#and instead you need to compare HOW they approach those aesthetics styles etc etc

[sanstropfremir]

Hey! I hops life has been treating you well! And warning for a long and convoluted ask incoming (which is pretty par for the course for me). I’ve been going down a Yunho (U-Know Yunho to be precise lol) rabbit hole and I’m curious how you think he compares to other male SM solo artists especially Taemin (though I think it would be interesting to compare all SM solo artists like BOA or Taeyeon and Hyoyeon for the purpose of this ask im just thinking about the dudes). Cause I feel like him, Taemin, and Kai all fall on different ends of the same spectrum that’s distinct from some of the other SM solos like the other Exos (except I might add Baekhyun in there but I’m just not familiar enough with him) as they tend to tackle that darker sexier sound. I’ve been thinking about how when people say a male solo artists is making taemin lite music it’s usually actually closer to Yunho’s more recent stuff. Like taemin has kind of become short hand for dark male solo concept especially if it’s on the sexier or high concept side when that’s not always an accurate comparison. I’ve seen this especially with Wonho which is really interesting to me cause in my mind he falls way more on the Yunho end of the spectrum than Taemin (by like a long shot). And this could also be cause the kpop circles I run in are way less familiar with Yunho to make that comparison in the first place, I was just wondering if others like you that knew Yunho would agree with me. I also found it interesting that Taemin went solo before Yunho even though TVXQ are the older group so I wonder he affected Yunho’s music at all. Cause Yunho kind of seems like a more, I don’t want to say masculine, definitely more of a player, conventionally sexy foil to taemin’s more unhinged (satanic?? Fantasy? Horror-adjacent? I can’t really describe it accurately but I mean TVXQ has down their share of that too) sensual side and I can’t tell if it’s cause of the age difference between them, their group concepts (I mean TVXQ are the grown men of the kpop industry in my mind and I have no doubt they play a role in inspiring any “manly” or mature concept and Yunho’s concepts seems to follow pretty closely to TVXQ’s image in a way that Taemin doesn’t at all with Shinee), or their own artist personas and careers- taemin has always been viewed as the “feminine” one and you’ve talked a lot about how he’s both rejected and embraced that image overtime in his career. And to further complicate this I don’t really know where to put Kai between them cause he has the more overt sex appeal in Mmmh, and in his image over all, that Yunho has but also is more sensual and softer (subtle?) dance style that seems closer to taemin (or at least taemin’s image I’ll be the first to admit that my understanding of him as an artists doesnt always align with his actual output and the expectations I project on him) so I guess he goes in the middle. But peaches does really stand out as a sort of softer lighter storybook concept (which I love cause I feel like we don’t see traditional concepts that are more feel good) so that kind of throws a wrench into my theory and I guess thats what I get for treating artists’ output as a monolith and for comparing them😅. This ask is getting very very long and I’m late for class so I won’t continue but I did have some idea about where Xiumin’s recent comeback fits into this roster of artists but I’ll save that for another day lol. As always thanks for your input and I hope this makes at least some sense to you!

i stopped photo editing to answer this lmao bc i think this a very interesting question/thought experiment etc etc

firstly, most people will make the taemin comparison for male soloist because he is significantly more well known as a soloist, and part of that is that he's famous for being a soloist; an extension of which is the disparity between his solo work and his group work. now there are two points i want to fork off into from here:

-> the first is that it's a flawed comparison to place yunho, taemin, and kai on a spectrum because they're not derivatives of each other in the way that a spectrum would imply; what they all are is derivatives of rain. every dance-based male soloist is, via some lineage, a descendant of rain, whether it's through the skills line (taemin) or the 'masculinity' line (yunho) or a mix (kai). baekhyun doesn't factor in here because he's almost purely rnb based and therefore a kangta derivative.

-> the second is that it is valid for people to be making that comparison to taemin because most younger idols are going to be using him as reference, and because a lot of these younger idols are following his method of creating a separate solo persona from their group. yunho does not have that distinction. he is quite literally the face of tvxq, and therefore inextricably bound to the group's identity because there are literally only two of them. if they were, for example, still a five member group, he might have had more a chance to diversify himself a bit, but that's a bygone point because we don't live in that world. the reason tvxq made it through the split and maintained being an extremely successful group is very likely because of yunho's singlehanded determination. obviously changmin does care about the group, but as we've seen with his solo work, he's much more of a musical chameleon; he's more focused on dabbling in widely different genres that interest him. yunho's solo music however, is pretty consistent in sound and also not all that surprising of a leap from who he is in tvxq. so by that observation, i would say there isn't actually a difference between uknow yunho and uknow the soloist. his artistic identity is tvxq, in a way that he can't separate, unlike how taemin can separate from shinee. and following that point through, no younger soloist can really be compared to him because his history and group image are so integral to what he does. that's why there's like a negative number of young idols that every attempt to cover a yunho song, bc the vibes of something like follow or thank u would OBLITERATE anyone under the age of 30.

if you were to look at just aesthetics and music styles, sure on the surface there are some younger idols that unintentionally skew more towards some of the stuff that yunho has done, but in the end that's because they're all under the rain umbrella.

#kpop questions #tvxq w #tvxq #yunho #taemin meta #i know i've talked about this before in a post somewhere. but yunho's only comparable peers are literally like. junsu and rain #both them COULD cover a yunho song if they wanted to. but again. their vibes are wrong. they don't have the same desperation #to be completely honest i actually think it's unimportant to compare the literal aesthetics/music style of solo artists #and instead you need to compare HOW they approach those aesthetics styles etc etc #like you could say that taemin kai yunho and baekhyun have all done dance based 'dark sexy' concepts within a relatively close timespan: #criminal (sept 2020) mmmh (nov 2020) thank u (jan 2021) and bambi (march 2021) #but that doesnt take into account the fact that all of them approach the concept of 'dark sexy' totally differently #and each according to their own contexts #i dont think you can put all of sm's soloists on a big scale of similarity of music and aesthetic #i mean. you can bc duh theyre all gonna look and sound similar bc they share resources #but that's not seeing the forest for the trees in terms of actually analysing and understanding a soloist's work #this is basically just a very longwinded way of me saying that i dont think there's anyone that makes solo work like yunho #i guess you could argue that kai is actually the most similar to yunho since he doesnt have a real distinction between solo kai and exo kai #but again its different bc he's got a wider array of genres he's willing to try and exo is not the same as tvxq #but again again its not about relating them to each other. its about relating them in comparison to rain #answers #text #like when i say taemin is more popular i mean like. 1.2 million monthly spotify listeners vs 30k. its not an insignificant difference

[serpentstole]

Hey I was wondering what your view on luciferianism is? I know a lot about theistic satanism (as one myself) and the horned god but not much on Lucifer.

That's a bit of a complicated question! I'll try to keep things brief so I don't end up writing you an essay, but I welcome any follow up questions if there's something I didn't go into/cover/explain.

My view on Luciferianism as a whole is that it's a very vague label. It can encompass a lot of beliefs, both theistic and atheistic (as with Satanism). In the past, I made myself this working definition.

Luciferianism is a religion or system of belief held by those that appreciate and strive to embody the traits typically associated with Lucifer as Lightbringer, such liberation and rebellion over blind faith and obedience, and a pursuit of knowledge or enlightenment. It can be theistic or atheistic, and typically involves an equal appreciation for the arts and science. Incorporating the occult or some form of magical practice is common among theistic Luciferians, but not a requirement.

How people then choose to put those concepts into action can vary wildly. For example, I'm personally of a belief that a focus on liberation, rebellion, a rejection of dogma, and a pursuit of higher understanding of the world around us should lead people to be more socially minded and aware of how many bigotries and biases are built into our cultures and our day to day exchanges. Meanwhile, many people who fall under the vague LHP umbrella (Luciferians, Satanists, etc) will regurgitate militantly evangelical talking points with a coat of black paint, use their animosity towards Christianity as an excuse to be Islamophobic and antisemitic, have incredibly homophobic or transphobic attitudes, so on and so forth. Everyone wants to think they have the actual enlightened truth, you know? I don't think Luciferians are any more or less immune to conspiratorial thought and systemic bigotry than the rest of the population.

I'll also give a quick list of what I (personally) think Luciferianism is not, or at least doesn't have to be, since there's some trends I see in discussions about it that I don't particularly like.

Inherently better or more thoughtful than Satanism. I often see the two described in contrast/opposition to each other, with the idea being that one focuses on the philosophical while the other trends towards being more carnal. I feel like the way they're compared gives an overly simplified view of both, and I don't like that I tend to see it written with the implication that Luciferianism is the more noble set of beliefs. I have my quibbles with LaVeyan Satanism especially, but they're far more to do with the writing that helped inspire it and how I see that put into practice by the Satanists I've known.

Automatically hostile towards other religions. This truly exhausts me. I think the harm that religious groups that have a massive amount of political or social power can inflict on individuals, communities, and even countries cannot be understated. However, I far too often see this devolve into animosity towards the very concept of that religion or the religious individual instead of examining what this says about power, control, corruption, the protection of abusers within their communities, and other important aspects of the issue.

Inherently demonic, infernal, edgy, and so on. I know this is a bold claim coming from me, given my personal aesthetic, and I have often been quietly irked by the Luciferians who try to push too hard in another direction and reject the concept that anyone should approach Lucifer as anything but a love, light, and knowledge Jesus alternative. However, I think a lot of people cling to the idea that a concept, deity, or style of magic needs to be appropriately "dark" enough to be incorporated into Luciferianism. The end result is a lot of appropriation from closed practices and very samey books or talking points.

If you wanted to take a look at some of my thoughts in great detail, I have a bunch of posts tagged as 30 Day Luciferian Challenge. Some of the links between them don't work since they were written before I changed my blog name, but I try to keep the tagging as coherent as possible. I stand by what I wrote (so far as I can remember) so they're a closer look at questions like who Lucifer is to me, what drew me to Luciferianism, my thoughts on the community, advice I'd give, that kind of thing.

#luciferianism #theistic luciferianism #ask #asks #answer #answers #kiaqtexistuku

[mbti-notes]

I'm an isfj. I know someone with serious mental illness and I don't feel very compassionate when I hear about his life. I feel pity, I feel very helpless/powerless and angry, I feel guilty, or I feel uncomfortable and want to turn away coz it's scary that people's lives can go really badly. I feel really selfish being like that and I don't want to be this kind of person. How can I nurture more compassion?

Assuming typical brain development, you are born with the capacity to empathize. Empathy is an important part of human genetic history because we needed it for survival, specifically for successful cooperation. To work together well, we must understand each other well, we must support each other’s efforts well, and we must help each other contribute well. As with any raw, inborn capability, it’s up to you to develop it to its higher potential through the choices that you make. Your choices have decreased your ability to empathize. There are two common obstacles to overcome in the process of empathy development:

1) Egocentrism: People at low levels of ego development aren’t able to empathize because they aren’t able to recognize other people as subjects. Do you understand the difference between a subject and an object? Many people only know the difference in theory but can’t apply it. In English grammar, a subject is the “active” part of the sentence, e.g., the person who is doing something. By contrast, the object is the “passive” part of the sentence, e.g., the person who is having something done to them. This basic grammatical structure belies the framework that the mind uses to understand relationships in the world.

Everybody has their own experience, which means that your understanding of reality begins from your own personal vantage point - you see yourself as a subject, experiencing and doing things in the world. Your vantage point includes things like your self-concept, thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, judgments, schemas, triggers, past experiences, etc. When you look out into the world through your vantage point, you don’t see the world as it is, rather, you merely see the world as it gets interpreted through the content of your vantage point. A simple example: When you look at a painting, what happens? All you see is a canvas with some colored paint smeared all over it? If that’s all you see, then you’re either not human or you don’t have a personality. No, for instance, as ISFJ, you see the colors and whether you like them, you see the image and how it makes you feel, you see the style and how it compares to the aesthetic styles that you’re already familiar with, and so on. 

The same principle holds true when you deal with people. You, the subject, acts upon the other person, the object, with the contents of your vantage point. You don’t see people as they really are but only as you want/expect/hope them to be - it’s all about you. For example: You think about how they make YOU feel, when in fact, they’re not purposely doing anything to make you feel anything. You think about who they remind YOU of, when in fact, they bear no relation to the people you’ve known before. You think about whether YOU are better/worse than them, when in fact, they are simply a person with strengths and weaknesses just like you. And so on.

There’s nothing wrong with having your own vantage point, as we all have every right to our own existence. However, the problem arises when you never learn or never acknowledge that there’s more to the world than your own vantage point, which means that you are, in essence, completely confined by it psychologically. In short, your vantage point gets in your way instead of aiding you. Egocentrism makes it difficult to empathize because you don’t really see people, rather, you only ever see aspects of yourself as you constantly project the contents of your vantage point onto them. This creates ego drama, as you are more concerned with your experience and how you’re reacting than what’s actually going on with the other person. When you’re not grasping the truth of someone, how can you know the most appropriate way to relate to them, comfort them, help them, or guide them, especially when their experience is very different from yours? You’ll be grasping at straws.

Therefore, empathy requires the ability to transcend egocentrism, essentially, to stop approaching the world as though your own experience is all there is (oblivious) or all that matters (narcissist). To have meta-awareness of your egocentrism and understand how it holds you back (in limiting your perception and distorting your judgment) is to create the space to choose differently, i.e., to refuse to be a slave to ego drama. When you finally wake up fully to the fact that you aren’t the center of the world but rather only one equal part of a greater whole, you will possess the humility that is necessary for empathy. Humility refers to the ability to put yourself into the right perspective. A genuinely humble person knows their rightful place because they are no longer a slave to the ego dramas that create craving for strength and superiority and/or fear of weakness and inferiority. Humility allows you to stop treating people like objects and respect them as subjects in their own right. In other words, their experience is just as important to them as yours is to you, and you are both fully equal in that respect, so you know to honor their existence, as you honor your own. This is the basis of the classic golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

What does humility look like in real-life relationships? It looks like LISTENING. To be a good listener is to listen without all the biases, prejudices, and judgments of your ego dramas. Reasonable and sound judgment comes only AFTER you have collected all the facts, which requires listening - only then should you be trying to apply what you know to their experience. But you won’t be capable of listening well if your ego drama is always twisting the facts or if your ego drama always gets triggered every time you interact with someone. To truly hear someone is no small feat. Not everyone who talks about their struggles wants “help”. A lot of human problems arise from never feeling truly seen and heard. Therefore, to be a great friend is, first and foremost, to have the ability to see and hear someone and receive their experience without judgment. Once you are capable of listening empathetically, compassionate action naturally follows.

2) Poor Emotional Intelligence: I have already written about this, so you should read the articles provided. It’s obvious from your description that you have poor emotional intelligence. The development of emotional intelligence is correlated with the development of the F function, so you struggle with using Fe properly. Being confronted by your friend’s struggle with mental illness, your emotions get triggered, your ego dramas start playing out, and in the end, you are stuck in your own head trying to make sense of what’s happening. Your attention isn’t on your friend, is it? You’re not really listening.

It’s common for people who struggle with empathy to frame the problem as “me versus them” - either I protect my own experience or I surrender to theirs. This defensive attitude is rooted in egocentrism. There’s “me”, there’s “them”, and there’s “us”. When you are egocentric, all that really matters to you is "me”, and "they” are only important insofar as they impact you. In “me vs them” mentality, you don’t want to feel any negative disruptions from the outside world, so you close yourself off to emotional influence (a common symptom of Ti loop). By being defensive, you are directly hampering Fe development. Without healthy Fe, establishing a sense of “us” in a relationship is impossible, because the wall of defensive fear never allows anyone to actually reach you. But what about the other side of F dysfunction, such as the people pleasers of the world? They are also egocentric in that they only care about their craving for acceptance and affirmation - it is still ego drama all the same. People pleasers give the illusion of not caring about “me” to get what they want from “them”, but it is actually all about ME and getting them to like ME, not about “us”.

When you have poor emotional intelligence, you aren’t able to accept and resolve your own feelings and emotions, which results in them becoming self-inflicted obstacles - they get in the way of good judgment. Having good emotional intelligence means knowing how to put feelings and emotions into the right perspective, such that they inform you to make BETTER decisions. Resistance to your own emotional life means damaging your decision-making ability as well as resisting all the negative things out in the world. When you encounter negativity in someone else, it reflects back to you your own negativity, and thus begins your ego drama of fighting and trying to bury the negativity in yourself. You are at least aware enough to honestly describe what you feel when you encounter someone that triggers you, but you don’t have the ability to resolve those negative feelings.

One of the main problems of poor emotional intelligence is not being able to tell the difference between thoughts and feelings. Feelings are simple, all you have to do is say, “I feel sad” or “I feel guilty”. That’s it. That’s a feeling. Once you start to say more, once you start to talk about the feeling, then you’re having thoughts. Feelings need not become anything more than what they are, and they come and go like the wind. But thoughts are complicated because they are about analyzing, evaluating, believing, speculating, etc. Thoughts stick to you in the form of ideas and beliefs, and they impair your judgment when you’re not addressing the underlying negativity that creates them. People often try to think their feelings away (i.e. rationalization), which doesn’t resolve anything and even spins you out of control.

You say that you feel guilty when hearing about his suffering. If you feel guilty, then feel guilty. Do you believe that there’s something wrong with feeling guilty? Is it not normal to feel bad for having more than someone when you’re an empathetic person who hopes that everyone can find their happiness? You say that hearing your friend makes you feel uncomfortable because you’re scared of confronting negativity. If you feel scared, then feel scared. Do you believe that there’s something wrong with feeling scared? Is it not normal to feel scared when imagining negative things that could threaten your survival? Why do you view feelings as abnormal or as something to be banished out of yourself? It’s a form of self-loathing.

