Two or three weeks ago, Jim Cosgrove, AKA
Mr. Stinky Feet made a splash in the kids music world by announcing he was "crowdfunding" his next album by asking for supporters to pledge money toward the costs of recording, producing, and distributing the next album. Cosgrove's
views on why he went this route are essential reading for kids musicians. He also noted that he hadn't previously heard of
Kickstarter, a site which helps musicians (and countless others) do the same thing.
One major difference, though, between Cosgrove's approach and Kickstarter's is that Cosgrove's going through with the project regardless. (In fact, I'm pretty sure he's starting recording this week.) But if a person seeking Kickstarter help doesn't reach the required amount, they receive squat.
So let's hear it for Portland, Oregon's
Matt Clark, who's established the first genuine kids music Kickstarter project. That's right, if you go
here, you can be part of another crowdfunding experiment. $3 gets you 1 mp3; $5 gets you 2, and so on. My favorite level -- $50 gets you (among other things) 3 chances to name the new disk.
Clark's debut,
Funny Little Fella, was a nice little disk -- here's hoping he gets the $3,000 to have round 2 see the light of day.
Hopefully you're seeing a fancy new logo up there at the top of the page and down a bit along the right-hand side of the link bar. Isn't it pretty? I think so (though I probably need to increase the resolution a bit).
When I first started thinking about getting a professionally done logo to replace my own poorly-crafted one, for a variety of reasons the first name that came to mind was that of Brandon Reese. I knew there was a lot of talent in the kids music field -- Billy Kelly, for example, or Kevin Kameraad, not to mention musicians with a nice eye for design, such as Frances England. But Brandon was definitely my first choice.
You're probably familiar with Reese's work -- he's designed album covers for Lunch Money and The Jellydots, not to mention a bunch of games and other stuff for eeBoo. (And I interviewed him a little more than a year ago.)
He has a sense of whimsy and play along with a strong design sense, two things I wanted to convey with this new logo, and I think he nailed it. That logo on the right is what I like to think of as the main logo, the one that if I were to sell all sorts of stuff would be plastered all over it. (Anybody need a men's organic t-shirt?) But it's got a very portrait orientation and sometimes I'm all landscape-y, so Reese designed a second logo that incorporated part of that first logo...
Anyway, I'm very happy with the logo. Thanks to Brandon for taking some pretty vague design concepts and turning them into something with a virtually no fuss. If you want to learn a little bit more about the design process for this logo and Reese's next projects, read on...
