#but a device invented to create a social hierarchy

[horizon-verizon]

Rhaenyra's children have never been legitimised. Even though the king has claimed them as his grandchildren, even though corlys claimed them as velaryons. And even though laenor claimed them as his children. Even though they were claimed in front of multiple witnesses including the entire court, they’re still not legitimised. because they were never acknowledged as bastards in the first place. They have always been claimed as 'true born' children, not as bastards, and of course you can’t legitimise a true born child.

This better be about Fire and Blood, anon. I’m working from the assumption that it is.

I get your point, anon. I’ve both heard it and debated about it myself many times.

You're saying that even though Viserys and Corlys accepted them, by the rules of legitimization and acknowledgment they are and always will be bastards and illegitimate. People would have to have the official revelation for Viserys to publicly legitimize them.

My thing is that:

in real life, what determined a child’s legitimacy in Europe was nebulous right from the start and had to do with property and changed according to the needs of the people involved. In Wales–before the Norman conquest of it and its incorporation into “England” around 1093–had “bastard” meaning a child whose father doesn’t acknowledge them. All children acknowledged had equal legal rights. That included the right to share in the father’s inheritance. The real-life House of Tudor, Elizabeth I’s house, was a house that ruled England after Henry VII took the throne through conquest and after presenting himself as a candidate to those opposed to the Plantagenet York House. The Tudors weren’t a “big” house compared to these houses. And yet it produced notable people…. including Elizabeth I. William the Conqueror was not mocked for having unmarried parents, but specifically for his mother not having a good or illustrious lineage.

In Westeros, riverman Benedict Rivers/Justman/”the Bold” and Orys Baratheon (last one rumored bastard) loyally or dedicatedly lead armies for other lords or lead loyal soldiers themselves, completely negating the idea that bastards are inherently “monstrous” or “treacherous”, which is the bulk of disdain and trepidation for illegitimate people. Benedict Rivers, a bastard born from a Blackwood and a Bracken, became a King over all the riverlords and lead the riverlords into years of prosperity and peace. Orys founded the very house that currently rules Westeros (the irony is not lost on me, but that’s because Robert himself is a fucker and patriarchy).

illegitimacy doesn’t exist as a reality and an independent fact without political context; it must be actively enforced by the active decision of the people around to have any actual true effect

Rhaenyra, as a woman giving birth to children not her husbands’, would be getting a stronger even maybe deadly punishment for something that a man would get off scot free for, and her kids -- through no fault of their own -- would also have their lives taken or ruined. And for what? Something that has no real substance in of itself and is more conviently hidden for power if done right? [go to point #4] -- the further political and personal ramifications are is why the V boys’ parentage will never be admitted....just as her adultery would never be admitted (we don’t know if Book!Rhaneyra did the arrangement with Laenor of HotD)

both women and men have had affairs and lovers for millenia in ancient and medieval cultures....why? Because marriage is about resources and joining families together for power/security, not love or intimacy. And both men and women want love and/or real intimacy, or just horny. This means that there is a higher possibility for there to be "unexposed" "illegitimate" children on either side than you might think or have clear archealogical or otherwise historical evidence for. 

Sometimes affairs and illegitimate kids were tacitly and publicly known already ( @the-king-andthe-lionheart), but if a person were to want to gain something from a princess', noble lady's, queen’s reputation falling or outright removal...then whether or not she actually cheated on her husband or slept with others, they could engineer claims of her “ruination” and “treason” 

Jon Snow. Enough said.

Power is the thing that is really sought for, not moral righteousness. Alicent & Criston both are so out of the loop for this. Bastardy is a societal excuse and invention. It is a tool to be used, to flaunt, to slice others, to hide, etc. How you use it and for what purpose determines your ethical status. Add in circumstance and that will determine whether you will “win” or not.

EDIT: As what la-pheacienne says HERE, Viserys I, Corlys, and Laenor all tacitly/silently accepting Rhaenyra's sons is legally valid, as it is in all legal contexts, so yes they are all legitimate.

