What are your frustrations with making band flyers?

tspike · #1 05-23-2011, 12:12 PM

Hey guys,

I'm a bass player and a programmer and I've recently decided to start my own small business. One thought I had was that since it's kind of a pain in the a** to make good-looking band flyers, I could create a web-based tool for easily making flyers. My initial thoughts were:

- Make it super easy and simple -- there are tons of tools that give you lots of control, but not very many that just make it easy
- Just type in your band name, the date, and other info.
- Have a bunch of different designs and color palettes so you can remix.

Is this something you would use? Obviously I'd like to make a little bit of cash on this but also make something that's genuinely useful without necessarily having to pay.

I was thinking it would be free to make a flyer and to send a low-resolution version flyer electronically, but if you wanted a high-resolution print-ready version, you'd pay $3 or $4 for a PDF. Or you could subscribe and for like $5/month be able to make unlimited flyers.

Basically: make a kickass looking pro quality flyer in less time than it takes to fight your way to the front of the bar line and for less money than you'd pay for a drink.

What are your frustrations with making flyers? Does this sound like a good idea? Would you pay for it if it looks good?

Thanks so much!

Double E · #2 05-23-2011, 12:16 PM

Make it free and see if you get enough traffic to get some adverts. You can also have a premium service that one could pay for to upgrade options.

MJ5150 · #3 05-23-2011, 12:17 PM

Stop putting them on my car when I'm at the mall.

-Mike

warwick.hoy · #4 05-23-2011, 12:31 PM

While I've never made a flier myself,...it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to make one with existing tools and a little knowledge of work flow.

I think it would be a niche market,...at least in my scene,...no one is making any money at this. If they have to pay for it,...they'd likely go elsewhere,...or resort to piracy.

jp58 · #5 05-23-2011, 12:34 PM

The guy at Kinko's saying "So you're in a band, eh?"

Unrepresented · #6 05-23-2011, 12:41 PM

I'm currently the designated flier maker for my band, and at this point the biggest challenges are:

a) finding time -- doing things with a creative flair requires a lot of tweaking until it all works
b) finding necessary info -- looking up addresses, dates, other bands, whatever.
c) finding inspiration -- creating something that is easy to read but also eye catching and professional looking
d) finding artwork, fonts, etc. I have photoshop, and I have a buncha fonts already, so usually art is the hardest part. Especially something that's high quality and large enough to reproduce without being a buncha pixels.

That all said, I'm probably not in the market for a service, since at this point it's mostly a matter of updating some show info and finding an image to tie it all together.

mpdd · #7 05-23-2011, 12:56 PM

if it takes more than 25 minutes to make a flyer then something is wrong, if it takes more than an hour to make a great flyer something is really wrong, try the design index book series by jim krause

MJ5150 · #8 05-23-2011, 01:07 PM

Tips to you guys making flyers.....keep it simple. The date, time, name of the band, and name of the venue is all you need. An easy to read font in black ink on white or bright colored paper works fine.

When I do look at band flyers, I skip the one with large graphics, crappy b&w band pics, and an insane amount of text. I'll decide how good you are, you don't need to tell me how good you think you are, or how awesome you think the concert is going to be.

-Mike

Bozendoka · #9 05-23-2011, 01:25 PM

I'd offer something where you'll print the flyers and ship them - I'm next to positive you could have something set up with Kinko's where you could automatically drop a print file and an address file and they'd print and ship without any interaction from you.

As far as your users: for free, they can download a low-res jpg. For $5 or whatever, they can download a full quality tiff or pdf. Otherwise they can have them printed. Tack on a 20% upcharge on the printing and you're set. (I'm a programmer who has, for no particular reason, been in the print industry for most of my career)

GeneralElectric · #10 05-23-2011, 01:28 PM

Generally bands get a tech savy friend to make the fliers for them. If you offer a printing service as well, then that might help you out as well.

tspike · #11 05-23-2011, 01:34 PM

Good stuff. Thanks for the replies, keep 'em coming....

**jmattbassplaya** · #12 05-23-2011, 02:26 PM

I'd go the free route and see if you can get advertisers interested in your company.

Just some food for thought - I know plenty of advertising/communications majors who have to do stuff like this all the time for projects, so I'm usually never short of someone being able to do something like this for me for free.