From these two examples, do you understand that it is your own inability to accept yourself and your feelings that is the root of the problem? As SJ, it is typical to be more concerned with being “proper” than being real, so you consistently deny the truth about yourself because you don’t want to see the many ways that you are “improper”. Resisting your negative feelings and the truth that they reveal about your impropriety only feeds the negativity as you start judging yourself harshly, calling yourself “selfish”, thus your negativity escalates into ego drama and throws you for a loop. By contrast, if you were to simply allow your feelings to inform you about the truth of what’s happening with you and accept that truth gracefully, there would be no need for negative feelings to turn into a big ego drama. 

In the history of psychology, the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers was perhaps best known for his ability to empathize very deeply. He said: “If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual.” 

If you fear change, if you fear your heart being disrupted, if you fear confronting what is strange and unknown to you, if you are easily threatened by difference or negativity, if you fear feeling the heavy moral responsibility of helping someone in need, then you will fear the act of empathizing with people, because they may, at any moment, say/do something that turns your world upside-down. It is that fear which keeps you closed off and stuck within yourself, refusing to empathize when you clearly have the ability to empathize. It’s up to you to acknowledge the fear, accept it, and let it go. Until you make that conscious choice, you are merely stuck on your side of the wall, never able to truly see past it. Only by letting someone into your world, being emotionally strong enough to feel touched without feeling undone, can you establish a connection with them. Once you’re connected to someone emotionally, compassion comes easily (and that is the basis of having a healthy F function). 

#isfj #auxiliary fe #ti loop #empathy #compassion #egocentrism #emotional intelligence #defense mechanisms #self compassion #fear #morality #ask

[tyrantisterror]

TT Rambles: Building a Kaiju Cast

As far as I’m concerned, the kaiju renaissance is in full swing - not just because of movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Pacific Rim, but because of all the original novels, webcomics, etc. that the kaiju fandom is publishing.  It’s beautiful to see all these new kaijuverses blossoming.

and I want to see more of them

It takes me back to that brief, shining period in the early 2000′s where there were DOZENS of thriving kaijuverses on Deviantart, all with weird and wonderful takes on giant monsters that oozed with style and creativity.  God that was a good time and 

I want to see more

So, as a person with a semi-successful kaiju-verse of my own, I’ve been thinking about how I could encourage people to make more kaiju beyond, like, just making my own and hoping it resonates and inspires people like the kaiju-verses that I see inspire me.  And then my teacher brain got to thinking - one of the best ways to help people create is to give them structure to build off of.  So that’s what I’m going to do.

Friends, enclosed here are some written instructions on how to build a fun and dynamic kaiju cast.  You don’t have to follow these rules to the letter, mind you, but if you don’t know where to start, this might help.

Step 1: Pick Your Flavor

There are more ways to make a kaiju story than you may realize, as the genre is deceptively diverse despite its obscurity.  However, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to try to reduce it to two main categories:

Hero Monster(s) saves the world from evil monsters

OR

Hero humans attempt to save the world from evil monsters

This is a crucial fact to figure out before you make your kaiju cast, because the differences between these two variants will inform how you structure your monsters.  In the first approach, the monsters not only need personality and motivations, but character arcs, and benefit from being as distinct from each other as possible.  In the second, the monsters generally have to be a bit simpler and less, well, person-y, so we don’t feel as bad when they’re cut down by the heroes.  They also tend to be more uniform in appearance, origin, and personality, to make the division between humanity and monster more clear cut.  The first approach will generally result in a “humanity needs to be more open minded and compassionate to those we deem as other” sort of message, while the latter will generally show how humanity needs to pull together in the face of catastrophic threats.  On the surface these two story routes may seem very similar, but the differences between them are important ones.

Step 2: The Main Kaiju

In addition to OC kaijuverses, another big trend in the glory days of the DA kaiju fandom was revamping/redesigning the cast of the Godzilla franchise.  There were dozens of different takes on it, and a friend of mine noted a peculiar but important lesson that could be learned from each of them: if you looked at how each artist redesigned Godzilla himself, you could basically predict how the rest of the monsters would look.  This is because Godzilla is the crux of his universe - all the other monsters are designed to play off of him, and thus any change made to Godzilla will be reflected in the rest of the cast.

You can see this in other stories as well - Batman’s cast is built around his gothic horror/detective fiction roots, Spider-Man’s around his teen drama/sci-fi genre mashup, etc.  As a general rule, stories are tailored to their protagonist, and in kaiju fiction, the protagonist is generally one of the giant monsters.  Therefore, figuring out your main monster is important, as they will ultimately shape the entire story.

Now, when I say “protagonist,” I mean this in the “main/most prominent character” sense, rather than the “hero” sense.  Your main kaiju may be a bad guy - they may be the villain of the story, the face and root of its conflict.  Alternatively, they may live up the hero label in every sense of the word - one of the coolest things about the Kaiju genre is that it sports a LOT of heroes that are also non-human characters.

If you are going for the second variation of the kaiju genre - that is, the “Humans destroy evil monsters” story - your main kaiju still matters, even though it likely isn’t a prominent enough character to really qualify for protagonist status.  In shows like Evangelion and Ultraman, or movies like Pacific Rim, there are still essentially “main” kaiju - that is, kaiju who define the style and approach that monsters in the series will take.  Often they’re the first monster the heroes encounter - Knifehead from Pacific Rim, for example, establishes early on the aesthetic and rough personality of the giant monsters featured in the movie.  Other times they show up later in the story to make a big impact - Red King and Gomora in Ultraman both showcase the creativity of the show’s designs while having unique personalities and power sets that really leave an impact on the viewer.

When creating your main kaiju, consider the following questions:

- What if your monster’s main motivation?  Is it looking for something?  If so, what?  Is it seeking revenge?  If so, why?  Is it defending its territory?  Is it investigating civilization?  Is it searching for food?  Company?  The greatest kaiju characters have clear and defined motivations to bring them into the plot, just like all good characters do.  What is your monster’s drive?

- How tough is your monster?  Kaiju generally get into a lot of violent conflicts, so determining how much punishment your monster can both withstand and dole out is important.

- What are your monsters’ vulnerabilities?  This includes both physical weaknesses and psychological ones.  Are they weakened by the cold?  Incapable of flight?  Slow moving?  Quick to anger?  Stupid?

- What strengths/powers does your monster have?  Can it heal fast?  Is it smart?  Does it have unique weapons?  Is it creative?

- What quirks does your kaiju have?  Is it gluttonous?  Cocky?  Graceful?  Clumsy?  Does it beat its chest or dance in triumph?  Does it cackle maniacally while wreaking havoc?

- What is your monster’s relationship to humanity?  Does it hate humans?  View them as food?  Feel indifferent to them?  Is curious about them?  Cares for them?  How does humanity feel about it in turn?  Does this relationship change over the course of the story?

- What is your monster’s attitude towards other monsters?  Is it hostile towards them?  Friendly?  Indifferent?  Does its attitude vary depending on the monster?  Is its attitude mostly consistent with a few exceptions?  Does it have friends?  Enemies?

- How did your monster come to be?  Is it an atomic mutant?  A mythic beast?  A space alien?  A prehistoric creature from a forgotten age?  We’ll dive into the archetypes associated with these origins later, but keep the question in mind.

Part 3: Other Kaiju Roles

Once your main kaiju is figured out, you can start building the cast proper in reaction to it.  There are LOTS of ways you can do this, but I’m going to focus on a few common roles supporting kaiju have to play:

- The Arch Enemy: the King Ghidorah to your kaiju’s Godzilla, the Gyaos to its Gamera, the arch enemy is exactly what it sounds like: your main kaiju’s recurring nemesis, a big bastard of a monster that your main kaiju absolutely hates.  You don’t have to limit yourself to one of these, of course - most main kaiju in fiction have a LOT of enemies, since monster battles are one of the main draws of a kaiju story. At the same time, most kaiju stories also tend to have one kaiju that is more wicked than most, whose grudge with the main kaiju is more vicious than normal.  Creating an arch enemy for your main kaiju is a good way to give your story structure - every protagonist needs a primary antagonist to struggle against.

- The Guardian of the Earth: a lot of main kaiju tend to be anti-heroes, often starting off as enemies of mankind before slowly becoming protectors of the earth.  As a result, a lot of kaijuverses often include an explicitly good kaiju who exists in contrast to both the main kaiju AND the main kaiju’s enemies.  If the Arch Enemy kaiju is often what the main kaiju could become if they don’t change their ways, the Guardian of the Earth is what the main kaiju usually works towards being.  Or, in short: every Godzilla needs a Mothra to be the angel on their shoulder.

- The Damage Sponge: Sometimes there are kaiju who are famous not for their prodigious destructive power, but rather for their ability to endure ridiculous amounts of damage, even by kaiju standards.  The damage sponge normally isn’t the main kaiju, since the main kaiju’s job is to establish a baseline, while the damage sponge is defined by being more durable than other monsters.

- The Runt: a smaller than usual kaiju, who often compensates by being faster and more clever than the usual kaiju.

- The Giant Among Giants: the kaiju that makes other kaiju feel small, generally used to escalate the plot by its sheer power.

- The Rival Turned Ally: since kaiju generally socialize by fighting, most kaiju friendships begin with an unsuccessful fight to the death.  Often your main kaiju will have at least one friend who began as a bitter enemy.

- The Big Eater: In large kaiju casts where the kaiju have different motivations and morals, there will almost always be one kaiju whose ethos can be defined as “neutral hungry.”  It’s not good, it’s not evil, it just wants to eat, and unfortunately everyone else looks like a viable meal.

- The Brute: while all kaiju are generally violent and tough, the Brute takes it to another level.  Its violence will be more extreme, its bloodthirstiness beyond compare, and its raw strength will surpass most if not all of the other monsters on the cast list.

- The Clever Bastard: like the Brute, the Clever Bastard makes for a harder than normal fight.  However, instead of relying on sheer strength, the Clever Bastard uses cunning to make the fight more vicious, being a devious schemer who thinks significantly more than the average monster.  It may also have more than a few tricks to its biology to help it as well, and generally manages to throw the heroes off guard by doing things they wouldn’t expect.

- The Innocent: in a world full of violent monsters, this kaiju is a notable exception for its sweetness and (relative) vulnerability.  It means no harm and often has few ways to defend itself, and as a result is generally imperiled by the more vicious and bloodthirsty giants in the setting.  The main kaiju may actively try to protect it, though the harsh world of kaiju means its likelihood of survival is rather slim.

Part 4: Kaiju Archetypes

Ok, now that we’ve talked about the more substantive personality based stuff, let’s get onto some fun surface details.  The origin and design of your kaiju are important in their own right, but work best when they are made in service of your kaiju’s personality and role in the story.  A lot of people start with these archetypes first - “I’m gonna make a fire breathing reptile!” - and while this can result in a good monster design, it doesn’t necessarily translate into a memorable kaiju character.  Tailoring the design and origin to your kaiju’s role and personality, on the other hand, is more likely to result in a character we remember, since the design is now more than a surface detail - it’s an extension of the character.

Archetype 1: The Fire Breathing Reptile - best exemplified by the big two, Godzilla and Gamera, almost every kaijuverse has at least one big reptilian monster, and that monster likewise almost always has the ability to breath fire.  It calls back to the many European dragon myths, and is just a fun visual in general.  This archetype is so prolific that many modern kaijuverses actually skip it because it’s considered cliche, but while it may be hard to make a fire breathing reptile kaiju standout, the trope is still a classic and one many people think of as synonymous with the genre.

Archetype 2: The Big Ape - similarly, King Kong has made giant apes a staple of the genre, to the point where they are almost as common as fire breathing reptiles are.  King Kong vs. Godzilla in turn made it customary to pit these two archetypes against each other, and as a result every kaiju story that has both a fire breathing reptile and a big ape will almost always portray them as natural enemies.  The Big Ape is one of the archetypes that is most likely to be presented as sympathetic/heroic, following the logic that more closely related to humanity a creature is, the more noble it must be.

Archetype 3: The Magnified Bug - since kaiju are in part defined by being way bigger than an animal has any right to be, one of the most extreme visuals you can bring to a kaiju design is to take something that is normally very small and make it HUGE, because this emphasizes just how exaggeratedly big the kaiju is.  As a result, giant arthropods - insects, spiders, etc. - are very common in the genre, as they really sell the idea of kaiju being unnaturally enormous creatures.  Magnified bugs are generally not treated as sympathetic kaiju for the same reason big apes usually are - if we treat “more human = more good” as true, then bugs, being distantly related to humanity, can’t be very good creatures.  However, there is at least one prominent and notable exception to this rule, and to be honest it’s a rather shitty rule anyway.

Archetype 4: The Mechanical Doppelganger

Ever since Mechani-Kong stepped onto the silver screen, it has been a tradition for a main kaiju to have a robot or cyborg made in their image as part of their rogues gallery.  Hell, even Gomora from Ultraman got one, and that’s a show where the monsters aren’t protagonists!  Like the previous tropes, this is one that comes to mind when people think of the genre, as countless parodies (including an infamous episode of South Park) have shown.

Archetype 5: The Alien Invader - a monster from another planet, with all the strange biological quirks such an origin implies.  In Monster Saves the World kaiju stories, the alien is usually brought in late in the tale to heighten the stakes by delivering a stranger threat than the usual kaiju.  In Humanity Saves the World kaiju stories, however, most kaiju tend to be alien in origin, which is used to justify wiping them out since they are an invasive species by nature.  Alien kaiju are rarely sympathetic or heroic.

Archetype 6: The Mutant - whether the result of atomic fallout, genetic engineering, pollution, or some other unnatural mistake, the mutant is a new lifeform whose monstrous form is the direct result of humanity breaking the natural order of things.  A LOT of kaiju are mutants, as the kaiju genre began during the atomic age as a direct reaction to the discoveries of what radiation could do to living creatures (discoveries that ranged from “Wow these radioactive fruits are really big!” to “Oh god this radioactive man is full of tumors!”).  When a mutant is in a kaiju story, it exists at least partially to point out how humanity is screwing up.

Archetype 7: The Prehistoric Monster - often (but not necessarily) going hand in hand with the fire breathing reptile, the prehistoric monster is a kaiju whose kind lived millions of years before humanity evolved, in a time when giants ruled the earth.  It is only a monster now because the world moved on while it didn’t - small creatures took over while it slumbered in some hidden location.  This trope is becoming less common now that science has marched on and we treat the giant fauna of prehistory less like monsters and more like, y’know, actual animals, but it’s still a fun one to play with even if it has little basis in actual science.

Archetype 8: The Sea Monster - the ocean is full of weird animal life, and creatures are able to get much larger underwater than they can on land.  As a result, giant sea monsters are a trope as old as story-telling itself, and are particularly prominent in kaiju fiction.  Sea monster kaiju have a tendency to be particularly huge and abstract as kaiju go - one of the perks of hailing from a relatively alien environment.

Archetype 9: The Mythic Monster - While the earliest kaiju stories lean more sci-fi than fantasy, the genre quickly stretched to take elements from both.  As a result, it is just as common to see kaiju based on real life myths as it is to see ones that are atomic mutants or space aliens.  In fact, some of the bigger names in the kaiju genre have even alternated between having sci-fi and mythic origins, being atomic mutants in one tale and guardian monsters of ancient kingdoms in the next.

Archetype 10: The Defense Robot - Often (but not always) overlapping with the Mechanical Doppelganger, this enormous mecha is humanity’s ultimate weapon in the struggle to survive a world filled with kaiju.  The actually effectiveness of the defense robot varies from story to story, but they often have greater offensive capabilities than flesh and blood kaiju while at the same time being a lot less durable.  The Defense Robot rarely gets out of a battle unscathed - though it just as often comes back with a new remodeled look to fight another day (and also sell more toys).

Archetype 11: The Human Kaiju - most common in Humanity Saves the World from Kaiju stories, the human kaiju is, well, a human who becomes a kaiju.  Sometimes it’s a temporary transformation, other times it’s permanent.  Human kaiju are almost always the main characters of their given story, as the story potential of a human who can take the fight to the monsters is VAST.

Archetype 12: The Blob - our final archetype will be the blob, because sometimes you just want a big ol’ heap of goo in your story.

Conclusion

To reiterate, none of these things should be considered “requirements” for a kaiju story.  Think of this as a set of guidelines rather than strict rules to follow.  Many of the best kaiju stories have thought outside these archetypes, roles, and character questions, so you should by no means feel constricted to follow these ideas to the letter.  However, if you want to start on your kaijuverse but don’t know where to begin, please consider this as a starting point.  If you work with this approach, I think you’ll be on your way to making a fun cast of giant monsters in no time!

#TT Rambles #kaiju

[viktorbezic]

Lessons on Creativity from Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin is arguably one of the greatest producers of all time based on the number of hit albums produced. With a track record of not only popularizing new genres but also reviving artists and bands of the past by producing in a wide variety of genres. In my mind, the creative lessons learned not only transcend music genres but creative disciplines as well. His production credits are too numerous to list and span the gamut of metal to country and include: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, AC/DC, Slayer, Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and Heartbreakers, Rage Against the Machine, Frank Ocean and the list goes on. I’ve made it a personal exercise to try and extract patterns or core principles that lead to his creative success from a doing a deep dive into his career through Jake Brown’s Rick Rubin in The Studio. The lessons learned are found below. They serve as reminders for me but hopefully are useful to others.

