Help Us Choose A Book Cover! (Inside The Book)

We need your help! We are designing the cover of the new Musicality book and we’ve narrowed it down from over 450 designs (yes, really!) to just four.

Now we need your help to choose the best cover for this exciting new book.

You can go to musicalitybook.com to vote now, or stay tuned in a moment for more info.

So the most important thing to say is just go to musicalitybook.com/vote and vote. Give your comments, give your input.

But I wanted to share a little bit more just because I’m always conscious this could be the first episode from us you’ve ever watched.

So if this is your first ever episode, if this is your first time, joining us here on Musicality Now, I wanted to explain a little bit about the book and share a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of this cover design contest we’ve been running.

So this forthcoming book, entitled “Musicality”, simple enough, is designed to be the kind of “missing manual” that we feel every music learner should have been handed on day one.

It’s a hefty tome packed with basically everything, all the most valuable stuff we’ve developed over 15 years here at Musical U, based on decades and decades, I think over 100, if not 200 years of collective experience in the Musical U team. All focused on this topic of musicality, and how you can reach your true musical potential and start doing the things that most people think you need a gift or talent to do.

So this book has been in the works for almost two years now and has become an epic project. And fittingly, the cover design aspect of it has become similarly epic!

It’s been really tough. So just to share a little bit about why we’ve done it the way we’ve done it…

There’s a number of designers we work with on a regular basis who I love to go back to for particular projects, but there are certain types of design work where this idea of having a contest, I think is particularly valuable.

And it’s something we’ve done multiple times going back almost a decade now. I think the first time we did it was actually for the Musical U logo, that came out of a design contest. And I love it for things like logos, because you get so many different ideas, and for something like a logo or a book cover, the concept is so important, I think. And the execution obviously matters, but compared to something like “can you make me a graphic to go on Facebook”, really having a lot of ideas at that early stage is so powerful.

And so we’ve done it a number of times, and I will just say, I know it can be a slightly divisive issue! Some designers hate design contests, and they hate the idea of working on a design and then not winning a prize and not getting paid for the work. And other designers love it because it means they don’t need to do all of the overhead of finding clients and project management and making sure they have work coming in. They can just design all day, basically.

So there are definitely designers that absolutely love it, and we love working with them in this kind of setup for particular projects.

And so I knew when we were coming up with the cover for this book, I wanted to do it this way – and it was not an easy task!

So I won’t share my full description of what we needed the cover to be, but it was lengthy. Because it’s a really unusual book.

It couldn’t, for example, look like “just another music book”. It needed to stand out and clearly be about musicality.

It couldn’t show an instrument on the cover because it caters to all instruments, and so it couldn’t just have, like, a piano emblem or a bass guitar on the cover And that actually rules out a lot of potential design ideas.

It was also a challenge for me because I wasn’t yet quite decided what style of cover I wanted for the book. And our approach at Musical U has always been to try and combine, you know, authority and expertise and really knowing what we’re talking about with a very friendly, approachable attitude.

And I hope anyone in our membership community would agree, we do that pretty well. I think we balance, you know, speaking as the authority and teaching, we teach, but not doing it in kind of a dictatorial way and not being, you know, out of reach and the “guru on the mountain”, like I talked about on a previous episode.

And I wanted the cover to try and hit that, too, which isn’t the easiest thing to do. It’s fairly easy to dry design a fairly dry, textbook like cover, and it’s pretty easy to design a very kind of lightweight, work of fiction type cover, but to marry the two is not the easiest.

So I knew it was going to be a challenging project, and I was so pleased to see the amount of interest we had in this project. The designers really were, you know, they came out in droves.

We had over, I think the total was 470 design submissions! And over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been going through them and giving feedback and rating them and working with the designers to refine them, and we’ve whittled it down to just four.

And I want to invite you today to help us choose which we’re actually going to use.

So you can go now to musicalitybook.com/vote and there you’ll be able to see all four of these candidate designs.

Rate them, leave your comments, let us know what you like, what you don’t like, why you like the ones you do.

I really want you guys to help. And if I show you the page you’re going to land on, it’s going to look a little bit like this. And when you click that button, it’s going to show you the actual designs and you’ll have the chance to weigh in.

And I really carefully planned so that we could factor in your feedback. As you may know, we have a number of Pillar Beliefs at Musical U. One of them is “Better Together”. And anytime we’ve been able to work with our community, with our incredible members to make decisions about what we do next and how we do it, it always works out so much better.

And so I really want your input on this. Whether you are a member of Musical U, or you’re a YouTube subscriber, an Instagram or Facebook follower, an email subscriber, or you’ve just somehow stumbled upon this today.

If you’re tuned in to what we do at Musical U, this idea of musicality, bringing the music out from inside you, developing the instinct for music, getting deeply connected to music and finding ways to express it in a free-flowing, exciting way, then your opinion is invaluable to us on this.

Now, I can’t promise we’ll definitely pick the one that comes highest rated! There are lots of other factors to include, such as feedback from the team who’ve been voting this week and all of the specific comments you make and the reasons you’re voting certain ways will all be taken into account. But the more input we get, the better a decision we can make.

So please take a few minutes out of your day today. We’re aiming to make a decision fairly soon. So if you’re watching this, go ahead right now and vote!

Go to musicalitybook.com/vote . I’m so excited to hear from you and involve you in this decision and can’t wait to hear what you think of these four designs.

I’m very excited about all of them, so I hope you are too!

Go to that link now: musicalitybook.com/vote. Let me know what you think.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music! But only after you’ve voted. Bye!

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