Decider: Band? Brand? Yes!
Decider started as a band.
It didn’t stay that simple for very long.
Writing and recording the music was only part of what it meant to put a new band into the world. It needed an identity. Photography. Artwork. Social content. Video. Motion graphics. Advertising. Release campaigns. A website. And enough ongoing material to keep the whole thing visible between songs, shows and releases.
Fortunately, I already had a few of those skills lying around.
For Decider, I handled the art and creative direction across virtually every touchpoint, from the original identity through photography, album and single artwork, social media, motion graphics, short-form video, paid advertising and promotional material.
It became an opportunity to do something relatively rare: build a brand without having to hand pieces of it off along the way.
The music and the visual identity could develop together.
And while making music was unquestionably supposed to be fun, we never approached the project as a hobby.
If we were going to do it, we were going to do it properly.
It was to establish a visual language capable of supporting everything that might follow.
The identity needed to work on an album cover and an Instagram post. On a website, in motion, in photography, on promotional material and across advertising. It needed enough personality to be recognizable without becoming so rigid that every piece of communication looked the same.
That meant thinking in systems from the beginning: typography, composition, imagery, colour, texture and the relationship between them.
The logo was part of it.
The brand was everything around it.
The single had its own visual language, supported by a full length music video, social content, motion graphics, short-form video, promotional assets and paid media. We also engaged veteran Canadian music publicist Eric Alper to handle PR and help extend the release beyond our own channels.
Radio was part of the strategy as well. Decider received airplay across the major Ontario college radio stations, giving the music another audience beyond streaming and social.
And then commercial radio joined the party.
Barrie’s Rock 95 put Decider into rotation as well, although, in a wonderfully inconvenient bit of storytelling, they chose a different single.
Photography could introduce the band. Artwork could establish the single and the rest of the music. Motion could tease it. Short-form video could give people a reason to stop scrolling. Paid placements could reach beyond the audience we already had. PR could put the story in front of people we couldn’t reach ourselves. Radio could put the music somewhere entirely different again.
Reviews, airplay, interviews and milestones then became new reasons to continue the conversation after release day.
Rather than creating one campaign asset and resizing it indefinitely, the visual system allowed the campaign to keep changing while remaining recognizable.
One album.
Many different ways into it.
A new release needed artwork. A show needed promotion. A review became content. Photography found its way onto social. Social became advertising. Artwork moved from screens onto things people could actually wear, hold or take home.
The audience grew along with it.
The debut release eventually accumulated approximately 70,000 streams across Spotify and Apple Music, accompanied by press coverage and radio airplay. Useful numbers, certainly, but only part of the story.
For me, the more interesting result was seeing all of those individual pieces begin to operate as a recognizable whole.
The identity wasn’t sitting in a brand guide.
It was out there doing its job.
Have a project, an idea, a question, or an interesting problem that refuses to behave? Something that needs making, fixing, rethinking, photographing, designing, or otherwise coalescing into existence? Make contact. I can’t promise to say yes, but I can promise to have an opinion.