Developing a strong brand as a musician can help boost your profile among audiences. This doesn’t mean that it has to be a soulless corporate exercise. Rather, when you approach it mindfully, your brand can be a powerful extension of your artistic expression.
One of the elements that contribute to the most positive and impactful brand building is your visual universe. The images, colors, and assets you choose to support your music can help you connect more deeply with your audience, tell more effective stories, and strengthen your position in a crowded marketplace.
Let’s explore some of the elements you should consider when designing your music brand’s visual universe.
Broaden Your Skill Set
As a professional musician, you’re unlikely to have unlimited capital at your disposal. This means you need to find ways to make cost-effective decisions to boost your brand. While developing great visuals for marketing, merch, and other elements may improve your income, hiring a graphic designer can eat into your budget. Therefore, it’s worth considering gaining some skills in this area.
Taking a graphic design course introduces you to the fundamental technical principles. This tends to include aspects such as color theory, using space and type, and navigating popular software platforms. Importantly, many courses are available both in-person and online. This means you can develop your skills around your schedule, including being able to attend classes even when you’re on tour in another city, state, or country.
Expanding your skills in graphic design isn’t just cost-effective, either. Perhaps more importantly, it gives you even more control over the visual universe you’re trying to create for your musical brand. Rather than having to always rely on someone else for your vision, you can create these aspects yourself. Additionally, at times when you choose to work with another creative or graphic design professional, your skills can empower you with the technical vocabulary and visual expertise to express your ideas and needs.
Establish Some Consistent Elements
Maintaining consistency in the visual universe is essential for any brand. It helps your audience to easily connect marketing materials to your music. It also helps to strengthen the values behind your musical brand as consistency shows commitment to a creative concept. Therefore, it’s important to take a little time to establish consistency in some key areas.
These may include:
- Color, type, and style. Some of the most recognizable visual elements of any brand are the colors being used, the typefaces in the title text, and the overall style of your materials. Make sure these are in line with your music and the identity you’ve been cultivating.
- Visual assets. It’s helpful to have some standard visual assets that you can repeatedly utilize across all media. Some good branding assets might include a logo, an animated sting, or just a stylization of your name. Create a standard set of high-definition versions of these that you can use on videos, merchandise, and social media, among others.
Consistency doesn’t mean you need to use the same images throughout your entire career. Rather, establishing repeatable elements gives you a strong identity to build on. You can evolve your visual universe over time by making tweaks here and there that reflect your growth as an artist.
Tell Visual Stories
Avoid limiting your visual universe to logos and color palettes. While these things are important, they are just tools. The important thing is how you utilize your visual universe to engage your audience. Perhaps the most effective way to approach this that serves both creativity and marketing is to prioritize storytelling.
These don’t necessarily have to be traditional narratives, though that can be an option through music videos, lyric videos, or even concept album illustrations. Storytelling can also simply involve what emotional journey your music represents or how you want to reflect your approach as an artist. Remember that while merchandise is a way to make money as an independent musician, the visuals you use on your products can tell or support a bigger story.
In either case, whenever you start a new piece of visual media, it’s worth asking yourself what story you want to communicate to your audience. You’ll find that not only can this enhance your artistic process but it also offers a multifaceted experience for your audience.
Collaborate Effectively
Even when you have solid graphic design skills, there may be times when it’s wise to collaborate with others on developing your visual universe. Some collaborators might include:
- Visual artists and technicians. Sometimes you just don’t have the technical skills to achieve a creative vision and will need more experienced technicians who can help get you there. These may be animators, graphic designers, and merch developers among others.
- Management, marketing, and label representatives. These collaborators may have insights into what visuals work best from a business perspective. Collaborating with them mindfully can serve economic interests while maintaining your artistic integrity.
To get the most positive experiences, you should adopt techniques to make your collaborations easy and practical for everyone involved. This can include utilizing team collaboration tools. Project management platforms, like Asana and Wrike, enable all contributors to see the progress of design projects and keep documents related to them organized. Virtual whiteboard software can be particularly useful for sharing creative ideation sessions with contributors who are geographically distant. At the beginning of any collaboration, take a moment to discuss each participant’s needs so you can work together on solutions, tools, and practices that are mutually beneficial.
Conclusion
Designing your music brand’s visual universe can boost your creative impact and your marketing, but it requires some focus. This should include developing greater visual skills and consistent design elements, alongside focusing on storytelling and effective collaborations. Nevertheless, you should be mindful that great visual branding as an artist is rarely static. Occasionally review your visuals to ensure they still reflect who you are as an artist and the feel of your music. Listen to your audience, too, as they may have insights into what they’re connecting with and what doesn’t quite resonate.
By Indiana Lee