Aside from how Viserys and Corlys both voluntarily decide so, never revealing anything.

[hayatheauthor]

Tips To Consider When Writing A Fantasy Religious Story

This was requested by @saltykidcreation if you want to request something send me an ask!

A fantasy religious story is a fantasy story where, even if a God-like character does not exist, true biblical values are made obvious in the book's theme because of the author's worldview. I personally don’t write fantasy religious stories, however, since this was requested I decided to come up with some tips for this genre.

Establishing a Rich Mythology

At the heart of every captivating fantasy religious story lies a well-crafted mythology that breathes life into the beliefs, deities, and rituals of your fictional world. Just as our world's religions have intricate backstories, your fantasy realm's mythology provides the framework for understanding the spiritual landscape. Here's how to create a mythology that resonates:

Deities and Powers

Develop a pantheon of gods and goddesses, each with distinct personalities, domains, and motivations. Consider drawing inspiration from real-world mythologies or inventing entirely new divine beings. For instance, in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," gods from various cultures manifest in modern-day America, reflecting changing beliefs.

Rituals and Traditions

Infuse your world with rituals, ceremonies, and festivals that reflect the beliefs of your fictional religion. Whether it's a solemn pilgrimage to a sacred site or a joyful celebration of a deity's favour, these rituals offer opportunities to reveal cultural norms and values. Take the example of "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss, where the University's Archives hold religious significance, connecting knowledge and faith.

Holy Texts and Prophecies

Craft ancient texts, prophecies, or scriptures that guide your characters' beliefs and actions. These texts can hold hidden truths, enigmatic predictions, or moral codes that shape the course of the story. In Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, a mysterious device called the Alethiometer becomes a tool of divination, echoing themes of destiny and belief.

Cultural Impact

Consider how your fictional religion influences art, architecture, fashion, and daily life in your world. Are there specific symbols associated with the faith? Does the religion inspire grand cathedrals, tranquil monasteries, or vibrant marketplaces? J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series exemplifies this through the majestic Hogwarts Castle and its hidden rooms dedicated to various founders' beliefs.

A well-developed mythology adds depth and authenticity to your fantasy religious story, enriching readers' immersion and emotional engagement. As your characters interact with these elements, their beliefs will take centre stage, shaping their decisions and driving the narrative forward. 

Worldbuilding and Cultural Depth

Creating a compelling fantasy religious story extends beyond the spiritual realm—it involves crafting an immersive world where faith intertwines with culture, society, and daily life. As you build your fantastical universe, keep these worldbuilding aspects in mind to ensure a rich and authentic backdrop for your narrative:

Cultural Diversity:

Just as our world hosts a tapestry of cultures, your fantasy realm should embrace diversity. Explore how different regions or communities within your world interpret and practice the same religion. George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series masterfully showcases distinct religious beliefs held by various societies, adding layers of complexity to the narrative.

Social Impact:

Consider how religion shapes social hierarchies, class systems, and power dynamics. Does the priesthood hold political sway? Are certain religious groups marginalized or revered? In Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," the planet Gethen's religious beliefs are deeply tied to its unique genderless society.

Iconography and Architecture: 

Infuse religious symbolism into architecture, art, and everyday objects. Temples, sculptures, and artefacts can embody beliefs and tell stories within your world. The stained glass windows of Notre Dame Cathedral in Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" visually depict biblical narratives while reflecting the spiritual essence of the setting.

Language and Terminology: 

Develop specialized terminology, prayers, and phrases specific to your fantasy religion. This linguistic distinctiveness adds authenticity and depth to the faith. J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" features languages like Elvish that enrich the cultures and religions of Middle-earth.

Impact on Conflict and Plot: 

Explore how religious differences can drive conflict or cooperation within your story. Religious tensions can lead to political strife, wars, or alliances. In Frank Herbert's "Dune," the complex interplay between the Fremen's religious beliefs and the political landscape fuels the narrative's intrigue.

