The problem with grants.

Look, I was a musician for many years. We toured, we put out records, we lost money. I mean, I get it, musicians need all the help they can get and so, they get grants. Grants are awesome. Once you’ve gone through all the hoops of getting past the panel and being deemed worthy of the grant, they’re really helpful and can save your ass. For a cd, they raise a problem–everybody wants their logo on there. I understand. I mean, they give you the money, they get their logo on there but imagine your canvas is roughly 5″ x 5″. That’s not a lot of space and when everyone wants their logo on there, it cuts into that space. Also, they cheapen your cover since some logos just do not fit in with the aesthetic of your design. Colors clash, sizes are wonky or the logo just plain sucks.

For an example, a project I am currently working on requires 4 logos. Add to those 4 marks a record company logo, a barcode, and a distributors legal spiel and you’re taking up a lot of space. If these considerations are there in the first place, no real worries, you work around it. More often than not though, these logos are an afterthought. All your work and effort gets ruined as you make your design resemble a Nascar race car. I’m all for musicians getting some government funding since I know it helps a great deal but there is something to be said for the anonymous donor, the silent benefactor. Plastering a logo everywhere comes across as self-glorifying and cheap. We want to promote the culture not the government though I imagine they need as many pats on the back as they can get.

*It should also be noted that in print production, the proper way to prepare a logo (or at least the way I learned and have read over the course of 10 years) is as vector art. Vectors are infinitely resizable, maintain their edges on output, and can be easily edited. Of the logos I have, only two are .eps files (meaning vector) while one is a .psd and the other, a scan converted to .pdf straight from the organization. I don’t wanna rag, but this is pretty bad. When you decrease the size of a raster image, all sharpness goes out the window. For instance, all of the copy under the Factor logo will be unreadable and the MFS logo will halftone like a mother since you can see how blurry it is already. There are ways around it but it would be so much easier if people just supplied the logos in the proper format if they expect you to use them. If you know of vector versions of these logos, please shoot me an e-mail because what usually happens is I figure it’s unacceptable and redo them in Illustrator so I don’t look like a total hack. I sure would like to save myself the time.

*Just after I wrote this, we added another to the lineup. Looking good.