1. All aspects of your life fuel your creative output.

“My production style involves being in tune with everything. You can’t do it by listening to music. Pro-wrestling is really important. Movies. You know, everything. You have to make records the way that you live your life.” - Rick Rubin (1)

Your lifestyle contributes to your creativity. The rooms you sit in, the places you eat, the things you see, the media you consume, your routine and the people you talk to all have an influence on you and have the ability to spark something new. The act of creating is in large part a focused act. One of doing. But time away from work is critical as well. It creates the space for you to reflect and get a different perspective. You become the sum of influences. But sometimes you can’t do through sheer work alone. Sometimes you need time away from the work to make new connections. This is what Rubin is referring to when he says, “you can’t do it by listening to music.” In Wired to Create the author Scott Barry Kaufman describes how solitude leads to creative breakthroughs. As Kaufman states, science has confirmed that solitary reflection feeds the creative mind. Isolation is needed to reflect, make new connections and find meaning. Kaufman highlights some of the reclusive activities of filmmakers, writers, and philosophers seeking refuge in remote cabins to create from Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman to philosopher Martin Heidegger (2).

Another factor Kaufman highlights that lead to creative breakthroughs is an openness to new experiences. Kaufman references studies that show a higher correlation between openness and total creative achievement over other traditional characteristics such as IQ and divergent thinking (3). Having a singular focus may make your work feel one dimensional. By using your whole life to help influence your work the higher chance of originality.  Rarely are our interests singular, and it’s tough to place the various aspects of ourselves into silos. By embracing all of your influences, you’re able to channel a distinct point of view which shows up in your work.

2. If it’s a team effort, you have to like the people you work with.

The starting point for all of Rubin’s work is whether or not he has a healthy relationship with the artist. “I have to really like them as people first and foremost.” It can’t only be about the music. He really cares about what kind of people the artists are and what’s going on in their lives. He uses these inputs to evaluate whether or not they should collaborate (4). It sounds, but when tensions arise from pressure like a project deadline, poor team dynamics lead to the team's demise. The parallel here is also don’t work with assholes or be an asshole yourself.

Many creative partnerships start around mutually shared interests and a curiosity about the other collaborators. Someone’s project may hit you in the right way. You might reach out and ask how they produced the work and what their process is etc. I like the idea the conceptual artist and hacker Ryder Ripps puts it, "Those are the best kinds of friends to make, the ones that are around shared projects and interests” (5).

It’s hard to imagine any team that hates each other going the distance and doing great work. It happens on occasion. An example that comes to mind is A Tribe Called Quest. When they made the Love Movement they hated each other. And it’s arguably their worst album. It wasn’t a total write off, but it didn’t compare to the Low-End Theory and other records they had early on when they were more of a cohesive unit.

3. It’s not about what you can add, but you can take away.

With any creative project, the things that you don’t do are just as important as the things that you do. Rubin is a long time fan of AC/DC, he was drawn to them by their simple guitar riffs. It had a profound impact on how he thought about music. Rubin focused on simplicity with all of his artists and peeled away any unnecessary parts to get to the essence of an artist's music. As an example, when producing Electric for The Cult, he asked Billy Duffy to not use any effects on guitar solos. He’d tell Duffy “Play it clean, man; use a Les Paul, no effects.” (6). Bassist Jimmy Stewart also mentioned, “we stripped off all the surface clutter and got down to what we are really all about.” (7).

When Rubin helped the Red Hot Chili Peppers with Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Flea remarked, “On the majority of rock records you don’t hear a guitar or drums or bass. You hear a bunch of processed synthesized shit. That’s all because it’s a wall of sound…a recording studio creation. This record is very minimal, and it’s very live. When I hear it, I get a picture of a hand hitting a guitar, a string vibrating. This is four guys playing music. That took us a while to learn to do. There are so many options in the studio, you’ve got to know what you want. We were real careful not do anything unless it helped the song, which meant keeping that ‘band feel’ all the time."

My key takeaway, if something doesn’t feel right, trying to improve it with effects won’t work. Instead, we should be digging down deeper to find what better resonates with our tastes. By avoiding creating a wall of sound, the Red Hot Chili Peppers honed in on what really made a song great in their minds. It’s about peeling away the things that aren’t necessary. This can apply to any creative discipline. IE. Simplifying a design, editing down our writing, etc. As Antoine Saint Expury famously stated, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

4. Don’t get stuck in a ‘genre.’

Rubin continually pushed himself to work with all different kinds of artists and music genres. From Rap and Heavy Metal to Country. His guiding principle was to operate on the fringes. He was into both Rap and Punk in the 80s because at the time they weren’t mainstream and there was a lot of room for experimentation and defining the sound (8). He started with hip-hop producing for both Run DMC and the Beastie Boys. Then he had success producing for The Cult which he followed up by producing for Slayer and Danzig. Creative differences with his Def Jam partner Russell Simmons forced him to create a new label. Instead of turning Def Jam into something it wasn’t. He decided to leave Def Jam and moved to the west coast to form Def American for all his other musical endeavors outside of hip-hop. Guiding principles for Rubin were vital, including a feel for music regardless of genre. It was about getting to the heart of an artist, and their music was about.

I’ve interpreted this as an example of being open and pursuing the things that feel right to you. If you feel like you’re not growing or stuck within a style, defined by you or not, it’s important to experiment outside of those boundaries. It’s effortless to do what you know and get complacent. Or take gigs to do X thing because you’ve done it fifty other times before. I’m not saying jump around and change your aesthetic or voice every week. You should definitely try to master a work style and hone in your voice in a focused way. Once it becomes routine, a change is required to maintain continued growth. A core philosophy or point of view that you can take with you across projects no matter how varied they may be. For Rubin, it was production by reduction and bringing mainstream sensibility and organization to music that’s on fringes or forgotten.  

5. Produce a lot of work and mine for ‘hits.’

This is definitely not a new idea, but to produce good work, you need to create a lot of it. It’s rare that you get a hit from producing only a small handful of things. A volume of work is required to not only build up your skill set but to actually start finding things that work. It also gives you way more material to recombine and reshape. Ultimately, after long sprints of creativity, you need a period of time edit and curate. You can’t jump into editing from the onset as you might not have enough output to play with. You also might squash new ideas by editing too early.

Rubin’s approach is to get artists to write at least 30 songs to be able to have 10 that are album worthy. If a band only writes 10 songs the chances are only 2 are album worthy. He encourages songwriting because the artists are in fact writers, and writers write. It’s the homework that needs to be done before you get to the studio. You need to know you have great material before getting to the studio. The studio is for performing and not writing. When Rubin produced Californication for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he had them write a ton of songs, around 30 to 40. Followed by heavy practice during the spring and summer, so they knew exactly what they needed to do when they got to the studio (9).

I’ve rarely come up with a great idea without writing down hundreds of ideas. On top of that, it gets you into a rhythm and flow versus editing too early. Editing too soon can easily result in writer's block.

6. Technical skill doesn’t always trump substance and taste.

The designer Ben Pieratt turned me on to a concept he adopted from the book cover designer Peter Mendelsund which he calls “special wrongness.” It’s the quality of something that’s slightly off that makes it memorable or gives it a unique character. He used it in the context of creating a name for a company, but I feel the concept works for any form of creative output. When we try to perfect something, smooth out its rough edges or refine it to death, we smooth away some of its original voice and character. Rubin doesn’t focus on the technical skills it takes to produce a track but searches for what he finds unique in song. It usually the unique quirks or what others would perceive as mistakes that are part of the artist’s individual expression (10).

Most of the studios Rubin works in were built in the 50’s or 60’s. He believes their sound is superior to a modern studio that is appropriately spec’d out and perfected. He describes these studios as follows, “before they were kind of magically, with smoke and mirrors, made to sound good by people with good ears. Now everything is computer generated. Now it’s perfect, but there’s no vibe at all…” (11).  Bad vocals can be pitch corrected. You can argue that these corrections don’t make the work any better, depending on your definition of ‘better’. I guess the key whether or not there’s something worth correcting in the first place. Rubin goes on to state, “I do not know how to work a board. I don’t turn knobs. I have no technical ability whatsoever. But I’m there when [artists] need to me to be there. My primary asset is I know whether I like something or not. It always comes down to taste…I’m there for any key creative decisions” (12)

7. You don’t need to wait for special equipment to get it done. Embrace constraints.

When Rubin and the Beastie Boys produced their first album Licensed to Ill, they had no samplers and no digital technology. Chung King where they recorded was an analog studio. They would make tape loops. They would also have 3 or 4 people on a console who would be responsible for however many buttons they could press. There was no automation the songs were literally hand made. On the drumbeat in “Fight for Your Right,” Rubin and engineer Steve Ett would physically hit the rubber pads with their bare hands to emphasize the song’s kick and snare parts. Even though it took much more work to create a song it allowed for more freedom to alter a song on the fly (13).

There has to be a strong desire to create. With that, you’ll use anything that’s in front of you to pull something off. I’m reminded of a quote from photographer William Eggleston that illustrates the point, "The artist... If the thing is in that person to do, it will find a way out. Doesn't matter where you plant it.” Waiting to buy the latest tool, or to properly learn the software, may not help you produce better work. Or even help you produce more work. You may find another excuse altogether once you get the equipment you think you need. Start creating and experimenting with whatever you have in front of you. The only way you’ll learn to do something right is by spending a large amount of time doing it wrong. I’m using “right” in relative terms. As in what’s right for you. Constraints may also help the creative process along. I’ve written a series on creative breakthroughs based on constraints here.

8.  Collaborate and Cross-pollinate

Rubin highly encouraged collaboration among all of his Def Jam artists to come up with breakthroughs and to push each other creatively. LL Cool J wrote songs for Run DMC. Run DMC shared songs with the Beastie Boys. An example is Slow and Low. The Beastie Boys took the track and modified the lyrics to reflect their interests. The idea to play the beat backwards on "Paul Revere" came from Run when the Bestie Boys were looking for a slower beat to rap over. Around this time Rubin had also signed Slayer to Def Jam. He walked down the hall and asked guitarist Kerry King of Slayer to play the lead on the Beastie Boys “No Sleep till Brooklyn” track. They shared the studio and didn’t know each other until the collaboration. It took a few minutes, but it became a signature part of the song (14).  

Although Def Jam was a small label and didn’t have a massive roster of acts Rubin used what artist he did have in his studio to full capacity. They influenced each other, and he could take parts and pieces of their talents and strengths to make a song that he felt in his mind worked. My key takeaway is, yes it’s good to work alone to get things done. But periods of collaboration are needed to expand on initial thoughts and improve the final product. Diverse perspectives can lead to more unique outputs. Stephen Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From highlights London coffee houses during the Age of Enlightenment. It wasn’t the lone genius toiling by themselves but the interactions between creative people and free-floating conversations around different passions and interests. It allowed different networks of people to come that typically wouldn’t in the course of their day. And through their interactions would get new ideas (15).

9. Work with your idols

AC/DC is a band that Rubin admired for years to the point where AC/DC became his archetype for how to produce rock records. Very minimalistic sounds, peeling back all the layers to get to a raw sound. He worked directly with AC/DC after years of using their music as his benchmark for an excellent rock record. Their first collaboration began when he worked on one song with AC/DC for the Last Action Hero soundtrack. He would later produce 1995’s Ballbreaker Album with his idols. The key for Rubin was going back to their classic signature sound that was very stripped down (16).

In my mind, I think it was inevitable that Rubin would cross paths with his heroes after being committed to their music making approach and applying it to most of the bands he worked with for so long. He was so well versed in their material that when the opportunity came up, he was prepared to capitalize on it and brought them back to their original sound. It’s rare that we get to work with our heroes. But having a group of creative folks whose work you appreciate and follow may help guide some of your own work as there's some type of resonance between the work that they produce and the work that you create. Austin Kleon referred to this notion as identifying your creative lineage. Similar to a family lineage there’s a genealogy of folks who came before you that you have parts of. There’s also a genealogy of ideas. Although you can’t pick your family, you can indeed select who you allow to influence you based on the books you read, the music you listen to, etc. Similar to where we started in the article. Your creative lineage the sum total of life experience. What you let into your life becomes what influences you. You become the sum total of your influences. Although it’s rare to wind up working for your heroes at worst, you’ll end up finding a community that shares similar influences (17).

References

1.  Rick Rubin: in the Studio, by Jake Brown, Accessible Publishing Systems, 2009. Page 1. 

2. Kaufman, Scott Barry. Wired to Create. Penguin Publishing Group, 2015. Page 45. 

3. Idem. Page 84. 

4. Rick Rubin: in the Studio, by Jake Brown, Accessible Publishing Systems, 2009. Page 3.

5.  Anderson, Chuck. “Life + Limb.” Ryder Ripps - Life + Limb // A Podcast about Creativity with Chuck Anderson, 10 Sept. 2014, www.lifeandlimb.com/episode/ryder-ripps.

6. Rick Rubin: in the Studio, by Jake Brown, Accessible Publishing Systems, 2009. Page 63. 

7. Idem. Page 64. 

8. Idem. Page 4.

9. Idem. Page 141.

10. Pieratt, Ben. “A 3-Step Process for Naming a Project/Product. (And Some Resources).” Ben Pieratt, Blog, 20 Feb. 2014, blog.pieratt.com/post/77293289254/a-3-step-process-for-naming-a-projectproduct.

11. Rick Rubin: in the Studio, by Jake Brown, Accessible Publishing Systems, 2009. Page 11.

12. Idem. Page 15.

13. Idem. Page 45.

14. Idem. Page 46.

15. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come from: the Seven Patterns of Innovation. Penguin, 2010.

16. Rick Rubin: in the Studio, by Jake Brown, Accessible Publishing Systems, 2009. Page 120.

17. Kleon, Austin. Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative. Workman, 2012.

#my writing #long reads #creativity #creative process #music production #Rick Rubin

[allblackmusclemen]

Bodybuilding: is it worth playing candles?

When in some countries bodybuilding federations do not make any restrictions, there are enough "freak" participants who are not always enthusiastic.

They become a laughing stock for the audience and a target for the judges' frequent taunting remarks to their ears. I often felt sorry for such "young" athletes. And the question always arises: why do they do it? Becoming a laughing stock, many of the grief-builders never go on stage again. Their self-love has already been killed away. Some of them, of course, don't care about it, and they are glad to rush to the podium again and again to amuse their self-esteem. Such athletes are just excessively high opinion about themselves, and no one can convince them that they will never get into the top ten.

When we start to pump our muscles, we usually do it because. That we want to become like our muscular companion, or an athlete in the photo that we come across or like the girl from the next yard. Everyone, of course, has his own idol. First, we start to gain some weight, and then more and more often we stare at our reflection in the mirror in an attempt to see increasing volumes. But there comes a moment when it suddenly seems to us that we have achieved something, and now we have something to show others. At this moment, it is imperative to have a real sober head of a friend or coach next to us, who must cool the passion and make us really look at our results. The best criterion that determines the moment of your readiness for competition should be a compliment from someone you don't know in the gym. If you start to make compliments, it means that you have really acquired some forms that people around you already notice.

But you should also remember that not everyone has the right idea about really well developed, quality muscles. For example, there are guys who sit on a steroid needle all year round, have a fat layer of 50% and weigh far from a cent. They usually wear sweaters and do not bare anything but their hands in summer, because they are really afraid to show off their stomach. You should not listen to such advisers, because they do not understand anything in bodybuilding. For them, the criterion of a person ready for competition is huge bodies and strength in the hall. Such people usually remain terribly dissatisfied with judging, when the first place is taken by an athlete with relief, quality muscles and excellent proportions, and the "flooded" big man with elephant legs is put on the second, or even fifth place.

If, however, you really want to participate in bodybuilding competitions, then you should pay attention to the following.

Genetic data

Bodybuilding is a beautiful, aesthetic sport, it is won by athletes with excellent genetics. Because there are standards, according to which judges determine the winners. And these are not the sportsmen with huge muscles, but suffering from the lack of beautiful proportions. There are a lot of measurements. At one time, there were such mastodons as the American Paul Dillet, and the Germans Gunter Schliercamp and Markus Rohl. When these guys came out on stage one by one to pose, the hall was delighted. Huge forms, incredible relief! All this impressed the audience. But as soon as they stood in one ruler compared to a star like Flex Wheeler, the raptures subsided. They never defeated Flex. So, if you do not have good genetic data, then accept the idea that you always have to be, at best, second. I will tell you right away that being second is also a good thing. But this is, of course, in a professional league, and only the chosen ones rise to this level.

Bodybuilder CharacterIf

You have a weak character, then forget about bodybuilding as a pipe dream. "Iron" sport requires maximum dedication. Solid character and willpower are needed to follow your diet scrupulously every day. In order to overcome your laziness and weakness in the gym. In order to force yourself to increase the load on training. In order to be able to sit on a strict diet of 12 weeks a year, and perhaps even longer. In order to be able to return to the gym when no one believes in you. And finally, you need character to not give up on iron after you've stopped competing. After all, bodybuilding is for life and more. And not because it is necessary for the beauty of the body and self-assertion. It's because if you quit pulling "iron", then you will no longer have the same health. There comes, as doctors say, the "failure syndrome". From the very beginning of your work with heavy weights, your heart gets used to work in a higher mode, and in no case you should not break this mode, or there will probably be chronic failures in its work. No one wants to have a malfunction of the heart.