Remember, effective worldbuilding integrates religious aspects seamlessly into every facet of your fictional world. By intertwining faith with culture, you'll create a vivid and immersive environment that enriches your readers' experience and deepens their connection to your story.

Weaving Themes of Faith and Doubt

Central to any fantasy religious story are the themes of faith, doubt, and the profound quest for meaning. These themes can elevate your narrative, sparking introspection and emotional resonance. Here's how to skillfully weave these threads throughout your story:

Character Beliefs

Explore how characters' beliefs shape their worldviews, actions, and interactions. Does a protagonist's unwavering faith lead them on a heroic journey, while a sceptical character questions the mystical elements surrounding them? In C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia," characters' diverse beliefs guide their roles in the unfolding saga.

Spiritual Journeys

Craft character arcs that mirror spiritual journeys, complete with challenges and revelations. Allow characters to grapple with doubts, undergo transformative experiences, and emerge with a deeper connection to their faith. The character Eowyn in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" confronts her inner struggles and finds a newfound purpose.

Crisis of Faith

Introduce moments of crisis where characters' faith is tested to its limits. These moments can lead to internal turmoil, moral dilemmas, and choices that define their paths. In Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" the protagonist questions the nature of humanity, blending themes of religion with questions of identity.

Divine Intervention

Explore the concept of divine intervention and its impact on characters' lives. This can be a source of guidance, trials, or even scepticism. In "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman, the gods' involvement in human affairs raises questions about their true motivations and the nature of belief.

Existential Quests

Delve into existential themes as characters search for meaning beyond the material world. Incorporate quests that transcend physical boundaries, encouraging characters to uncover truths about existence, mortality, and the afterlife. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" humorously navigates themes of fate, destiny, and the cosmic battle between good and evil.

By exploring the intricate balance between faith and doubt, you'll create characters who resonate with readers on a deeply human level. These themes not only enrich your narrative but also invite readers to ponder their own beliefs and uncertainties

Utilizing Symbolism and Allegory

In the realm of fantasy religious storytelling, symbolism and allegory serve as potent tools to convey layers of meaning and depth. These literary devices can bridge the gap between the fantastical and the profound, enriching your narrative in powerful ways:

Symbolic Artifacts

Introduce artefacts or objects that hold symbolic significance within your world. A mystical amulet, an ancient tome, or a sacred tree could embody themes of faith, wisdom, or protection. Consider the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," representing the corrupting influence of power.

Allegorical Journeys

Craft allegorical quests that mirror spiritual journeys or moral dilemmas. Characters might embark on physical journeys that parallel inner transformations, mirroring the trials and growth inherent in belief systems. In John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," the protagonist's journey to the Celestial City mirrors the Christian path.

Metaphorical Creatures

Introduce fantastical creatures that symbolize spiritual concepts. A mythical phoenix representing rebirth or a guardian dragon embodying both danger and enlightenment can add layers of meaning to your narrative. In "The Chronicles of Narnia," Aslan the lion is a symbolic representation of Christ.

Cosmic Forces

Use cosmic events or celestial phenomena as metaphors for divine influence or moral alignments. A comet's appearance could herald significant events, while an eclipse might signify moments of transformation or impending conflict. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King weaves cosmic forces into the fabric of its multiverse narrative.

Subtextual Commentary

Employ allegory to comment on real-world issues or philosophical concepts. By grounding your fantastical narrative in allegorical discussions, you invite readers to reflect on broader themes while engaging with your story. George Orwell's "Animal Farm" is an allegory for political corruption and societal manipulation.

By artfully integrating symbolism and allegory, you add depth and resonance to your narrative. These devices not only enhance the fantastical elements of your story but also invite readers to explore the layers of meaning hidden beneath the surface.

