Random musings of Jeromey Balderrama
Last week Amy and the Peace Pipes played at Surfside 7 (which has become one of our favorite venues) for Amy’s Birthday Bash. We had a great lineup with Wolfer and The Happy Dapples. Since this show was being pitched as a birthday bash, I wanted the gig poster to feature Amy a little more than usual, ending up with this result:
It’s been a crazy-busy January. I’ve been cooking a few different blog topics in my head, but time has gotten the better of me this month. However, I’m really excited to announce that my band, Amy and the Peace Pipes, has released a new single, “Burning Bridges”. Go check it out!
I know many of us are now using streaming services (and why not), but if you’d like to download your own copy, we’re giving it away for free to our Peace Pipers mailing list subscribers, just join up and you’ll get the download link! Even if you don’t download music, you should join up anyway. In the age of prevalent social media, it’s become increasingly difficult for bands to reach their audience across all of the noise (especially when Facebook wants to force people into buying ads to reach all of the people who liked their page). The mailing list is really the one true place where everyone who is interested in us has an opportunity to receive our updates – whether they open the emails or get too many emails to open them is another story, but at least I know that our updates were at least delivered.
Thanks so much to everyone for supporting me and my band. When I stop and think about it, it’s really incredible to think that we can put stuff onto iTunes and Spotify and make it available for the world to hear.
We have a really exciting gig coming up with Amy and the Peace Pipes on Friday, where we’ll be playing with Aires Attic and South to Cedars to benefit Homeless Gear. Members from the three bands has been doing a lot of work towards things, getting some generous businesses to donate really cool prizes that we’ll be giving away. I got a chance to design some artwork for it, I do have to confess that I did borrow from a previous design that I put together 8 years ago – but I figured the Statute of Limitations for my artwork expired and I could make it useful again.
One of the biggest challenges was the use of all of the logos for the sponsors. Everyone’s managed to come in different shapes, sizes and colors. I also found it difficult to striking the balance to providing the logos enough prominence without detracting too much from the other information I was trying to convey.
I also played around a lot with the new Facebook banner design, coming up with this guy:
The gap in the middle was allocated to give space for the event title and date that Facebook imposes. People who would click onto the cover art would see the full “donate items” text, but I wanted to put the most striking content above the fold. Here’s what it looks like over on Facebook:
I played around with the art some more, making a 1×1 image for our Twitter and Instragram profile pictures:
I’d definitely welcome any thoughts or input!
Just wanted to share out my latest gig poster design for the recent showcase that Amy and the Peace Pipes took part in at the Downtown Artery.
One of our goals for this show was to stress that this was a showcase of all three bands, rather than having a headline with supporting acts, so I tried to keep all of the image sizes relatively equal (also working on constraint with the images that I was given).
As you can see there was also a significant amount of information that I had to include in the poster, so I was a bit worried that I may have made things too busy. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the poster, especially when considering I also had to rush the design a bit. I’m already looking forward to playing with some more original artwork for the next gig poster.
I’m so incredibly excited to be playing FoCoMx again this year with Amy and the Peace Pipes, this time headlining the Boot Grill on Friday Night! There are so many incredible bands taking part in this festival, and to celebrate that I wanted to share some Spotify Playlists of the bands. Whether you’ve already got your wristband, love the FoCo Music Scene, or want to check out some awesome bands, hopefully these playlists will get you excited about the upcoming weekend!
Friday’s Schedule at FoCoMx
Saturday’s Schedule at FoCoMx
Thanks for checking out the playlist! I hope you enjoy it, follow it and pass it along to other #FoCoMusic lovers.
