6 days til iB4the1.1!!!!

Yesterday I presented to you the concept of the EPK – a quick video meant to introduce yourself to strangers without having to accept candy and enter their black Oldsmobiles.  Today I’m pleased to introduce our brand new press kit!

A press kit and an EPK serve generally the same purpose, except one is more ADHD oriented than the other, depending on whether you read very slowly or have a terrible internet connection.  There are benefits and fallbacks to both – while an EPK allows for the viewer to get an informative and personal summary of your work, a press kit allows for you to go into way more detail than a several-minute video.  It’s hard to predict whether people, press, and bookers prefer one or the other, so why not create both!

Press kits are PDF documents that vary in length and style, but key aspects include:
(click images to enlarge or download the whole thing HERE)

1. Your bio

2. Descriptions of your work

3. Discography

4. Press articles and quotes

6. List of past shows

7. Contact and booking info

[Click HERE to download the whole thing]

To build a press kit, I recommend using a publishing program, preferably Adobe InDesign.  But others that can make something equally magnificent are Quark, Microsoft Publisher, and very clever usage of Microsoft Word.

Once again, it’s a very self-involved process, and since one of the main challenges artists often have is writing their own bios, I always recommend having someone else whip one up for you (plus, the Adriels know that talking about themselves in third person makes them go crazyyyyyy). Because people sometimes don’t like to navigate through websites and wait for Myspace pages or videos to load in order to learn about you, a press kit allows for them to flip through at their own speed, and focus on the aspects that matter to them.

We’ve been using press kits primarily for bookings since the beginning, even when we were a student organization and my design skills were limited to Microsoft Word text boxes, but they’ve always been one of our most vital aspects, sometimes even more so than this here website.

Here’s something fun and somewhat embarrassing…a history of our press kits, from the very first through the current!  Don’t laugh.  I’ll probably never show these the light of day again.

(2003-04)

(2004-05)

(2005-06)

(2006-07)

(2007-08)

(2008-09)

(Spring 2009)

(2009-10)

THERE!  Now you know our whole lives.  And also how long it took me to learn Photoshop.  But of course we’re not the standard, and though I’m running this series of how to do stuff we do, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we know what we’re doing.  So here are some (somewhat outdated) press kits from other artists!

Blue Scholars | J*Davey | Janelle Monáe | Slick Corea

Make sure to look at the last one…it’s siiiiiiick and basically represents the design that I’m forever aspiring for…in life.