Crafting Moral Dilemmas and Choices

A hallmark of captivating storytelling is the inclusion of moral dilemmas that challenge characters' beliefs, forcing them to confront their convictions and make difficult choices. Within the realm of fantasy religious stories, these dilemmas become even more potent, as characters navigate the intersection of faith, ethics, and personal growth:

Clashes of Belief

Introduce conflicts where characters' divergent beliefs clash, sparking debates and raising questions about the nature of truth and morality. Such clashes can lead to both external conflicts and internal struggles. In "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman, characters' differing beliefs influence their actions in a world with soul-representing daemons.

Test of Principles

Develop scenarios where characters must make choices that challenge their faith or require them to compromise their values. These choices can lead to soul-searching moments that reveal the depths of their character. Guy Gavriel Kay's "Tigana" explores characters' moral choices amid political and religious conflicts.

Consequences of Devotion

Examine the consequences of extreme devotion to a religious cause. Characters who blindly follow their faith might be driven to commit ethically questionable acts, raising questions about the balance between devotion and ethics. In "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, the characters' missionary zeal leads to unforeseen moral dilemmas on an alien planet.

Doubt and Redemption

Narrate character arcs that involve doubt and eventual redemption. Characters who experience crises of faith might embark on journeys of self-discovery and growth, ultimately finding renewed purpose or understanding. In "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, the protagonist's journey of doubt and rediscovery aligns with themes of magic and faith.

Personal Growth Through Struggle

Showcase characters who emerge stronger from moral challenges, reflecting personal growth as they navigate the complexities of their beliefs. These experiences can lead to a deeper understanding of faith and a more profound connection to the divine. Jacqueline Carey's "Kushiel's Dart" features a protagonist whose unique perspective challenges and evolves her understanding of religion.

By infusing your narrative with moral dilemmas, you encourage readers to grapple with complex questions, fostering empathy and introspection. These dilemmas illuminate the nuances of faith and the intricate choices that define the paths characters undertake.

I hope this blog on Tips To Consider When Writing A Fantasy Religious Story will help you in your writing journey. Be sure to comment any tips of your own to help your fellow authors prosper, and follow my blog for new blog updates every Monday and Thursday.  

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks? 

Are you an author looking for writing tips and tricks to better your manuscript? Or do you want to learn about how to get a literary agent, get published and properly market your book? Consider checking out the rest of Haya’s book blog where I post writing and publishing tips for authors every Monday and Thursday! And don’t forget to head over to my TikTok and Instagram profiles @hayatheauthor to learn more about my WIP and writing journey! 

[laurenlavianafamer]

Blog Post #2: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

(1).  In the book, Lauren lives a life that is not unlike my own life today.  I live in a suburb, protected from real-life issues like poverty, rampant pollution of the air and water and soil in many urban settings, and violence.  All of these are issues in my own world that make it necessary to create an Earthseed community.  However, it does occur to me that the Earthseed community (like the suburbs) isolates people from the problems and may provide something like a fresh start for humanity, but it does not necessarily solve the problems where they are occurring.  Still, an Earthseed community would indeed provide shelter from poverty, pollution, and violence.  

(2).  One Earthseed verse that stands out to me is “the only lasting truth is change. God is changing.”  The quote is short, but there is a lot packed into it and it occurs twice in the novel, both in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 7.  I am attracted to the paradox this verse is expressing, the idea that the only permanent and stable truth is change.  Rather than change being something to fear, instead it should be something to embrace.  I would apply this concept to my new Earthseed community by working on change toward equity, toward safety, toward humanity and embracing every person’s unique and inherent value.  Another Earthseed verse that stood out to me is from Chapter 23, and it is somewhat darker than the first quote; in fact, it is a warning.  “God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.”  This quote could be applied to my own Earthseed community by emphasizing to everyone in the community that embracing change, giving up our old ideas and constructs, is not an easy thing to do-it is hard, harsh, even painful.  In my community, I’d want people to give up thinking about themselves as “better” than others because they have a higher social status, more education or more beauty than someone else; instead, in my community I want to value equality (not status), wisdom (not degrees), and authenticity and ethical beauty from the inside (not external beauty).  It it hard to give up ideas and hierarchies that make us feel better than others, but this is a harsh lesson and God, as the quote says, is a harsh teacher.  These are lessons we need to learn, or we will die mired in oppression and false consciousness.

