Why Graphic Design is Important and How Musicians Can Use Canva To Make Quick and Easy Graphics for Their Music
The last thing any professional musician would want for their music release are bad visuals. The graphics that you post on social media, print on your merchandise, and use for your album art are the epitome of your artist branding. They give your fans a visual representation of who you are as an artist, and show the purpose of your music by conveying some type of message and aesthetic.
Bad graphics can result in a misconstrued idea of your music, or it will simply make you look unprofessional, which is a huge turn off to potential listeners. Think about it: how likely are you to listen to an artist’s music if everything they share publicly is messy, pixelated, hard to read, or simply does not match anything else they use to promote the song? The quality of the designs you use are a great indicator to fans of the quality of your music. It shows that you take extra care of your content and pay attention to detail.
Therefore, you want to make sure that what you post on social media is in high definition, attention grabbing, pleasing to the eye, and clearly expresses what you are trying to say. All of this can be accomplished with a good eye for aesthetics and experience in graphic design. However if you lack either of these qualities, Canva luckily has your back.
If you do not know what Canva is, it is a website and app that lets you create beautiful graphics to serve whatever purpose you desire. Many professionals in any industry use Canva for their advertisements and social media posts, however in the music industry, it can serve so many more purposes that extend past the virtual space. Canva can be used to design your merchandise, your album art, posters, etc.
Use of the platform is free and already comes with a wide range of options from which you can choose. You can select what kind of graphic you want to make (i.e Instagram post, YouTube Thumbnail, Twitter Banner) or you can customize the size to fit your own personal needs. For those that prefer to start from scratch you are given the option to start with a completely blank art space, however for those that need a little extra help with starting, there are hundreds of free templates available for editing.
Once a template is selected, you can customize it in just about any way: color, text, pictures, the size of different elements, and even the option to animate it. Another fantastic thing that Canva can do is draw a color palette from pictures that exist in the art space. Therefore if you are looking to keep your aesthetic consistent, you have the exact colors ready for you to select for your design elements.
Free users have nearly free range of the platform, however there are some templates and design elements that are only available with the paid version. The biggest upside to the Pro version of Canva is the ability to build a brand kit. If you are an artist creating multiple graphics for a music release, and you want to keep the same aesthetic with the same fonts and colors, the Pro version of Canva allows you to save the colors and fonts that you use for your designs into a brand kit for easy access when creating future graphics. This is incredibly helpful to maintain consistency when marketing your music and yourself as an artist because it gives you direct access to the tools you need to establish consistency throughout the entirety of your promotional campaigns.
Despite some of its great features, there are some disadvantages to note about the website, which might steer you away from Canva. Firstly, Canva is quite limited in its features even with the paid subscription. If you are looking to widen your options in terms of what you can do, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are definitely a bigger bang for your buck, even if it is on the pricier side. Some of the features that Canva lacks are the various typography styles included in Adobe, the ability to upload your own fonts to the program, the ability to edit shapes and vectors, and the ability to adjust and manipulate photos freely. You are also limited in the ways you can streamline the design process, as Canva does not allow you to utilize layers which help organize the placement of different elements when creating a graphic. While these may not be huge deal breakers for the beginner designers out there, these features can definitely help take a graphic to the next level, and you would not have that ability while using Canva.
Overall, Canva really simplifies the process of designing cohesive content for the inexperienced hand, however regardless of the kind of template you use or the simplicity of the design you have in mind, we understand that bringing your vision to life can be time consuming. If you don’t have enough time between making music and engaging with your audience directly, EAR offers our own in house graphic design services. EAR Design can take that extra responsibility off your back and make you high quality graphics for your music release, so you as the artist can focus on making the music itself high quality. With the combined efforts of fantastic graphic designs and even better music, you are guaranteed to earn listeners for any new project that you put out there.