Life style rocking

You will have to reconsider your lifestyle. Understand me correctly: of course, in the world practice there are athletes in all kinds of sports, who train in the hall during the day and in the evening they drink beer and vodka, smoking all this with a cigarette, and despite all this, they are able to show high results. But don't be seduced - these people can be called extremists and nothing good will happen in the future. As a rule, the career of such people ends very quickly and sadly. If you want to be in the spotlight for many years, you should live bodybuilding. And this means that you will have to get a personal coach in the gym, in order to be constantly near the simulators. You need to eat properly and fully, and for this you should start earning good money. The power mode in the bodybuilder's life is in the first place, and therefore it is necessary to strictly monitor the mode of eating. Every time you miss the next "feed", you will lose muscle mass, which means - move back in development. It cooks for you all day long and takes care of you like a child. But do not forget that for this, again, it is necessary to earn a decent income to support your wife, who will become a housewife because of you. Of course, you will be lucky if you have a sponsor. Then partly the financial problems will be solved, and you can concentrate even more on your career.

The meaning of all training

Many people do not have the slightest idea of how professional bodybuilders live. Once I talked to one acquaintance who asked me about exercises and different training "nonsense". Word for word, the conversation suddenly turned into the fact that he had recently met with a popular Russian bodybuilder. And that he was lucky, too. He is a world-famous bodybuilder. Money sea, fame, etc., etc. I am, of course, dumbfounded, where such false information comes from. I have known this athlete for over twenty years. Together we performed and traveled around the country with guest poseings. We are still in close contact and often meet in business. In a word, the welfare of my old friend is well known to me, and, I will say not melting, he is far from being a millionaire. Now he trains governors and rich people, but to say that he is provided for life, I would be afraid. And I gave this example to the fact that a lot of rainbow lies hover in people's brains. And there is a lot of wrong information about our sport. That's why with the confidence of a connoisseur of this question I would say that 90% of Russian competing bodybuilders barely make ends meet. I will also tell you who of our sport is really rich and, alas, they are not Russian sportsmen. They are Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler, Lee Labrada, Rich Gaspari and so on. As you can see, there is not a single Russian name. This is all the elite of the world's professional bodybuilding, which earned money from constant victories in competitions and guest poses around the world. Only the elite of professional bodybuilding has solid contracts. The rest survive, who can. The main income of professionals is earnings from advertising sports supplements, seminars and personal training . It is this industry and contains the whole world bodybuilding. If people stopped using supplements, then bodybuilding would die.

Conclusions on everything said

I hope I did not cut off your desire to perform. I would really like to open your eyes to the real facts and put you on the ground for your own good. Bodybuilding is a super sport. Only it can really change the figure of a person, can help improve health, can bring back youth. But do not forget that it is a hard sport, which can be traumatic, both physically and psychologically. Some of you have already heard about steroid addiction. Well, it does exist and bodybuilding is one of those sports where steroid addiction is developed much more than in other kinds of sports. Often, you have to see people who inject you instead of repetition or approaching the muscles.And this is tragic, because not only the meaning of training is lost, but also the idea of a healthy body. If you look at the lineup of athletes in the late eighties and early nineties and compare them with a lineup of today's professionals, built for comparison at Olympia, you will notice an interesting pattern. Yes, undoubtedly, modern athletes have progressed in size, but do they look better? Of course they do not. They have become heavier and more massive, but also uglier. If you look at the stars of the nineties - Barry De May, Gary Stridom, Sean Ray, Lee Labrad, etc., you will see a healthy look, a dig of head hair, clean skin and a narrow waist. Today's pros have sprawling bellies, bald head and pimple skin. This only indicates that previously steroids were used in reasonable quantities, but now - in crazy doses, unprofessional, unjustified. Previously, the bodybuilding philosophy was built primarily on training, and only the second - on steroids. And now the uncontrolled use of steroids is what guides athletes in the first place, and training is relegated to the second place. But, thank God, the International Federation has finally started taking reasonable steps which begin to stop the attempts to distort the essence of "iron" sport. After all, first of all in our sport there should be excitement and craving for "iron" rather than dependence on steroids and the number of cubes in your syringe. Have a healthy workout for everybody!

One of the sources:

https://fbfm.moscow/

#bodybuilding #health & fitness #sports #sport news #gym

[piotrbezhukov-blog]

So I Wrote a Concert.

Hey everyone. This is a longer post, so fair warning.

I didn’t have a terribly productive summer, musically speaking; a lot of my time was taken up with other stuff (work, an internship, other personal obligations, a depressive episode I’m still not on the other side of, etc, etc). That’s not great, because usually the summer is when I compose most of my stuff (usually, in the sense that I have a composing schedule after only a couple years of composing--ha!). With  all that said, I did manage to write enough for a short concert of chamber music, centered around the solo piano and the piano trio! 

I’d never really written for the piano before-- the polyphonic nature of the instrument scared me, as someone who writes melodies by ear and has no real grasp of harmonies. However, I like to think that I have a good grasp of rhythm (that tap dancing background is good for something after all!) and that was my guide through the instrument. As for the piano trios: I love the cello, and can tolerate the violin. Why wouldn’t I write some trios. 

With all that said, I’ve included links in the title of each piece to rough MP3′s of each of the four pieces for the concert. Below each link are the program notes I’ve drafted for the concert program. I’d really appreciate it if y’all let me know what you think!

Grazie,

T.A.R.

PS-- As always, PDF’s of the scores are available upon request.

Link and Program Notes for the Piano & Piano Trio Concert

I remember the first time I read a Bernard Shaw script. It was his Saint Joan, and, like most of his scripts, contains a long essay about what he as the playwright wanted to accomplish by writing the play. The essay is nearly as long as the play itself. Since then, I’ve tried to keep two goals in mind: first, to use program notes to explain clearly at least one thing that might be of interest to the audience for each piece that I write, and second, to avoid Shavian long-windedness in my program notes. Success is, as ever, illusory. With those goals in mind, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to offer you a guide through the pieces you’ll be hearing tonight. These remarks follow no particular pattern, nor do they dwell on a consistent topic—the focus, broad as it may be, is merely to offer some context (whether personal, aesthetic, or what-have-you) fr each of the pieces in the way they’ll be presented tonight. None of the pieces are so complicated or obtuse to make this guide essential reading (or at least I hope they aren’t), but you might like something to do while you wait for the concert to start.

A Minor Catastrophe:

The first piece in this concert for piano trio is actually not a piano trio at all; instead, it’s a piece for solo piano. It wound up on the program tonight simply because I think it serves as both a warm-up (and then some) for our wonderful pianist [insert name here], and because for better or worse I think it does a good job explaining my particular musical ‘voice’ (how I hate that pretentious term) or idiom. The piece is titled A Minor Catastrophe, which sums up the structure of the piece well. There is relatively little thematic material holding it together—instead, the cohesion comes from a relentless rhythmic intensity, and constant tension between various rhythmic patterns. The title also contains a pun to the constantly recurring theme—a simple tracing out of the A minor chord, which underpins the entire piece in the manner of minimalist harmony (that is to say, the harmonic structure of the piece is relatively static and entirely tonal). This three-note theme creates a tension with the other material of the piece, which shifts between phrases in multiple different times—that is, a phrase ‘in three’ (with a one-two-three, one-two-three rhythmic pattern) with pull and push against a phrase in four (a one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four pattern). I’ve used this pull and push to create some of the rhythmic energy of the piece, and if nothing else it keeps it moving along briskly.

Entirely in one movement, the whole of the piece finishes within the nine minute mark. In that sense, and given what could generously be called a rhapsodic form (and less generously a rambling one), it’s probably best to call this a “piano prelude,” according to the formal conventions of ‘classical’ music. Those conventions aren’t a language I’m entirely comfortable using; I was raised on ‘popular music’ and never had any formal musical training or education until college, and what education I have is introductory at best. I’ve always composed entirely by ear and inspiration, which probably accounts for some of the structural ambiguity (or incoherence) in the first two pieces you’ll hear tonight.

However, despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of a rigid structure of this piece, I think it offers a good look into my mental process and the way I think about music, as both a composer and as someone who listens to music. In that sense, I thought it would be a useful way to start tonight’s concert. Unrestrained by outside conventions, this piece, I hope, will serve as a workable introduction to the kind of music you’ll hear tonight.

With that in mind, let’s look at the second piece.

Quick and Dirty:

Having established a sound world for this concert that is essentially without traditional conventions or forms, this second piano prelude takes us a little further down the path of modern music. By that, I mean that the harmonies are more jagged and dissonant, the rhythms less predictable and more unsteady, and the melodies completely fragmented.

I wrote this piece, like virtually all of my pieces, by ear. Usually, this process entails a stunningly bad first draft of a piece that I then slowly whittle down and shape into something that comports with my limited knowledge of traditional conventions (sonata form, tonal triadic harmonies, etc, etc). And usually I wind up reasonably content with the result—I say reasonably content because as an artist I’m never truly happy with my work. This process, however, does lead me down the path of neo-romanticism, or sometimes minimalism, or so on. In other words, I worry that it tends to make each piece sound derivative of someone else’s music. So I tired something different.

With this piece I tried to create something that was purposefully *ugly* in the way it sounded. Hence, the title “Quick and Dirty.” (It’s also a comparatively short five minutes, thus the first part of the title.) I intend for this ugliness to remove the impersonal polish to try and find a more distinct musical voice underneath all the convention. As always, however, that is a judgment that is ultimately up to you the audience.

I was interested in ugliness, specifically, for a few reasons. First, a lot of my effort usually goes into disguising the work that goes into a piece–that is, making each piece look effortless and sound, if not pretty in the stereotypical sense, at least polished to a sheen. The other reason is that I’ve never really used music as an outlet to explore my mental state; it’s never the way I think about it. My usual approach is to create a piece for someone or something else– that is to say, I write a piece for X instrument because a friend needs a new piece to pad out their recital, or because I want to see what I can do with an odd instrumentation (i.e. two clarinets and a viola). I thought I should probably look inward at some point, and this is a somewhat clumsy first result.

Triage:

Having used the first two pieces of tonight’s concert to show off the pianist, I thought it would only be fair to similarly showcase our excellent string players [insert names here]. This second piece, a short piano trio, was built around what are called ‘extended techniques’ for playing string instruments. In other words, there are instructions for the players to use their instruments in some odd ways, to produce sounds that are rather different from the normal lyricism and rich song-like lines of the violin and cello. The intended effect is to add an ethereal element to an already somewhat mournful piece. (Of course, you know what they say about artistic intentions.) It might be that mournfulness that led me to the title Triage, which to me conjures up an image of the dead and dying, but I honestly think it was the shared prefix with the word Trio. I’m very drawn to surface similarities as a way to connect seemingly disparate concepts. On top of that, I do like a good pun. Sadly, between the title of the first piece and the title of this one, apparently I have to make do with remarkably poor ones.  

The form of this piece is essentially undefined, floating between one idea and the next. There is an occasionally recurring metronome in the piano, and few moments when all the players elaborate on a syncopated scale. But aside from those occasional grasps of familiarity, the players glide from one gesture to the next, sometimes echoing or reflecting back to each other, but never stopping to relentlessly drive a musical idea into the ground. It’s a dreamlike and insubstantial conjuring of a particular tone, or mood.

It’s also resolutely tonal, with very conventional harmonies and so forth. While I would hardly call myself a neo-Romantic composer, I’m certainly more comfortable writing the sort of music you can hum on your way out of the theater than I am writing more avant-garde or conceptually intense music. That’s probably a function of my composing style—I like to hum up a melody before I ever sit down at a piano or computer to work out the harmonies, the instrumentation, or any other aspect of a piece. And sadly, I never learned to hum in set theory tones. (Any singer could tell you I never learned to hum in any kind of tone, but that’s another conversation.) All of which is to say that, while I’m a great fan of most of the quote-unquote “new music” composers and the pieces they’re putting out, and while I admire the artistic talent it takes to write that sort of music, it’s a talent that I either don’t have or haven’t cultivated. My sound world is entirely blue-haired.

Which brings us to the final piece of the evening.

Piano Trio No. 1, ‘Repartee’

I very rarely like any of the pieces I write. Part of that is just the standard-issue self-loathing of the artist, part of it is that I’m still a relatively immature composer and I can see the amateurism in what I write, and part of it is simply that by the time I’ve finished a piece I’ve heard the playback from my electronic score so frequently that the familiarity renders it loathsome. The larger part, however, is a kind of conceptual loathing—very rarely does my original idea for a piece survive contact with the actual process of writing it. However, with this piano trio, the original idea sails through in fine form. That’s probably why this piece is one of my personal favorites.

I had a very basic idea for this trio. I wanted to write something glittering, light, and adorably entertaining. Forget artistic pretensions, or rigorous theory to back up every choice of chord. This is a piece that I had fun composing, and that you’re going to have fun listening to. The informal title, Repartee, reflects that idea: a jaunty conversation where the verbal volleys banter back and forth and around the room as everyone laughs gaily and has a grand old time.

The first movement is a light allegro: open, airy, dashing along to leave you suspended in a pleasant haze. The second movement, though a slower adagio, maintains the airy feeling through the use of transparent orchestration and delicate quavers in the right hand of the pianist. Throughout the third movement, a faster tempo creates tension with a lethargic two-step time signature; this tension propels the piece into the fourth and final movement, an ecstatic release for both players and audience, with the notes rushing by on their way to a triumphant finale that seems to arrive altogether too soon. The structure is fairly straightforwardly linear and old-fashioned. Each movement follows the rough pattern of fast—slow—faster—now-really-fast structure of most classical pieces, to present a clear contrast between movements, and to make sure there’s enough variety to keep everyone (me included) interested. One note about the musical theory: the first movement sits in B major, and every subsequent movement sits one half-step above the previous movement (so the second movement is in the inescapable C major, the third in C sharp major, the final in D major). I like to think this gives us a sense of rising up through the progression of the piece, even as we slow down to look at the pretty scenery.

The key to this piece, I think, is the incredibly simply and open harmonic pattern. In a word, I eschew the chromaticism of the neo-Romantics, and avoid the atonality of the avant-garde in favor of something closer to three-chord rock & roll. By keeping each instrument confined to a particular distinctive timbre, and by avoiding cluttering up their respective lines with excessive and extravagant harmony, the interplay between each of the short melodies—not quite full melodic lines, but more substantial than quick motives and phrases—is highlighted. The forward motion comes from a bounding and delightful rhythmic energy and the changing interplay of these short melodies.

Don’t remove any part of this caption and don’t steal shit, y’all. 

#new music #music #classical music #piano #piano music #piano trio #my compositions #composition #composer #concert #modern music #art #new art

[sometimesalwaysmusic]

THE PALE LIGHT

After cutting his teeth with For the Mathematics and Higher Rights, Robb Barnes (RB) was looking for a new challenge: enter The Pale Light. We spoke about his history playing music, love for vintage keyboard sounds, ideal meal companions and the end of the world. Check out Future Eaters and read on! 

VITALS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thepalelightmusic/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_pale_light

YouTube: http://bit.ly/2oYgXQW

Latest Release: Future Eaters (LP, Mar 2017)

Upcoming shows: Stay tuned!

SA: How did The Pale Light come to be? RB: The Pale Light came about in early 2016. I was thinking of starting a podcast and then got some gear to record. Once I had it, I thought to myself, "I've got some gear on hand - why not try to record some music instead?" I had stopped writing music for awhile. I would write some tracks to jam with friends, and I would still play guitar regularly, but I had dropped regular writing since Higher Rites (my last band) dissolved in 2010. The experience was pretty liberating; modern technology makes it feasible to write and record all instruments and put out a decent-sounding record. So the band was simultaneously a way to explore audio engineering and to start working on music again in earnest. It was also a chance to indulge my growing interest in vintage keyboard sounds. 

SA: What bands, musicians or artists would you cite as the biggest influences on your sound? RB: The bands that influenced my old music continue to resonate today - groups like At the Drive-In, the Mars Volta, etc. But I think the biggest influence on the Pale Light's sound is probably Operators, a band led by Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs). I love the synth sounds on that album, and there's a real energy when the keys are paired with a bad-ass rock band. Other influences include Interpol, the Strokes, Twin Shadow, the Cure and Nine Inch Nails.

SA: Thus far in the band's lifetime, what has been your biggest success? RB: So far it's been writing, recording and producing a full length on my own. No fancy studios, no guest musicians, no producer - just me in my basement, agonizing over kick drum sounds, synth sounds and getting a sweet sound out of my old amps. The whole experience was challenging, but also very exhilarating. From a creative standpoint, it was also liberating. I love playing with other musicians, but there's something very cool about being able to sculpt every sound on an album yourself.  

SA: On the other hand, what is the biggest challenge you have faced, and how have you dealt with it? RB:  I think the biggest challenge has been psychological: convincing myself that this is something I could commit to again. I tried really hard with my older bands - I put a lot of money and time into practicing, touring, recording, gear, etc. Because I took my past projects so seriously, I ended up pushing other things away - important things like finishing school, investing time in relationships, and getting a reliable or rewarding job. Now I'm at a different stage in life, and I'm working on a way to integrate music into my daily rhythm in a way that balances with other priorities, while not at all sacrificing the music or the live show. I think I have the formula now, at least conceptually. Time will tell if I'm right.  

SA: How do you approach the song-writing process? RB: Well, it used to be very bass-driven or guitar-driven. I would think of riffs and then write around them, usually with a fast tempo and Latin rhythm. That was the case with For the Mathematics and to some extent for Higher Rites. Now, with the Pale Light, a lot of it starts with keyboard sounds. I play around with different melodies using different keyboard sounds until something cool starts happening, and that usually materializes into a riff or chord progression. Then I write around that. As someone whose main instrument is guitar and not keys, it's liberating in part because I don't really know what I'm doing. What key am I in? Does this song have a major or minor scale? These questions get answered in time, but when I start the songs I often have no idea what's actually going on, technically speaking. It's also cool from the vantage point of a guitarist and vocalist, because it leaves so much space for those instruments.

