focus on so that you are taken seriously by industry and fans:

• Professional, professional, PROFESSIONAL!!! STAY AWAY FROM THE GLITTER!!!  Remember the steps you took to create a logo?  All of those steps apply when designing your page.  It should look like you.  Sound like you. Be you…because it IS you!
• Quick to open!! Cool it on the embedded videos.  The player takes long enough to download and you want the viewer to hear your music and poke around for a bit, not wait for two minutes while your page loads.  Keep the embedded photos in a small size, too!!  And ONLY keep up-to-date and relevant items on your page.  Played a show last week?  That flyer should NOT be on there, no matter how cool it looks…because it makes it look like you haven’t been on your page in a week, which correlates to – “I don’t have much going on” to fans or “I’m lazy” to industry.
• Make it your own!! Hit myspace flash generators, banner creators, wix.com anything to give your audience that better than just “okay” experience

Check out how my two sites are branded differently:

• Post only your best!! Don’t put songs that you aren’t proud of.  Pictures you think…”Well, at least it’s something”  If you aren’t ready, then don’t have your page public.  No impact is better than a negative one because you pretty much get one chance for people to hit your page…so make it a good one!!!

I won’t lie.  It takes HOURS upon HOURS to figure out some of the generators and create the page you want.  AND you’ll have to learn some basic html (just search “html tutorial” to find out what you need) but the work is worth it!!!  It’s another calling card and your first out the gate.

The simple answer:  Yenos!

I know, not helpful, but think about it.  Not every band needs a photo.  Take all of that work that’s gone into your branding, finding who you are as a band, what you speak about, who you speak to…doing that work will make the answer to the above question pretty obvious for you.

But I’ll break it down a little bit.  Are you mainstream?  Top 40?  Hot A/C?  Country? CCM? Rap? Solo artist? If you answered yes, then I would venture to say that it would be in your best interest to have a great photo that matches your branding and speaks to your music by looking at it.  These genres need that visual and the fans want to see you!!

If you’re in Metal, Electronic Rock, Underground, Avant-garde, Indie, DJ – you get the picture – you have a lot more creative leeway with what you can do.  In these genres the music/songwriting/mixing is really front and center of the artists.  Think about it.

Need help?  Take Innerpartysytem (one of my fav electro-rock bands), for example.  In pictures and videos, their faces are distorted; and even during their live performances, the light shows and staging are so intense that you never get a “full frontal” of them in their musical glory.  Their music is front and center for them and that’s what you get…music.  There are countless other bands that would go unnoticed in the grocery store because of the use of their name or logos as their sole presence. You may get a glimpse of them in a video or in a Zine or blog or some hit on PerezHilton…or if you just stalk them.

No. I’ve never done it so don’t ask me for tips.

So really think about how you want to brand yourself in terms of picture or no picture.  You are your band and your band is you – what do you look like and how do you want the world to see you?

In Backnbloom land we’ve been working our tails off on getting our branding nailed down.  So I guess that’s the next logical place to go, huh?  By getting it nailed down I mean having all instances of us, whether that be online, a business card, a CD cover (secret Yay!  we finished our EP!!), a sticker, an e-mail to someone, our one-sheet, heck, even the way we speak about Backnbloom to anyone.  This is key so that in every instance that a potential fan, friend of a fan who could be fan, promoter, music sup, gear company, or anyone comes in contact with you gets the same visual and verbal message.  Make sense?

Now that you’ve got your sound and your band identity streamlined it’s time for the creative process of creating a logo that speaks FOR you!

A logo doesn’t need to have all sorts of bells and whistles.  In fact, the simpler the better.  The viewer needs to be able to digest it in a quick glance.  And glances over time will help to embed it in their mind.  But where to start?

Here’s what I did to create a logo for my band.  I began to think about my musical and band identity.  How do I see our shows on stage?  How do we dress? How do we interact with each other?  What does our music sound like?  What does our music “say”?  The answers to all of those questions is how you want your logo to feel when you look at it.  My band is slightly electronic rock; the lyrics focusing on busting through crap, being okay with decisions, growing, making your life and others better (even if that means you don’t always get it right), our band identity is sort of an ’80s retro, hipster cool with a bit of glam (because of the electronic element)….so I wanted something that could relate that.

I hit image searches with the words VECTOR, GRAPHICS,  CITY, IMAGES, FLOWER, RETRO (www.dryicons.com is where I started) and would come up with sites that offered plenty of ideas to go from.  Picture after picture after picture I poured through and was able to narrow down colorscapes, shapes, etc.  The colors I was originally in love with were just that, colors I loved, but they didn’t match what the band or music was about:

I needed something simple but spoke about the music…I needed lettering that was spacey in a way… and ended up (after MUCH tweaking) with the following:

This seemingly simple design took over a month to create!  I was sooo stuck in what I just loved in general and was trying to make that fit into the mold of the band.

But here we have the lettering that speaks to what kind of music you’re going hear.  The roots are sturdy (eluding to the fact that once you’re grounded the plant can whither away, but you’ll still be firmly planted…i.e. what our music is about), the flowers have funky, fun spindles (relates to my writing partner’s and my personalities–I can be a bit of a goofy dork), the color is muted yet cross gendered–again hitting the fact that our audience is male and female, a little older skewed, etc.

Make sense?  Fire away!!

First things first.  Your image says a lot about you and helps to imprint you on the minds of others.  The key to branding is to have every thing that correlates to you and your band streamlined and cohesive.

What does this mean exactly?  Let’s look at the Coca Cola logo:

Red and white with a swoosh and a definitive font.  The red and white colors are crisp and clean…kind of matches what they are after with their taste, huh?  The swoosh is playful yet consistent and uncomplicated…ties along with the feel that they created for themselves.  No matter what type of advertising Coca Cola pursues their “messaging” remains the same…refreshing, crisp, clean, invigorating and reliable.  They also remain consistent with font and “swoosh” use – so whenever you see those you think “Coca Cola”.

Questions to think about:  What words describe your sound (not bands but words)?  What are you trying to portray in your music?  What shapes do you think of when you thing of your genre?  What colors typically come to mind?

Really think about these things apart from who you are as a person because your typical response is usually going to be different than what a third party’s would be.  Try to distance yourself from the music and really look at it from a third party perspective.  It’s hard, I know!!

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