When I decided I wanted to be a musician, I wasn’t prepared to spend more time making graphics than music.

I recall an afternoon last year sprawled out on a couch in my communal living room, eyes glued to my computer screen and fingers poised instinctively on the undo keystroke as I approached my third hour on the same show poster. I pored over fonts, sizing and resizing elements to keep the layout uncluttered, wondering if the details of the show properly drew the viewer’s eye. The ideal show poster is a balance of form and function: able to convey critical information while being stylish and vibrant enough to stand out from the piles heaped onto telephone poles – or, more saliently, on the eternal scroll of the Instagram feed. I was excited to practice that balance at first – until the grind became exhausting.

Visuals have always mattered in music. Albums need cover art, performers need outfits, and live shows need flyers to attract audiences. For the majority of the 20th century, those materials were mostly handled by labels; from their chunky coffers, they would commission graphic designers, clothiers, and art directors to handle the aesthetics, with or without the input of their rosters. Then came the DIY movement. Beginning in the late 1970s, this movement developed into a resilient network of independent musicians and labels. To be DIY meant working within your means: hand-drawing or hand-stamping individual album sleeves, xeroxing show posters at the local print shop (always in stark B&W, the cheapest option), compiling collages of ideas and images into zines. The goal wasn’t just wresting financial control from the kingpins of the industry, but creative control as well. Prominent indie labels like SST and Sub Pop housed the works of  album artist Raymond Pettibon and photographer Charles Peterson (respectively), whose works indirectly fashioned touchstone aesthetics for the genres of music these labels proliferated.

Throughout the 21st century, a flurry of technological innovations caused, in short order, the obliteration of the music industry including translocation onto the Internet, and a deep intertwining with the social media platforms which commodified the web. And because these social media platforms operate within the mediums of image and video, independent musicians at all levels are incentivized to allocate additional time and efforts toward sculpting a visually attractive package around the fruits of their creativity. It’s not just show posters and band tees anymore. It’s portrait photography, live photography, longer-form music videos, shorter-form video content, album art, merch design…anything and everything that can catch the eye in the hopes that the ear will follow.

To some musicians, especially those employed in the design world, this balance is a no-brainer. When design comes naturally or is of particular interest, it is easy to revel at the prospect of crafting not just an album of tunes but a living world of brand identity and aesthetics.

Take Emilia Glaser, studio designer for Fruitsuper in Pioneer Square. As the songwriter behind budding dream-pop act Glass Egg, Glaser conceptualizes a nostalgic melancholia of visuals and design around their music. “Creating a visual identity is a lot of ‘big-picture-with-attention-to-detail’ thinking, and I thrive with that type of work,” Glaser says. It comes across, for example, in the album art for their debut album in case I forget you. On it, bold white Helvetica letters are superimposed on a vignette-laden photograph of a child: an analog medium graced with a touch of digital, the past disrupted by the present.

Or take Julian Tennyson, a member of garage rockers Biblioteka. Tennyson, whose love of the visual arts came from his architect father, helps design many of the graphics for the band - including that of the music video for their most recent single. Or take Che Hise-Gattone and Bryan Coats, both guitarists of local retro rock act TV Star and cooperators on most of the band’s visual components. Coats and Hise-Gattone’s collaboration led to the band’s lithe and withered logo - immediately recognizable among the band’s fans. Or take Jordan Moss, a Bellingham musician whose work as The Rhetorician has grown into a high-concept, multimedia endeavor. (“I don’t see us as just a band,” he says. “We can exists as a comic book, TV show, or on ice.”)

These are the people who think about creativity holistically – like an environment, or architecture. It’s no surprise that the musicians who think this way are the ones achieving both personal fulfillment and success on their terms, doing it themselves. For people like me, whose sense of creativity doesn’t translate as easily to other mediums, the struggle is real. Some of us choose to make music precisely because we ache to convey thoughts and feelings beyond the literate or visual realms. To us, the prospect of sitting in front of a computer spending hours fiddling with photo-editing software is enervating; those are hours I could be spending honing my true craft: music.

But, as Hise-Gattone assesses, simply being a musician is a luxury very few can afford. “The resources no longer exist for you to not really care,” he says. Artists historically operated under a scarcity mindset, but today’s paucity of income avenues for musicians (and even for labels) has made it difficult for many musicians to outsource graphic designers or art directors. The design that Tennyson does for other musicians, for example, tends to be on the house. He takes care to delineate between that work and his paid work, for self-preservation. “I get paid to do the 'job' side of my design work, and I intend to keep it that way,” he says.

Even those genuinely interested in designing supplemental visuals for their music can find themselves worn down. It takes time to conceptualize and execute a vision, and we’re too busy working day jobs to afford the effort. That’s led to a universal burnout among creatives of all stripes. “The pace I'm moving with designing, developing, and producing in the way I am now doesn't feel sustainable if we grow in the ways I want to,” admits Glaser.

There is, however, always the devil's deal of generative AI to ease this burden, but the response from the greater artistic community is (and will likely always be) a resounding no. The reasons cascade: it’s an unabashed amalgamated pilfering of human creativity; it’s an affront to the creative process; it’s robbing visual artists of gigs. Few dare take the plunge, perhaps because the results are still easy to spot and you’re wagering your reputation in the process. And for most burgeoning musicians, the respect of your peers is the entire foundation of your career.

It’s a complex issue with no clear solution. At the moment, I’m choosing to grin and bear it. The positive of having to be an ersatz graphic designer is the joy of learning a new skill set, and if I have to suffer, I can at least lean into that surprise sense of fulfillment as a reward. Even if I have to do it over and over and over to stay afloat, as the guitar sits unloved and gathering dust in the corner of the room.