SA: What are your thoughts on the Ottawa music scene? RB:  It's been awhile since I was fully engaged in it, but I'm looking forward to jumping back in. I think Ottawa is underrated. At the end of For the Mathematics, I was living in Montreal. Higher Rites lived and died in Toronto. Both of those cities are wonderful places, and I have musician friends who are doing quite well in the Toronto music scene, but I'd rather be in Ottawa. It's a good size, and there's a sense that the musicians who stay here are committed to building community. In Toronto, there's this expectation that you're in the big leagues and you have to be a little more vicious or self-interested, or something like that. In Ottawa, I never felt that way. People here love music and they want to help others who love music. It's as simple as that.  

SA: Your recently released album, Future Eaters, is described as being about 'creeping fascism and the end of the world' on your Bandcamp page. Can you unpack that description a bit more, and has what influences your song-writing changed over the years? RB: Lyrically, all three bands share a kind of autobiographical approach, with heavily reliance on metaphors and other imagery to make the messages sound more universal and less awkward. When I was in For the Mathematics, a lot of the lyrics dealt with interpersonal relationships. To a certain extent, that remained true in Higher Rites. Now that I'm happily married, there's not much drama to report on the interpersonal level, and so that doesn't manifest itself lyrically anymore. But I am heavily engaged in the environmental field, and the political field to a certain extent. The lyrics on Future Eaters reflect a sense of loss and dread at the dawn of the Age of Trump, but also point to more systemic concerns. Many scientists now argue that we're entering a new geological age that they dub the Anthropocene. This age is characterized by the dominance and pervasive impact of humans. I look around and all I see is impending climate catastrophe and supposedly enlightened humans chewing up the natural world, either literally (eating animals) or figuratively (oil and gas development, cascading biodiversity loss, rampant ocean acidification, plastics pervading our water bodies, etc.). This album is about reconciling my life as an activist with my hopes for the future, and my angst about the utility (or lack thereof) of political engagement.

SA: Given your history with bands of a variety of genres, what made you want to follow this style with this band, and how has your song-writing approach compared or contrasted with past projects? RB: On this project I finally had the opportunity to slow things down a bit. I really wanted to build long, lush passages of sound where melodies could really stand out. And as a writer this meant I needed to rely on something beyond the usual guitar-bass-drum dynamic to keep it all in place. So this project really allowed for experimentation with keys and drum machines. This was also an occasion to really be heard as a vocalist - to stop yelling and to start singing, allowing the words to stand out be understood. In the past, I distorted the hell out of my vocals and then usually buried them in the mix. This time I set out to be understood, and to let the message of the music stand out. As for what led to it, I think it has something to do with coming of age in the 80s and 90s. Although Nirvana and Metallica are what really got me into being a musician, that stuff was predated by some pre-grunge and non-metal 80s and 90s stuff that also feels like a part of me. Stuff like old U2, Bruce Springsteen - even Sinead O'Connor. Some of that music is hugely dependent on good synth sounds, and it was fun to try to recreate some of that feel while remaining rooted in the indie rock world.  

SA: You have the change to sit down for a meal with three musicians, dead or alive. Who are they, and why? RB:   Kurt Cobain, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Julian Casablancas. I started playing guitar because of Nirvana. If I could talk to the ghost of Kurt Cobain, I'd ask him what was going to come next after In Utero. I started taking touring seriously because of At the Drive-In, so I'd like to thank Cedric for blazing a trail and just being this fount of restless creative energy. As for Julian Casablancas, I modeled the songwriting approach and aesthetic in For the Mathematics after the Strokes, as much as that might not sound obvious. I've always enjoyed his tendency towards sonic experimentation, even when it doesn't work out. I'd like to hear what makes him tick.  

SA: After the successful release of Future Eaters in March 2017, what comes next for The Pale Light this year? We wish you guys the best, and good luck! RB: Well, I'm getting a band together and we're going to start playing live soon. I'm super excited. I'd like to bring some serious energy to the live show, which should be interesting given the tempo and mood of the album. I think it'll work. Stay tuned!

#robbbarnes #thepalelight #futureeaters #ottawa #toronto #newmusic #livemusic #indie #rock #postrock #kurtcobain #atthedrivein #thestrokes #sineadoconnor #u2 #bruce springsteen #operators #wolfparade #handsomefurs #themarsvolta #interpol #thecure #nineinchnails

[laurelkrugerr]

Visual Design Language: The Building Blocks Of Design

About The Author

Gleb has more than 15 years experience leading product, UI and UX design across web, mobile, and TV ecosystems. Gleb has rightfully acquired a global following … More about Gleb …

A robust visual design language is the cornerstone of good design. Here’s how the team at Fantasy approached designing a mobile OS for Huawei.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

Like written words are to language, fonts, colors, shapes and icons are to visual design. An effective visual design language not only acts as a communication framework for all stakeholders on a product development team, but unites a brand and its customers to ensure that a company’s brand identity matches a customer’s brand perception.

We use language as a tool for communication with other people. Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users. Fonts, colors, shapes, visual elements such as icons — those are elements of design language. Effective design language streamlines communication.

While working at Fantasy in 2016, my team was tasked with designing the interface for Huawei’s mobile OS (EMUI 5 interface). I personally was responsible for the visual design language for this OS. Surprisingly, the company didn’t have its own language at initiation; instead, they relied on a customized version of Android that was plagued by inconsistency and lacked a coherent vision. This was largely due to the existence of multiple teams and multiple functional roles with different skillsets and perspectives all grasping at straws to invent a way to communicate. UX designers, interaction designers, visual designers and graphic designers had all worked on the OS in the past, all using their own best efforts to communicate.

Without a uniform system of communication, not only was the user experience jumbled and confusing, it was extremely difficult to integrate changes into a final design. It was a true Tower of Babel.

Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users.

What Does Design Language Provide?

By unifying the project teams under one shared language, a project can move forward with clarity, cohesion and speed.

Consistency

Digital design has few physical constraints compared to industrial disciplines. This gives designers a lot of power to experiment and propose a variety of solutions to any given challenge. However, this can easily lead to disjointed user experiences.

To achieve consistency in design, it’s vital to define reusable and cross-platform components and styling options. Consistent design makes it much easier to ship products on a multitude of platforms and devices, which is especially crucial for companies like Huawei.

Brand Recall

When they interact with a product that has a strong visual language, users tend to remember it better. Unfortunately, a majority of products available on the market have generic designs. It is too easy to confuse one product with another when they share the same visual styles.

Creating a strong visual identity is a goal that design teams should state when working on visual design. This is the personality of a digital product! The colors, typefaces, photos, illustrations, animations are all part of a brand, and they should be designed in a way that helps people remember the product. When an authentic design language is followed consistently, it creates recognizability for the brand.

Clarity

We put a strong focus on clarity — we wanted to make our GUI clean, not cluttered. By following a minimalist approach, we minimized the number of elements that users have on every screen and created a highly-focused experience.

Minimalist design helps to focus user attention on important elements of your design. EMUI 5.0 Concept by Fantasy (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

A Way To Innovate

With so much competition in the phone market, companies invest significant resources to make people try their products. Companies invest in innovation and try to break new ground to attract users and peak their interest. Visual design is often the fastest and cheapest way for a product to innovate.

How Do We Create A Design Language?

For me and my teams, the process of creating a design language, we follow the same rubric we would create any complete consumer product: research-ideate-design-validate- implement. This is how we ensure that the language will work for our target audience.

Research

Often, the VDL is the most important, cornerstone product we create. And like every product you design, research should always be the first. When we started this Huawei project, it was important to understand the opportunities for our design. Jeshua Nanthakumar, a lead UX designer on this project, and his UX research team analyzed all mobile OS available on the market and identified the full range of challenges typically faced by users.

The UI Audit

As I’ve mentioned above, achieving consistency was one of the goals of creating a shared design language. It’s essential to standardize the visual design. That’s why even before starting work on a visual language, we decided to conduct a UI audit. Our goal was to understand the anatomy of the Android OS.

We broke down the whole mobile OS into atomic elements—colors, shapes, shadows, lines, transitions. By decomposing the design, our team was able to see how individual pieces work together and form a greater whole. At the end of UI audit, we had all the elements that make up the digital product (buttons, navigation bars, icons, etc.) grouped into distinct categories.

Understand How Users Perceive The Brand

When working on visual language, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of who you’re designing for and how they perceive your brand. Ideally, brand identity (the way the brand wants to be perceived by users) should match with the brand image (the way users actually perceive the brand). Designers have a direct impact on brand identity. Aesthetic styles, language & tone, iconography, and illustrations — all these are elements of brand identity.

Our goal was to create an innovative design language that feels customized for its audience. To understand how your users perceive the Huawei brand, our team invested in user research. We knew that design language should successfully meet the needs of both Eastern and Western design sensibilities, so we categorized large groups of users and created summaries based on the available information about our target groups. Every summary about our audience had the following information blocks — demographics, what they care about, and their expectations. Here is an example of the summary of the group of North American customers:

Huawei’s core audience lives both Urban and Suburban environments;

They are driven by business, social status, and personal organization;

Age range 30-64;

Average income: USD $75.000 per annum

They care about:

Being organized and ordered

Efficiency and productivity to enable them to enjoy their own time

Their expectations

Contributing to something bigger than themselves

Maximizing life and living for happiness

With the idea that design should match the audience’s lifestyle and be extremely refined, we evaluated every design decision in accordance with the needs of our target segments. This understanding will give you a reason for your visual direction.

Analyze Major Competitors

To identify strategic design opportunities, our team conducted the competitors’ analysis. We’ve identified four major competitors who had strong design languages and focussed on identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For example, when we evaluated Apple iOS, we’ve mentioned the following strengths of the language — scalable across devices, great focus on standardization, unique identity — and the following weakness — inconsistency with iconography, overuse of blur effects.

Four major competitors of Huawei at the time of our analysis. Every brand represented a large part of the market and had its own robust visual language. (Large preview)

This analysis helped us to identify four major directions that brands followed when they create products:

Empathetic to me (design tailored for the needs of the target audience; design that demonstrates real empathy with the human and truly reflects the audience)

Novel design (design that uses innovative visual styles and interaction patterns)

Commonplace design (design that utilizes conservative style elements)

Standardized for all (heavy standardized design)

We put every brand on the plot with those four directions.

Identifying opportunities for Huawei visual language (Large preview)

This process helped us to identify the opportunities for Huawei language:

Scalable Design Language The language should scale across devices and across third-party developer apps as well.

Unique Design DNA The language should be unique and distinct from the major competitors.

Be Bold Yet Timeless The language should be long-lasting.

Define Requirements For Visual Hierarchy

When UX researchers analyzed typical user complaints, they found that the location of key interactive elements was one of the most common problems that many mobile users mentioned. In 2016 mobile screens become larger and larger, but the location of key functional elements in Android remained the same — the top area of the screen. As a result, users had to stretch their fingers or change their grip in order to interact with the elements.

Thumb Zone: how easy it is for our thumbs to tap areas on a phone’s screen. (Image credit: Luke W) (Large preview)

Today a bottom-area navigation is an industry-standard, but back in 2016, the situation was a bit different. We’ve reached the Huawei engineering team with this insight and asked about the technical feasibility of moving controls to the bottom area of the screen — this area is more comfortable for user interaction. The engineering team confirmed that it was possible to move the elements, and we helped define the new default location for functional elements.

Functional controls are located at the bottom of the screen — in the easy-to-reach area. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface by Fantasy) (Large preview)

Ideation: Defining A Design Vision

Creating A Philosophy Of Design

Imagine that you need to design a language that will be integrated into products that will be used by people all over the world. The natural language we use in interpersonal communications cannot be separated from a culture because it has a close relation to the attitude or behavior of speakers of the languages. The digital language is absolutely the same — it should look natural for customers in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

The success of any visual design highly relates to how people perceive it. Many factors are influencing human perception, and the significant part goes to psychology. To create a sophisticated design, you need to consider the meaning of shapes and the impact which they have on users’ minds.

Creating a philosophy of design is extremely challenging, and you cannot do it alone. That’s why I worked with Abigail Brody, a former Apple creative director who joined Huawei in September 2015 as Chief UX design and VP of Huawei Devices. At Apple, Abigail was responsible for iOS design. She was the one who described the methodology of visual language to me.

Together we spend a lot of time trying to find the direction for visual design, and we’ve decided to use the philosophy of organic design as a foundation for our design language. Organic design is centered around using nature as the biggest inspiration.

Organic Design was pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright who believed in creating harmony between people and nature. (Image credit: museiitaliani) (Large preview)

According to this philosophy, design should help to achieve harmony between people and nature. When we worked on our visual language, we focused on incorporating natural forms (smooth curves and organic forms) in our visual design. As a result, all visual elements, such as buttons, icons, and shapes, had an organic design aesthetic.

Round shapes are one of the things that make organic objects different from non-organic. (Large preview)

Using Motion Design To Create A Distinct Visual Identity

There is no doubt about the importance of the role that motion plays in mobile design. For many product motion serves a purely-functional role—it provides feedback for user action and connects different states of the mobile app together. The well-crafted motion also makes things more attractive, and as we know, attractive things work better (the aesthetic-usability effect says that people are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing).

Our team put high stakes on the motion. Our ultimate goal was to use motion to breathe life into our products — make the interface feel alive and dynamic. We wrote a motion design manifesto with solid design principles. Every animated effect and transition that we wanted to introduce in our design was measured in accordance with the functional and emotional benefits it delivers to end-users.

We know that early impressions of a product design are especially important. And for that very reason our key focus was on creating magical moments — surprise and delight users while they interact with the OS.

[embedded content]

This video demonstrates the visual effects we used in EMUI.

Design And Testing: Build, Test, Iterate

Baking Meaning Into Every Design Element/Design Decision

Just like we have rules for using words in sentences in a natural language, we should have rules for using visual elements in visual language. Strong semantics is what makes visual communication efficient.

When a team works on a visual language, it should take two rules into account:

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

There should be no isolated units in visual language. Every unit in a visual language should be a part of a greater whole.

The animated effect behind the user avatar is used to convey a sense of active call. The animation is both meaningful and pleasurable. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

Experimentation And Design Review

It’s impossible to create a great design from the first attempt. Design is an iterative process, and whenever our team created a new visual solution, they evaluated it by comparing it with previous solutions. The comparison was visual—the screens were laid side by side on a board, so everyone could see the parts that require additional polishing. Team members gather together on informal design reviews where they discuss the pros and cons of individual solutions.

Design review in progress at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Pattern Libraries, Style Guides And Design Principles

Pattern libraries (reusable building blocks such as UI bars), style guides, and design principles (principles that allow developers to propagate design language in their own apps) are essential elements of design language. They are the foundation of the design system — a shared resource that teams use when they create interfaces. The fact that we’ve conducted a UI audit during the research phase helped us to categorize the visual design elements. We’ve established a toolbox for everyone who worked on the project. So, when a new member joins a team, all they need is the toolbox, and they are set to maintain consistency.

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

Test Early, Test Often

The Huawei EMUI project was an extremely important project for the Huawei Corporation. It was essential to ensure that the language we’ve defined work for the users. And the only way to get this understanding is to test our design as soon as possible.

We’ve followed a simple but effective technique — build, measure, learn. By following this approach, the design team didn’t postpone the testing design until the release. We’ve incorporated visual language into functional prototypes and tested them both inside our group (dogfooding) and outside (with real users). The feedback collected during the testing allowed us to understand what worked/doesn’t work for users.

Sharing the results of testing with product teams at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Implementation

If you have had a chance to use the Huawei EMUI 5 interface, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Um, that doesn’t look exactly like Gleb said!” And that’s true.

Production version of the Huawei EMUI 5 interface. (Image credit: androidauthority) (Large preview)

It is a sad reality that almost no design team is responsible for the implementation of this solution. Unfortunately, a lot of solutions we proposed to the engineering team weren’t implemented properly, or at all. As a result, the design language we’ve created and the design language the end-user saw in Huawei products end up as two different animals. But this is purely my opinion. In 2018, Huawei surpassed Apple in smartphone sales. The UI was a critical element to user confidence.

Based on my experience, the challenge of implementation is common for large-scale corporations. When designers who created the language aren’t invited into the process of implementing this language into the product, the final results will always be compromised. What usually happens is the engineering team follows a path of least resistance — they adjust the design solutions to the technical constraints they face when they start.

Every company needs a top-manager who cares about design and is ready to fight for it. It’s a well-known fact that when the original minimize animation in macOS that was proposed by the Apple motion design team, the engineering team said that it was impossible to implement that. At that time, Steve Jobs insisted that this animation is a must-have for MacOS. As a result, this animation became not only the most memorable transition for first-time users but also one of the things that contribute to good UX in MacOS.

The instantly memorable window animation of the Mac OS (Large preview)

A Robust Visual Design Language Is The Heart Of Good UX

Visual language can have a dramatic impact on user experience. It’s able not only to reduce friction by making UI more predictable but also to create delight. By pairing great form with excellent function, we will have an excellent user experience.

Visual language is a by-product of product design, and it requires a similar design process. It’s iterative and requires validation at every step along the way. When you build a visual language, you establish a new ecosystem for designers, and this ecosystem creates harmony between different teams involved in product development.

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source http://www.scpie.org/visual-design-language-the-building-blocks-of-design/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/visual-design-language-building-blocks.html

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Visual Design Language: The Building Blocks Of Design

About The Author

Gleb has more than 15 years experience leading product, UI and UX design across web, mobile, and TV ecosystems. Gleb has rightfully acquired a global following … More about Gleb …

A robust visual design language is the cornerstone of good design. Here’s how the team at Fantasy approached designing a mobile OS for Huawei.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

Like written words are to language, fonts, colors, shapes and icons are to visual design. An effective visual design language not only acts as a communication framework for all stakeholders on a product development team, but unites a brand and its customers to ensure that a company’s brand identity matches a customer’s brand perception.

We use language as a tool for communication with other people. Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users. Fonts, colors, shapes, visual elements such as icons — those are elements of design language. Effective design language streamlines communication.

While working at Fantasy in 2016, my team was tasked with designing the interface for Huawei’s mobile OS (EMUI 5 interface). I personally was responsible for the visual design language for this OS. Surprisingly, the company didn’t have its own language at initiation; instead, they relied on a customized version of Android that was plagued by inconsistency and lacked a coherent vision. This was largely due to the existence of multiple teams and multiple functional roles with different skillsets and perspectives all grasping at straws to invent a way to communicate. UX designers, interaction designers, visual designers and graphic designers had all worked on the OS in the past, all using their own best efforts to communicate.

Without a uniform system of communication, not only was the user experience jumbled and confusing, it was extremely difficult to integrate changes into a final design. It was a true Tower of Babel.

Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users.

What Does Design Language Provide?

By unifying the project teams under one shared language, a project can move forward with clarity, cohesion and speed.

Consistency

Digital design has few physical constraints compared to industrial disciplines. This gives designers a lot of power to experiment and propose a variety of solutions to any given challenge. However, this can easily lead to disjointed user experiences.

To achieve consistency in design, it’s vital to define reusable and cross-platform components and styling options. Consistent design makes it much easier to ship products on a multitude of platforms and devices, which is especially crucial for companies like Huawei.

Brand Recall

When they interact with a product that has a strong visual language, users tend to remember it better. Unfortunately, a majority of products available on the market have generic designs. It is too easy to confuse one product with another when they share the same visual styles.

Creating a strong visual identity is a goal that design teams should state when working on visual design. This is the personality of a digital product! The colors, typefaces, photos, illustrations, animations are all part of a brand, and they should be designed in a way that helps people remember the product. When an authentic design language is followed consistently, it creates recognizability for the brand.

Clarity

We put a strong focus on clarity — we wanted to make our GUI clean, not cluttered. By following a minimalist approach, we minimized the number of elements that users have on every screen and created a highly-focused experience.

Minimalist design helps to focus user attention on important elements of your design. EMUI 5.0 Concept by Fantasy (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

A Way To Innovate

With so much competition in the phone market, companies invest significant resources to make people try their products. Companies invest in innovation and try to break new ground to attract users and peak their interest. Visual design is often the fastest and cheapest way for a product to innovate.

How Do We Create A Design Language?

For me and my teams, the process of creating a design language, we follow the same rubric we would create any complete consumer product: research-ideate-design-validate- implement. This is how we ensure that the language will work for our target audience.

Research

Often, the VDL is the most important, cornerstone product we create. And like every product you design, research should always be the first. When we started this Huawei project, it was important to understand the opportunities for our design. Jeshua Nanthakumar, a lead UX designer on this project, and his UX research team analyzed all mobile OS available on the market and identified the full range of challenges typically faced by users.

The UI Audit

As I’ve mentioned above, achieving consistency was one of the goals of creating a shared design language. It’s essential to standardize the visual design. That’s why even before starting work on a visual language, we decided to conduct a UI audit. Our goal was to understand the anatomy of the Android OS.

We broke down the whole mobile OS into atomic elements—colors, shapes, shadows, lines, transitions. By decomposing the design, our team was able to see how individual pieces work together and form a greater whole. At the end of UI audit, we had all the elements that make up the digital product (buttons, navigation bars, icons, etc.) grouped into distinct categories.

Understand How Users Perceive The Brand

When working on visual language, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of who you’re designing for and how they perceive your brand. Ideally, brand identity (the way the brand wants to be perceived by users) should match with the brand image (the way users actually perceive the brand). Designers have a direct impact on brand identity. Aesthetic styles, language & tone, iconography, and illustrations — all these are elements of brand identity.

Our goal was to create an innovative design language that feels customized for its audience. To understand how your users perceive the Huawei brand, our team invested in user research. We knew that design language should successfully meet the needs of both Eastern and Western design sensibilities, so we categorized large groups of users and created summaries based on the available information about our target groups. Every summary about our audience had the following information blocks — demographics, what they care about, and their expectations. Here is an example of the summary of the group of North American customers:

Huawei’s core audience lives both Urban and Suburban environments;

They are driven by business, social status, and personal organization;

Age range 30-64;

Average income: USD $75.000 per annum

They care about:

Being organized and ordered

Efficiency and productivity to enable them to enjoy their own time

Their expectations

Contributing to something bigger than themselves

Maximizing life and living for happiness

With the idea that design should match the audience’s lifestyle and be extremely refined, we evaluated every design decision in accordance with the needs of our target segments. This understanding will give you a reason for your visual direction.

Analyze Major Competitors

To identify strategic design opportunities, our team conducted the competitors’ analysis. We’ve identified four major competitors who had strong design languages and focussed on identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For example, when we evaluated Apple iOS, we’ve mentioned the following strengths of the language — scalable across devices, great focus on standardization, unique identity — and the following weakness — inconsistency with iconography, overuse of blur effects.

Four major competitors of Huawei at the time of our analysis. Every brand represented a large part of the market and had its own robust visual language. (Large preview)

This analysis helped us to identify four major directions that brands followed when they create products:

Empathetic to me (design tailored for the needs of the target audience; design that demonstrates real empathy with the human and truly reflects the audience)

Novel design (design that uses innovative visual styles and interaction patterns)

Commonplace design (design that utilizes conservative style elements)

Standardized for all (heavy standardized design)

We put every brand on the plot with those four directions.

Identifying opportunities for Huawei visual language (Large preview)

This process helped us to identify the opportunities for Huawei language:

Scalable Design Language The language should scale across devices and across third-party developer apps as well.

Unique Design DNA The language should be unique and distinct from the major competitors.

Be Bold Yet Timeless The language should be long-lasting.

Define Requirements For Visual Hierarchy

When UX researchers analyzed typical user complaints, they found that the location of key interactive elements was one of the most common problems that many mobile users mentioned. In 2016 mobile screens become larger and larger, but the location of key functional elements in Android remained the same — the top area of the screen. As a result, users had to stretch their fingers or change their grip in order to interact with the elements.

Thumb Zone: how easy it is for our thumbs to tap areas on a phone’s screen. (Image credit: Luke W) (Large preview)

Today a bottom-area navigation is an industry-standard, but back in 2016, the situation was a bit different. We’ve reached the Huawei engineering team with this insight and asked about the technical feasibility of moving controls to the bottom area of the screen — this area is more comfortable for user interaction. The engineering team confirmed that it was possible to move the elements, and we helped define the new default location for functional elements.

Functional controls are located at the bottom of the screen — in the easy-to-reach area. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface by Fantasy) (Large preview)

Ideation: Defining A Design Vision

Creating A Philosophy Of Design

Imagine that you need to design a language that will be integrated into products that will be used by people all over the world. The natural language we use in interpersonal communications cannot be separated from a culture because it has a close relation to the attitude or behavior of speakers of the languages. The digital language is absolutely the same — it should look natural for customers in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

The success of any visual design highly relates to how people perceive it. Many factors are influencing human perception, and the significant part goes to psychology. To create a sophisticated design, you need to consider the meaning of shapes and the impact which they have on users’ minds.

Creating a philosophy of design is extremely challenging, and you cannot do it alone. That’s why I worked with Abigail Brody, a former Apple creative director who joined Huawei in September 2015 as Chief UX design and VP of Huawei Devices. At Apple, Abigail was responsible for iOS design. She was the one who described the methodology of visual language to me.

Together we spend a lot of time trying to find the direction for visual design, and we’ve decided to use the philosophy of organic design as a foundation for our design language. Organic design is centered around using nature as the biggest inspiration.

Organic Design was pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright who believed in creating harmony between people and nature. (Image credit: museiitaliani) (Large preview)

According to this philosophy, design should help to achieve harmony between people and nature. When we worked on our visual language, we focused on incorporating natural forms (smooth curves and organic forms) in our visual design. As a result, all visual elements, such as buttons, icons, and shapes, had an organic design aesthetic.

Round shapes are one of the things that make organic objects different from non-organic. (Large preview)

Using Motion Design To Create A Distinct Visual Identity

There is no doubt about the importance of the role that motion plays in mobile design. For many product motion serves a purely-functional role—it provides feedback for user action and connects different states of the mobile app together. The well-crafted motion also makes things more attractive, and as we know, attractive things work better (the aesthetic-usability effect says that people are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing).

Our team put high stakes on the motion. Our ultimate goal was to use motion to breathe life into our products — make the interface feel alive and dynamic. We wrote a motion design manifesto with solid design principles. Every animated effect and transition that we wanted to introduce in our design was measured in accordance with the functional and emotional benefits it delivers to end-users.

We know that early impressions of a product design are especially important. And for that very reason our key focus was on creating magical moments — surprise and delight users while they interact with the OS.

[embedded content]

This video demonstrates the visual effects we used in EMUI.

Design And Testing: Build, Test, Iterate

Baking Meaning Into Every Design Element/Design Decision

Just like we have rules for using words in sentences in a natural language, we should have rules for using visual elements in visual language. Strong semantics is what makes visual communication efficient.

When a team works on a visual language, it should take two rules into account:

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

There should be no isolated units in visual language. Every unit in a visual language should be a part of a greater whole.

The animated effect behind the user avatar is used to convey a sense of active call. The animation is both meaningful and pleasurable. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

Experimentation And Design Review

It’s impossible to create a great design from the first attempt. Design is an iterative process, and whenever our team created a new visual solution, they evaluated it by comparing it with previous solutions. The comparison was visual—the screens were laid side by side on a board, so everyone could see the parts that require additional polishing. Team members gather together on informal design reviews where they discuss the pros and cons of individual solutions.

Design review in progress at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Pattern Libraries, Style Guides And Design Principles

Pattern libraries (reusable building blocks such as UI bars), style guides, and design principles (principles that allow developers to propagate design language in their own apps) are essential elements of design language. They are the foundation of the design system — a shared resource that teams use when they create interfaces. The fact that we’ve conducted a UI audit during the research phase helped us to categorize the visual design elements. We’ve established a toolbox for everyone who worked on the project. So, when a new member joins a team, all they need is the toolbox, and they are set to maintain consistency.

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

Test Early, Test Often

The Huawei EMUI project was an extremely important project for the Huawei Corporation. It was essential to ensure that the language we’ve defined work for the users. And the only way to get this understanding is to test our design as soon as possible.

We’ve followed a simple but effective technique — build, measure, learn. By following this approach, the design team didn’t postpone the testing design until the release. We’ve incorporated visual language into functional prototypes and tested them both inside our group (dogfooding) and outside (with real users). The feedback collected during the testing allowed us to understand what worked/doesn’t work for users.

Sharing the results of testing with product teams at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Implementation

If you have had a chance to use the Huawei EMUI 5 interface, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Um, that doesn’t look exactly like Gleb said!” And that’s true.

Production version of the Huawei EMUI 5 interface. (Image credit: androidauthority) (Large preview)

It is a sad reality that almost no design team is responsible for the implementation of this solution. Unfortunately, a lot of solutions we proposed to the engineering team weren’t implemented properly, or at all. As a result, the design language we’ve created and the design language the end-user saw in Huawei products end up as two different animals. But this is purely my opinion. In 2018, Huawei surpassed Apple in smartphone sales. The UI was a critical element to user confidence.

Based on my experience, the challenge of implementation is common for large-scale corporations. When designers who created the language aren’t invited into the process of implementing this language into the product, the final results will always be compromised. What usually happens is the engineering team follows a path of least resistance — they adjust the design solutions to the technical constraints they face when they start.

Every company needs a top-manager who cares about design and is ready to fight for it. It’s a well-known fact that when the original minimize animation in macOS that was proposed by the Apple motion design team, the engineering team said that it was impossible to implement that. At that time, Steve Jobs insisted that this animation is a must-have for MacOS. As a result, this animation became not only the most memorable transition for first-time users but also one of the things that contribute to good UX in MacOS.

The instantly memorable window animation of the Mac OS (Large preview)

A Robust Visual Design Language Is The Heart Of Good UX

Visual language can have a dramatic impact on user experience. It’s able not only to reduce friction by making UI more predictable but also to create delight. By pairing great form with excellent function, we will have an excellent user experience.

Visual language is a by-product of product design, and it requires a similar design process. It’s iterative and requires validation at every step along the way. When you build a visual language, you establish a new ecosystem for designers, and this ecosystem creates harmony between different teams involved in product development.

(cc, ra, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/visual-design-language-the-building-blocks-of-design/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/614116349792452608

[scpie]

Visual Design Language: The Building Blocks Of Design

About The Author

Gleb has more than 15 years experience leading product, UI and UX design across web, mobile, and TV ecosystems. Gleb has rightfully acquired a global following … More about Gleb …

A robust visual design language is the cornerstone of good design. Here’s how the team at Fantasy approached designing a mobile OS for Huawei.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

Like written words are to language, fonts, colors, shapes and icons are to visual design. An effective visual design language not only acts as a communication framework for all stakeholders on a product development team, but unites a brand and its customers to ensure that a company’s brand identity matches a customer’s brand perception.

We use language as a tool for communication with other people. Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users. Fonts, colors, shapes, visual elements such as icons — those are elements of design language. Effective design language streamlines communication.

While working at Fantasy in 2016, my team was tasked with designing the interface for Huawei’s mobile OS (EMUI 5 interface). I personally was responsible for the visual design language for this OS. Surprisingly, the company didn’t have its own language at initiation; instead, they relied on a customized version of Android that was plagued by inconsistency and lacked a coherent vision. This was largely due to the existence of multiple teams and multiple functional roles with different skillsets and perspectives all grasping at straws to invent a way to communicate. UX designers, interaction designers, visual designers and graphic designers had all worked on the OS in the past, all using their own best efforts to communicate.

Without a uniform system of communication, not only was the user experience jumbled and confusing, it was extremely difficult to integrate changes into a final design. It was a true Tower of Babel.

Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users.

What Does Design Language Provide?

By unifying the project teams under one shared language, a project can move forward with clarity, cohesion and speed.

Consistency

Digital design has few physical constraints compared to industrial disciplines. This gives designers a lot of power to experiment and propose a variety of solutions to any given challenge. However, this can easily lead to disjointed user experiences.

To achieve consistency in design, it’s vital to define reusable and cross-platform components and styling options. Consistent design makes it much easier to ship products on a multitude of platforms and devices, which is especially crucial for companies like Huawei.

Brand Recall

When they interact with a product that has a strong visual language, users tend to remember it better. Unfortunately, a majority of products available on the market have generic designs. It is too easy to confuse one product with another when they share the same visual styles.

Creating a strong visual identity is a goal that design teams should state when working on visual design. This is the personality of a digital product! The colors, typefaces, photos, illustrations, animations are all part of a brand, and they should be designed in a way that helps people remember the product. When an authentic design language is followed consistently, it creates recognizability for the brand.

Clarity

We put a strong focus on clarity — we wanted to make our GUI clean, not cluttered. By following a minimalist approach, we minimized the number of elements that users have on every screen and created a highly-focused experience.

Minimalist design helps to focus user attention on important elements of your design. EMUI 5.0 Concept by Fantasy (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

A Way To Innovate

With so much competition in the phone market, companies invest significant resources to make people try their products. Companies invest in innovation and try to break new ground to attract users and peak their interest. Visual design is often the fastest and cheapest way for a product to innovate.

How Do We Create A Design Language?

For me and my teams, the process of creating a design language, we follow the same rubric we would create any complete consumer product: research-ideate-design-validate- implement. This is how we ensure that the language will work for our target audience.

Research

Often, the VDL is the most important, cornerstone product we create. And like every product you design, research should always be the first. When we started this Huawei project, it was important to understand the opportunities for our design. Jeshua Nanthakumar, a lead UX designer on this project, and his UX research team analyzed all mobile OS available on the market and identified the full range of challenges typically faced by users.

The UI Audit

As I’ve mentioned above, achieving consistency was one of the goals of creating a shared design language. It’s essential to standardize the visual design. That’s why even before starting work on a visual language, we decided to conduct a UI audit. Our goal was to understand the anatomy of the Android OS.

We broke down the whole mobile OS into atomic elements—colors, shapes, shadows, lines, transitions. By decomposing the design, our team was able to see how individual pieces work together and form a greater whole. At the end of UI audit, we had all the elements that make up the digital product (buttons, navigation bars, icons, etc.) grouped into distinct categories.

Understand How Users Perceive The Brand

When working on visual language, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of who you’re designing for and how they perceive your brand. Ideally, brand identity (the way the brand wants to be perceived by users) should match with the brand image (the way users actually perceive the brand). Designers have a direct impact on brand identity. Aesthetic styles, language & tone, iconography, and illustrations — all these are elements of brand identity.

Our goal was to create an innovative design language that feels customized for its audience. To understand how your users perceive the Huawei brand, our team invested in user research. We knew that design language should successfully meet the needs of both Eastern and Western design sensibilities, so we categorized large groups of users and created summaries based on the available information about our target groups. Every summary about our audience had the following information blocks — demographics, what they care about, and their expectations. Here is an example of the summary of the group of North American customers:

Huawei’s core audience lives both Urban and Suburban environments;

They are driven by business, social status, and personal organization;

Age range 30-64;

Average income: USD $75.000 per annum

They care about:

Being organized and ordered

Efficiency and productivity to enable them to enjoy their own time

Their expectations

Contributing to something bigger than themselves

Maximizing life and living for happiness

With the idea that design should match the audience’s lifestyle and be extremely refined, we evaluated every design decision in accordance with the needs of our target segments. This understanding will give you a reason for your visual direction.

Analyze Major Competitors

To identify strategic design opportunities, our team conducted the competitors’ analysis. We’ve identified four major competitors who had strong design languages and focussed on identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For example, when we evaluated Apple iOS, we’ve mentioned the following strengths of the language — scalable across devices, great focus on standardization, unique identity — and the following weakness — inconsistency with iconography, overuse of blur effects.

Four major competitors of Huawei at the time of our analysis. Every brand represented a large part of the market and had its own robust visual language. (Large preview)

This analysis helped us to identify four major directions that brands followed when they create products:

Empathetic to me (design tailored for the needs of the target audience; design that demonstrates real empathy with the human and truly reflects the audience)

Novel design (design that uses innovative visual styles and interaction patterns)

Commonplace design (design that utilizes conservative style elements)

Standardized for all (heavy standardized design)

We put every brand on the plot with those four directions.

Identifying opportunities for Huawei visual language (Large preview)

This process helped us to identify the opportunities for Huawei language:

Scalable Design Language The language should scale across devices and across third-party developer apps as well.

Unique Design DNA The language should be unique and distinct from the major competitors.

Be Bold Yet Timeless The language should be long-lasting.

Define Requirements For Visual Hierarchy

When UX researchers analyzed typical user complaints, they found that the location of key interactive elements was one of the most common problems that many mobile users mentioned. In 2016 mobile screens become larger and larger, but the location of key functional elements in Android remained the same — the top area of the screen. As a result, users had to stretch their fingers or change their grip in order to interact with the elements.

Thumb Zone: how easy it is for our thumbs to tap areas on a phone’s screen. (Image credit: Luke W) (Large preview)

Today a bottom-area navigation is an industry-standard, but back in 2016, the situation was a bit different. We’ve reached the Huawei engineering team with this insight and asked about the technical feasibility of moving controls to the bottom area of the screen — this area is more comfortable for user interaction. The engineering team confirmed that it was possible to move the elements, and we helped define the new default location for functional elements.

Functional controls are located at the bottom of the screen — in the easy-to-reach area. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface by Fantasy) (Large preview)

Ideation: Defining A Design Vision

Creating A Philosophy Of Design

Imagine that you need to design a language that will be integrated into products that will be used by people all over the world. The natural language we use in interpersonal communications cannot be separated from a culture because it has a close relation to the attitude or behavior of speakers of the languages. The digital language is absolutely the same — it should look natural for customers in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

The success of any visual design highly relates to how people perceive it. Many factors are influencing human perception, and the significant part goes to psychology. To create a sophisticated design, you need to consider the meaning of shapes and the impact which they have on users’ minds.

Creating a philosophy of design is extremely challenging, and you cannot do it alone. That’s why I worked with Abigail Brody, a former Apple creative director who joined Huawei in September 2015 as Chief UX design and VP of Huawei Devices. At Apple, Abigail was responsible for iOS design. She was the one who described the methodology of visual language to me.

Together we spend a lot of time trying to find the direction for visual design, and we’ve decided to use the philosophy of organic design as a foundation for our design language. Organic design is centered around using nature as the biggest inspiration.

Organic Design was pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright who believed in creating harmony between people and nature. (Image credit: museiitaliani) (Large preview)

According to this philosophy, design should help to achieve harmony between people and nature. When we worked on our visual language, we focused on incorporating natural forms (smooth curves and organic forms) in our visual design. As a result, all visual elements, such as buttons, icons, and shapes, had an organic design aesthetic.

Round shapes are one of the things that make organic objects different from non-organic. (Large preview)

Using Motion Design To Create A Distinct Visual Identity

There is no doubt about the importance of the role that motion plays in mobile design. For many product motion serves a purely-functional role—it provides feedback for user action and connects different states of the mobile app together. The well-crafted motion also makes things more attractive, and as we know, attractive things work better (the aesthetic-usability effect says that people are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing).

Our team put high stakes on the motion. Our ultimate goal was to use motion to breathe life into our products — make the interface feel alive and dynamic. We wrote a motion design manifesto with solid design principles. Every animated effect and transition that we wanted to introduce in our design was measured in accordance with the functional and emotional benefits it delivers to end-users.

We know that early impressions of a product design are especially important. And for that very reason our key focus was on creating magical moments — surprise and delight users while they interact with the OS.

[embedded content]

This video demonstrates the visual effects we used in EMUI.

Design And Testing: Build, Test, Iterate

Baking Meaning Into Every Design Element/Design Decision

Just like we have rules for using words in sentences in a natural language, we should have rules for using visual elements in visual language. Strong semantics is what makes visual communication efficient.

When a team works on a visual language, it should take two rules into account:

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

There should be no isolated units in visual language. Every unit in a visual language should be a part of a greater whole.

The animated effect behind the user avatar is used to convey a sense of active call. The animation is both meaningful and pleasurable. (Design concept of EMUI 5 interface) (Large preview)

Experimentation And Design Review

It’s impossible to create a great design from the first attempt. Design is an iterative process, and whenever our team created a new visual solution, they evaluated it by comparing it with previous solutions. The comparison was visual—the screens were laid side by side on a board, so everyone could see the parts that require additional polishing. Team members gather together on informal design reviews where they discuss the pros and cons of individual solutions.

Design review in progress at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Pattern Libraries, Style Guides And Design Principles

Pattern libraries (reusable building blocks such as UI bars), style guides, and design principles (principles that allow developers to propagate design language in their own apps) are essential elements of design language. They are the foundation of the design system — a shared resource that teams use when they create interfaces. The fact that we’ve conducted a UI audit during the research phase helped us to categorize the visual design elements. We’ve established a toolbox for everyone who worked on the project. So, when a new member joins a team, all they need is the toolbox, and they are set to maintain consistency.

There are no random visual elements in a visual language. Every element serves a purpose.

Test Early, Test Often

The Huawei EMUI project was an extremely important project for the Huawei Corporation. It was essential to ensure that the language we’ve defined work for the users. And the only way to get this understanding is to test our design as soon as possible.

We’ve followed a simple but effective technique — build, measure, learn. By following this approach, the design team didn’t postpone the testing design until the release. We’ve incorporated visual language into functional prototypes and tested them both inside our group (dogfooding) and outside (with real users). The feedback collected during the testing allowed us to understand what worked/doesn’t work for users.

Sharing the results of testing with product teams at Fantasy Interactive (Large preview)

Implementation

If you have had a chance to use the Huawei EMUI 5 interface, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Um, that doesn’t look exactly like Gleb said!” And that’s true.

Production version of the Huawei EMUI 5 interface. (Image credit: androidauthority) (Large preview)

It is a sad reality that almost no design team is responsible for the implementation of this solution. Unfortunately, a lot of solutions we proposed to the engineering team weren’t implemented properly, or at all. As a result, the design language we’ve created and the design language the end-user saw in Huawei products end up as two different animals. But this is purely my opinion. In 2018, Huawei surpassed Apple in smartphone sales. The UI was a critical element to user confidence.

Based on my experience, the challenge of implementation is common for large-scale corporations. When designers who created the language aren’t invited into the process of implementing this language into the product, the final results will always be compromised. What usually happens is the engineering team follows a path of least resistance — they adjust the design solutions to the technical constraints they face when they start.

Every company needs a top-manager who cares about design and is ready to fight for it. It’s a well-known fact that when the original minimize animation in macOS that was proposed by the Apple motion design team, the engineering team said that it was impossible to implement that. At that time, Steve Jobs insisted that this animation is a must-have for MacOS. As a result, this animation became not only the most memorable transition for first-time users but also one of the things that contribute to good UX in MacOS.

The instantly memorable window animation of the Mac OS (Large preview)

A Robust Visual Design Language Is The Heart Of Good UX

Visual language can have a dramatic impact on user experience. It’s able not only to reduce friction by making UI more predictable but also to create delight. By pairing great form with excellent function, we will have an excellent user experience.

Visual language is a by-product of product design, and it requires a similar design process. It’s iterative and requires validation at every step along the way. When you build a visual language, you establish a new ecosystem for designers, and this ecosystem creates harmony between different teams involved in product development.

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[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Independent Music/Inide Music

“Independent album” and “Indie music” redirect here. For the Billboard record chart, see Independent Albums. For music from India or performed by Native Americans, see Indian music (disambiguation). For the rock genre, see Indie rock. For the pop genre, see Indie pop.

Independent music (often shortened to indie music or indie) is music produced independently from major commercial record labels or their subsidiaries, a process that may include an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording and publishing. The term indie is sometimes also used to describe a genre (such as indie rock and indie pop); as a genre term, “indie” may include music that is not independently produced, and most independent music artists do not fall into a single, defined musical style or genre and usually create music that can be categorized into other genres.

Independent labels have a long history of promoting developments in popular music, stretching back to the post-war period in the United States, with labels such as Sun Records, King Records, Stax, etc.=

In the United Kingdom during the 1950s and 1960s, the major record companies had so much power that independent labels struggled to become established. Several British producers and artists launched independent labels as outlets for their work and artists they liked, but the majority failed as commercial ventures or were swallowed up by the majors.

In the United States, independent labels and distributors often banded together to form organizations to promote trade and parity within the industry. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), famous as the organization behind the Grammy Awards, began in the 1950s as an organization of 25 independent record labels including Herald and Ember Records, and Atlantic Records. The 1970s heralded the founding of the National Association of Independent Record Distributors (NAIRD), which became A2IM in 2004. Smaller organizations also existed including the Independent Music Association (IMA), founded by Don Kulak in the late 1980s. At its zenith, it had 1,000 independent labels on its member rosters.

The 1990s brought Affiliated Independent Record Companies (AIRCO), whose most notable member was upstart punk – thrash label Mystic Records and The Independent Music Retailer’s Association (IMRA), a short-lived organization founded by Mark Wilkins and Don Kulak.

The latter is most notable for a lawsuit involving co-op money it filed on behalf of its member Digital Distributors in conjunction with Warehouse Record Stores. The adjudication of the case grossed $178,000,000 from the distribution arms of major labels. The proceeds were distributed amongst all plaintiffs.

During the punk rock era, the number of independent labels grew. The UK Indie Chart was first compiled in 1980, and independent distribution became better organized from the late 1970s onwards. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, certain UK independent labels (such as Rough Trade, Cherry Red, Factory, Glass, Cheree Records and Creation) came to contribute something in terms of aesthetic identity to the acts whose records they released.

In the late 1980s, Seattle-based Sub Pop Records was at the center of the grunge scene. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s as the advent of MP3 files and digital download sites such as Apple’s iTunes Store changed the recording industry, an indie Neo-soul scene soon emerged from the urban underground soul scenes of London, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago and L.A., primarily due to commercial radio and the major label’s biased focus on the marketing, promotion & Airplay of Pop and hip hop music during this period. Independent Labels such as Dome Record and Expansion Records in the U.K. and Burger Records, Wiener Records and Ubiquity Records in the U.S. and a plethora of others around the world continue to release independent bands and music.

Going major versus staying independent

Many acts choose to go from an independent label to a major label if given the opportunity as major labels have considerably more power and financial means to promote and distribute product; thus increasing the chances of greater success.Some acts, however, may choose not to go to a major label if given the opportunity as independence generally offers more freedom.

Similarly, others may become independent label acts after having already experienced recording on a major label. Bradley Joseph requested to be let go from his major label deal with Narada/Virgin Records and subsequently became an independent artist. He states “As an independent, business is a prime concern and can take over if not controlled A lot of musicians don’t learn the business. You just have to be well-rounded in both areas. You have to understand publishing. You have to understand how you make money, what’s in demand, and what helps you make the most out of your talent.But some artists just want to be involved in the music and don’t like the added problems or have the personality to work with both”. Joseph suggests newer artists read and study both courses and pick one that best suits their own needs and wants.

A successful independent label with a strong musical reputation can be very appealing to a major label. Major labels look at independent labels to stay current with the ever-changing music scene.

If an act moves to a major label from an independent, they are awarded greater opportunity for success, but it does not guarantee success. About one in ten albums released by major labels make a profit for the label. Some artists have recorded for independent record companies for their entire careers and have had solid careers. Independent labels tend to be more open creatively, however, an independent label that is creatively productive is not necessarily financially lucrative. Independent labels are often operations of one, two, or only half a dozen people, with almost no outside assistance and run out of tiny offices. This lack of resources can make it difficult for a band to make revenue from sales. It can also be more difficult for the indie label to get its artists’ music played on radio stations around the country when compared to the pull of a major label. A testament to this fact could be that since 1991, there have only been twelve independent label albums that have reached the number one spot on the US Billboard 200 Album Chart. There have, however, been dozens of independent albums that have reached the top 40 of the US Album Chart.

Some major labels have created an opportunity for independent artists to be featured on a distribution/marketing CD project with no strings attached in an effort to help boost awareness of the Independent Music community

The difference among various independent labels lies with distribution; this is probably the most important aspect of running a label. Examples are:

Independent label that signs and distributes its own acts. These independent labels find and sign their own acts; then the label manufactures, distributes, and promotes its own product.

Independent label distributed by a major label. These independent labels are similar to the type mentioned above in that they find and sign their own acts, but they have a separate contract with a major label to handle manufacturing, distribution, and/or promotion.

The major label has no control over the independent label, simply an agreement to distribute its product. Either the independent or the major can terminate the pact at the end of the contractual agreement if they so choose. The independent provides for its own financial stability, and has no outside monetary assistance from a major label. -If signing to an independent label, this type of venture probably affords the better benefit.

This is because the act’s contract is actually with the independent label, which may offer more creative control, yet the act is having its album distributed by a major label, which also has an interest in seeing the album become successful.

Independent label owned by a major label. Some major labels have started independent labels or purchased an existing independent label outright, and have these labels use, or continue to use, independent distribution for their product. The reason for this is because independents usually are on the cutting edge of new sounds and potential hit artists, and signs acts and releases albums for less money than would have otherwise been spent if the acts were signed directly to the major label. One benefit of this scenario is that if the act eventually proves successful enough on this type of independent, and is seeking a major label deal, it may see its subsequent albums released directly on the major-label owner of its independent label. The moniker “independent” is sometimes associated with these major-label owned independent labels because they use independent distributors to distribute their albums instead of their affiliated major-label distribution system.

However, these labels are not true independents, the differences being:

 these independent labels can seek the financial backing of their major-label owner should they ever fall on hard financial times.

the major-label owner can sign acts itself, and then place acts on its independent label if it chooses, even though the independent label signs acts itself.

the major-label owner can potentially steal away any act from its independent label at any time and bring that act directly to the major-label owner, regardless of if the act is still under contract to the independent label.

the major-label owner could completely shut down the independent label entirely or sale it off for financial reasons or for restructuring of the overall conglomerate. None of these are circumstances that pertain to true independent labels like those in the first two examples. A record label needs more than independent distribution to qualify as an independent label, otherwise it is an arm of a major label.

It can be very difficult for independent bands to sign to a record label that may not be familiar with their specific style. It can take years of dedicated effort, self-promotion, and rejections before landing a contract with either an independent or major record label. Bands that are ready to go this route need to be sure they are prepared both in terms of the music they offer as well as their realistic expectations for success.

Major label contracts

Most major label artists earn a 10–16% royalty rate. However, before a band is able to receive any of their royalties, they must clear their label for all of their debts, known as recoupable expenses. These expenses arise from the cost of such things as album packaging and artwork, tour support, and video production. An additional part of the recoupable expenses are the artist’s advance. An advance is like a loan. It allows the artist to have money to live and record with until their record is released. However, before they can gain any royalties, the advance must be paid back in full to the record label. Since only the most successful artists recoup production and marketing costs, an unsuccessful artist’s debt may carry over to their next album, meaning that they see little to no royalties.

Major label advances are generally much larger than independent labels can offer. If an independent label is able to offer an advance, it will likely fall in the $5,000–$100,000 range. On the other hand, major labels are able to offer artists advances in the range of $150,000–$500,000. Some smaller independent labels offer no advance at all; just recording cost, album packaging, and artwork, which is also recoupable. If an artist gets no advance at all, they owe their record company less money, thus allowing them to start receiving royalty cheques earlier; that is, if sales warrant any royalty checks at all. However, since the record label typically recoups so many different costs, it’s actually to the artist’s advantage to get the largest advance possible because they may not see any royalties checks for quite some time; again, that is, if sales warrant any royalties checks at all. Another advantage of getting an advance; the advance money the artist owes the label is only recoupable through the artist’s royalties, not through a return of the advance itself.

In a record contract, options are agreed upon between the record company and the act. Options allow the label to request additional albums from the act if they so choose. Major labels tend to ask for more options in a contract than independents. For instance, a contract may state “one album, with an option for four”.

This would mean a total of five possible albums. This means that if the first album was recorded and released by the label and was profitable, the label is going to pick up its option for a second album. The act, therefore, must deliver a second album to the label. If that album is successful, the label will pick up its option for a third album; and so on and so on, depending on how many options are stated in the contract. Picking up the option for another album lies strictly with the label, not the act. The label can pick up as many options as it wants, up to the amount stated in the contract, it does not have to pick up all the options. That means, although a contract may state it has an option for four albums, the label does not have to pick up all four of these options.

The reason for this is, say the act’s first album is successful and the label picks up an option for a second album, but that second album fails miserably. The label could decide it is not about to spend more money on another album, and not pick up any more options and drop the act from its roster. Another ploy the label could utilize is to pick up an option for another album, even after a failed album had been released. If the label doesn’t like the finished product of the new album the act has recorded, the label may not release that album, and then pick up its option for yet another album! The label then may not release that album as well! But the money spent for recording these unreleased albums may still be recoupable from the albums that have already been released.

Because the act is under contract with the label, it cannot record music for another record label without permission. This scenario could potentially tie an act down to a label for years, even though the label has no intentions of releasing any more product from this act, in a career that guarantees no success, and if so, typically only sees a few prime years of prosperity. Some acts consider this unfair because the label has the right to not distribute an artist’s work, yet legally keep them bound and prevent them from recording elsewhere. In effect, the label could continue to demand more albums through the options clause until it deems one commercially or artistically acceptable.

Record labels also effectively own the product recorded (released or not) by an act during the duration of their contract with the label.

Options are only beneficial to the record label. The fewer options allowed in the contract, the better for the act.An example: if an act’s first and/or second album is successful, but there are no more options left, the label will re-sign the act all over again anyway. This time it will most likely be with a much better royalty rate and more creative freedom than the previous contract stated. Or, the act can decide to move to another label altogether, one that is offering a better royalty rate or creative freedom. However, when the label holds a clause for lots of options for additional albums, it has the advantage. Besides the scenario in the above paragraph of the label requesting albums it may not release and preventing the act from recording elsewhere, the exact opposite could happen instead. The act could release a blockbuster album on their very first release. The label will surely pick up its options for future albums and distribute them, but the act will continue to see all its royalty checks and recoupable expenses calculated under the same contract it signed many years ago. When its contract is finally up (with all those options), the act may have declined considerably in music popularity and may not have the same bargaining position that it had so many years ago when it released that blockbuster album. Had there been fewer options on the initial contract, the act could have negotiated a new and better contract while in its prime.

[andygsell97132-blog]

Mind Thinking For Ingenuity & Advancement.

Given that the 1950s cognitive psycho therapists as well as researchers have actually been actually trying to describe the distinctions in assorted types of reasoning. An innovative issue solver will certainly discover brand new services, instead of merely pinpointing as well as applying the absolute most ideal basic remedy. Nonetheless, this is true to say that some are even more creative compared to others - all of it baseds on the decided on innovative medium, the knowledge, understanding and skill of the person( s). This is advantageous during that it enables room for the artistic edge of you to surface area and is actually often beneficial for trouble dealing with as well. For instance, Bulgarian teacher, Dr Georgi Lozanov, in his introducing team up with increased knowing procedures accomplished extensive studies that illustrated exactly how Baroque music's steady pace of 60 beats per moment parallels the human brains wavelength when in a state of loosened up performance, phoned Alpha, and also contributes to discovering and retentiveness. Baseding upon this concept, six distinct, yet similar components result in prosperous innovation: notice, knowledge, presuming types, personality, atmosphere, as well as incentive. This article speaks out different procedures and also manner ins which can aid CEO and other specialists at the top of power structure to shed the worry and also experience rejuvenated. Utilize the Layout Your Remedy portion of this web site to analyze just how you could use our Ability Building ® Body to sustain the building from a clean thinking capacity in your marketing company, then download a personalised PowerPoint presentation that you can utilize as a thought-starter with your group. Yet another artistic person might observe in the same transmission the necessary gears for a multi-speed scorching walker for his steed. It's important to consider that as an article writer you are not simply an artistic artist. The majority of your thinking ends up being robotic and operates in lecture, which gives additional of the very same sort of thinking. Effectively critical believing involves the reliable treatment from the 5 phase method. In a steady method through their adult years we go off imaginative believing to defensive reasoning. Customarily the eight factors below are ones commonly thought of as intrinsic elements of innovative manufacturing, and also attributes linked with innovative problem solving capacities. Like under/low-valued sell, artistic individuals generate unique suggestions that are originally refused by other people. Mindlessness might be an innovative activity, but for those who are actually brand-new at including imagination into their lives, this's encouraging and also practical to have cement documentation that just what you are actually performing is getting somewhere. Make an effort confining your do work in some means as well as you could see the benefits from your human brain producing imaginative services to complete a project around the guidelines you have actually established. In creative development both believed procedures are necessary as one very first deviates ideas in many volume, and after that processes the range and narrows through coming together mind.. C) Make use of differed idea elicitation methods (lateral thinking, association, what-ifs, etc) to create a large quantity of ideas without analysis. Research presents that creative thinking doesn't belong only to supposed imaginative kinds. Coming together thinking is actually described as the ability to use sensible and evaluative thinking to assessment and slim suggestions to ones finest satisfied for provided scenarios, or specified requirements. Drawing on the methods that terrific thinkers have made use of - off Bob Dylan to Wagner, James Joyce to Charles Child - this seminar is going to illustrate practical, realistic approaches for assuming more creativity. There are actually a considerable amount of courses and also publications that inform you what to do however ultimately you can't copy someone else's type. All that takes is simply a little creative thinking, some organizing, as well as a great deal of work. That is absolutely NOT because there is a natural influenced choice towards creative thinking, despite exactly how nice and also culturally that seems. When this pertains to your own ideas, it's easy to be a hypocrite as well as use all kinds of difficulties to various other ideas while allowing your personal reasoning slide by unchallenged in your very own thoughts. They enable the Mind Mapmaker to look at a fantastic lots of components at one time, hence improving the likelihood from artistic affiliation and also integration. Creativity is actually the method of viewing brand-new possibilities as well as assuming 'from the box' in order to deliver unexpected options that divert coming from the regular or even the norm. Intellect is actually only among the six variables that can easily either exclusively, or along with the various other five aspects, generate creative thoughts. As a result the sessions must embody a wide array from discovering and thinking styles to cater to the pupil. Imagination is absolutely not restricted to exclusive celebrations or unique individuals. The moment the approaches are made use of, at that point the switch to the other mode of believing happens. With all the positive comments concerning using innovative digital media, more and more providers, little as well as big as well, are actually beginning to make our team of this. Keeping that in thoughts, it is actually just about critical that business begin considering that prior to it becomes far too late. When you have virtually any questions relating to where by along with the best way to make use of yellow pages online free; Highly recommended Web-site,, it is possible to e mail us in our own web site. Within this ensign job I had to alter or stating it much better boost the interpretation paragraph after the hunt for aesthetic information (graphics & and images) for the ensign. Every artistic procedure possesses a special shape, which suggests that every imaginative remedy will definitely have its own special and one time authentic pattern. Through knowing the contrasting procedures and also devices available to improve memory skill-sets, you may guarantee that found out are actually latched into long-term moment. What makes the book exclusive is actually the way Judkins tells stories regarding artistic people and also their difficulties, strategies, difficulties and motivations. If your competitors play certainly not inning accordance with the guidelines or if the common well-known approaches that have been actually presently worked with performed certainly not result along with the expected turn-arounds that your supervisor wished for, the call for creative methods is actually justified. The computer abilities and e-mail projects are usually quite simple and take very little effort. The focus performs job administration capabilities and the development of negotiable skills such as organizing, budgeting, staff building, leadership and practical measures to secure just what is distinct concerning your tips. Relaxation techniques like mind-calming exercise as well as physical exercise like playing your beloved sporting activity could offer your thoughts a breather off the consistent sound as well as needs of life. Clarified bit by bit: each card presents a collection from actions to succeed to assist you get influenced, arrange your concepts and also boost your creativity skills. As kept in mind over, the subconsciousness mind is the source from several valuable creative knowledges that are actually all too often removed through our conscious, restricted thought and feelings trends. Robinson highlights that you may not be imaginative unless you are actually performing something and, in this respect creative thinking is actually various off creativity.

[clockwize-blog]

Buy the trendy watches only on clockwize watch store

https://clockwize.uk/CLOCKWIZE WATCH STORE

Having a good life depends on how well you manage your time. There is nothing as valuable as time, which we can spend but we all know that each and every moment is of great importance. This great importance of time led to the innovation and invention of watches. Watches which were once clocks and classic wristwatches have now been changed into technological, cool trendy watches. The cool modern watches we have at our disposals today not only depict time but have much more enhanced functionalities.

Watches have also turned out to become a way to impress others and hence, have become an essential part of many people’s everyday outfit. The professional look for many people gets completed only with a proper cool watch. Nowadays, the main function of a modern watch is to enrich appearance as well as to promote you as a professional person.

The style and type of the watch selected by the wearer can depict who they are. Watches spell out elegance, style, and eccentricity. To make yourself unique, you need to select the right watch that suits and enhances your personality.

The cool, modern watches manufactured today, mostly tend to turn others’ attention towards it. The generation of today does not look out just for cool watches just for the sake of knowing what the time is, but they instead opt for amazing watches that will let them stand out from the crowd and get noticed. The cool, trendy watches are a perfect match for the fast-moving, tech generation we’re in today.

Decades ago, knowing the time was just one function of a watch, but with great technological inventions today, the cool watch on your wrist also compliments and garnishes the wearer’s looks, style, and elegance.

Clockwize watch store is an online retailer of cool and amazing watches. Our collection of watches come with a feeling that just when you think you have seen it all, our selected set of wristwatch manufacturers come bursting out with a new design, unlike anything you have ever seen before. Feel free to contact us today for more information about our wide range of amazing watches.

One way to show or prove that you value the fast-moving precious time is by putting on a wristwatch. But if you really want to leave an impact with regards to how you see time, then sport a cool trendy watch.

A cool trendy watch doesn’t just tell you what the time is, it also spells out your personality. The watch brand that you prefer, the attire/outfit that it perfectly goes with, etc., speaks a lot about your personality. A casual cool watch going with you in a casual pair of shorts or jeans and tees or a nice formal amazing watch that compliments your well-ironed blazer and linen suit can really add some touches to your appearance. Again, the designs, styles, and patterns of the modern watches have really taken a hike in fashion, with so many unimaginable lovely trendy watches to decide from.

The purchase of cool watches today is not only limited to the nearest retail brick outlet on the streets or some exclusive designer watch showrooms anymore. The online shopping stores (or e-commerce websites) are the newest location for buying almost everything online.

Choosing the right watch that will suit your style and personality is much easier online these days. Be it an official date, an evening dinner meet, or an all-night out, you can purchase a whole range of cool watches that suit your every step. By wearing an innovative watch brand with unique, unusual styles, you leave a huge impression on the people you roll and interact with.

At Clockwize watch store, there are several cool watches to choose from at our online watch store at affordable prices. Spending on a cool trendy watch would be quite a great option to portray your personality and status.

Our selected set of watches from innovative watch manufacturers come with highly geared unique and aesthetic features which not only tells time but also upgrades your outfit and spices up your appearance.

Due to the artistic and workmanship appeal, our collections of amazing watches come with, they are able to survive in this digital and technological era for watches.

There is an ancient saying that says “right before you head out your door, you should put on one more thing.” This could be a festive hat, a bright and beautiful scarf, or a wristwatch – classic or contemporary. The idea of the statement is to accessorize. Of course, a timeless pink dress will always look fantastic, but it is essential to spice it up a bit with a brilliant pair of earrings and a lovely necklace.

A gorgeous minimalist watch can really spice up an outfit to the next level of fashion for both men and women. A nicely tailored suit looks incredible on a man, but if he’s got the perfect amazing watch, people will notice that before even having a glance at his suit.

If you really love to spice up your outfit, you can’t get it wrong with a trendy watch by AARK or a minimal watch by Simpl.

ClockwizeUK is a specialist online watch shop retailer offering cool and amazing modern watches. If you long for an unusual watch, something remarkably cool, trendy and contemporary to light up your wardrobe, you can check out our collection of watches at our online watch store.

The great thing about our collection of cool watches is that they are suitable for every occasion – be it casual, formal or any you can think of. For example, the Void watch’s beautiful style is one perfect fit for wearing whether you have an important business meeting or going to the gym. While our beautiful collections of modern watches are still casual and affordable enough for the everyday wear, the watches you’ll get from our online watch shop are also so stylish that they will give you an extra boost of confidence when you save them for special occasions. We know you do not want to wear out the striking visual power of a magnificently crafted, tactile timepiece unnecessarily.

From the bracelet to the dials and casings, all of our selection of cool watches come with the most compelling and impressive features. Great color combination with a dichotomy that beautifully compliments the watches’ bezel. All watches at our online watch shop perfectly balances minimalism, classy and modern era.

If you are out searching for an exceptional and most importantly, exciting way to spice up your outfit, you can’t get it wrong with picking out a brand new timepiece at our online watch store.

Unless you’ve got a wedding ring, a cool watch is really the only piece of jewelry that men wear. Make sure that the watch on your wrist reflects your attitude and style. The following are the latest trends in men’s wrist watches to make sure that you are keeping up with time!

Funky

If you find your time beats to a different pace compared to your folks, why not let your watch stand out too? Brilliant colors, interesting watch band materials (think Ziiiro and Void), and varying unique styles of the watch (think Eone, Nava, and Slow) are great ways to change your style without overhauling it. Sporty, funky, punk, modern, amazing, alternative, – you name it – there is a watch trend to match it at our online watch shop. The great thing about a cool trendy watch that is a little bit unusual is that it is also a great way for a conservative man to stretch out and exhibit his funky factor. Keep in mind, though, that not all funky watches are best suited for formal wear. A funky watch is really best suited for casual wear. So it’ll be nice to be aware of the kind of image you are presenting to colleagues and clients because a watch really can stand out in your outfit – for better or worse.

Casings

Steel mesh casings have got a more conservative look but are still very trendy by today’s standards. Cool steel casings – either matte or polished – makes a really nice choice for a trendy watch because they are more versatile than some other choices that may feel gimmicky to some men and women alike.

Leather Straps

Even if you are someone who knows absolutely nothing about fashion, you probably at least know that when it comes to watches, leather is a consistent trend. It can be classic, vintage, and timeless or contemporary, embellished, and untraditional. The most popular trend these days is the wide leather straps, which will approach the feel of a wrist cuff (think back to the days of sweatbands, though it is far cooler than the sweatbands) and lets the watch sit perfectly on the wrist. Whether busy, minimalist or sophisticated, genuine leather features on a watch, either in straps or bands, are likely to be around for a very long time.

Hidden Faces

A really unusual and unique trend that has recently appeared on the face of modern watches is the covered timepiece. These amazing watches have some innovative kind of metal flap that covers the face. This uber-trendy stylish look certainly adds distinction to your look and even a little mystery.

There are thousands of watches sold every day in the UK. This is because the market demand for cool watches in the UK is very high. Many people love wearing cool watches, as these watches can make appearance become very trendy and wearers usually love to look trendy.

Wearing a cool, trendy watch has several advantages that come with it. Firstly, wearers that love trendy watches usually buy them because the watches make them feel great. Everyone wants to feel great always but most of the times, that is not often possible to do. Nevertheless, putting on an amazing watch can certainly help in making this occur quickly.

Again, people who love wearing cool trendy watches may also do so because they’d want to appear successful. The majority of those who go to work in the UK spend a great amount of time at work and they would want to look good there. A cool trendy watch can definitely help wearers look good and also spice up their outfit. Wearing an amazing cool watch can also make colleagues and others at work to think they are doing well for themselves and therefore give them more reverence.

People who love wearing stylish trendy watches may also do so because they love the watch itself. There are many different types of watches out there in the market and choosing a cool watch that you like best may take a very long time. However, once a person has chosen the type of watch they desire, it can certainly go a long way to making them feel great and everyone wants to be able to feel great. If wearing a favorite watch can make people feel great, then they should be able to wear it.

In a technological world, where everyone carries all the information he/she needs through their iPhones, Android or Blackberry phones, one might think that wristwatches have become outdated. Even if you do not want to use a watch for checking the time, thousands of watches are being sold daily due to the fact of their important presence in the fashion industry. Putting on a watch has become one of the easiest ways to make a strong fashion statement out there. However, it can also be one of the easiest ways to mess up an entire lovely outfit.

At Clockwize watch store, our collection of cool and ultra-modern trendy watches at our online watch store employ not only unusual, unique elements but often interesting aesthetic elements. Our selected set of cool watches are also far from convention, both in look and appeal, these watches appear transported from a time where innovation and creativity are kings. They can either be traditional and streamlined or look like they require some degree of use. This has made them a great choice for a nice, trendy watch for pretty much any gentleman or lady.

Trendy watches are a great way for fashionable folks to stay current without having to venture far into the realm of unfamiliar clothing styles and we have got them in stock at our online watch store. Trendy watches are a great way to switch up your look a little bit and let time tell what might happen.

Our selection of cool watches was crafted to be the most durable and long-lasting watch ever made. The watches are generally water resistant and come in a variety of colors and unique designs, so it also will make you look good, second to being very functional.

No matter the kind of trendy watch you desire, whether for business settings or casual, we’ve got a collection of cool watch accessories for everyone who wants to keep up with the times! Besides the outstanding functionality in their designs, our numerous lines of cool watches have exceptional styles and unique touches. Feel free to contact us for more information.

#minimal watches #trendy watches #online watch shops