(3).  I would go to the mountains to create my community.  Like military leaders and petty kings since human civilization began, I’d find the higher ground.  There is something metaphorical there too.  Indeed, higher ground quite literally provides a strategically good option for better protection.  But the higher ground can also become a symbol for what we are doing with this new community, the progress we are seeking in a moral and humanistic sense. 

(4).  Anyone can join this community because anyone can change.  There should be no limits on who can join.  There would, however, be limits on who can stay.  The community must have some mechanism for expelling members who make the community unsafe. 

(5).  I think that a group of elected elders would be a good option for leadership of my new community.  I trust wisdom more than education; I trust experience more than abstract knowledge.  Consider, if you were building a house, would you rather hire someone who had read a book about how to build one or someone who had already built five houses before?  I would want our leadership to be people who have a long lifetime of experience and who understand human nature, behavior, and consequences better than others.  

(6).  I would invent the Pain Meter.  This is a device that will read electrical and nueorogical signals in the brain to determine if someone is feeling any type of pain whether it is physical or emotional in nature; it can also quantify that pain and tell us how much pain that person is in.  One of the purposes of my community will be healing.  I want people to heal from the pain of cruelty, rejection, oppression, violence and trauma they’ve experienced.  I want a community of happiness, for I believe that happiness is the best path to equity and justice; it is those who hate themselves most who tend to project that into hating others.  But people tend to be unable to see or express their pain sometimes, and a Pain Meter would not only allow others to understand someone’s pain but would allow that individual to acknowledge it for themselves too.  

(7).  My Earthseed community will survive through cooperation, shared labor, and a shared sense of purpose.  The community will have to be close to basic resources like soil that is good for farming and a clean source of water.  But ultimately, this community will survive through its bonds, through mutual respect, and through a shared sense of commitment to making a better version of human society than has been done in the past.

(8).  My Earthseed community will make learning psychology a basic subject for all children, starting at an early age.  There is no reason why studying psychology should be relegated to the university level alone; everyone, starting pretty young, should learn the terms, theories, and harness the vocabulary to better understand and communicate about their own inner lives and to better understand those of others too.  Second, my Earthseed community will not condemn anyone to one single job, one single task that they do day in and day out for the rest of their adult lives.  Jobs will be rotated, everyone will be the janitor and the teacher, the food preparer and the monks devoted to prayer—the purpose of work is then not one’s own advancement in their individual career, rather the purpose is really for the community itself.  I also think this system might help prevent social hierarchies and all the damage they cause.  

[lost-in-yujikiri]

References of Classic Literatures in SAO

This post are thoughts I have on discord plus discussion with friends. I didn’t intend to publish this publicly but this was so well-received and a friend asked me to do so, so here it is.

Below are the classic works that I think SAO main arcs took many inspirations from:

1) Aincrad arc & Little Red Riding Hood

- Asuna is the Little Red Riding Hood, with Kirito as the brooding hunter who protected her and led her to a happy ending, and Kayaba is the wolf who disguised himself as Asuna's "Grandma" (aka her caretaker).

- Kayaba's nickname is the same name as the central character of Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff), both men created their world of their own obsessions (for OG Heathcliff is his love with Catherine, for Kayaba is his castle dream) and during that creation they ended up destroying a lot of lives, even innocent people involved.

2) Fairy Dance arc & A Midsummer Night’s Dream

- Fairy Dance might take references from A Midsummer Night's Dream with Fairy King & Queen Oberon & Titania, who are a married couple under quarrels (Asuna and Sugou). The Fairy Dance arc also presents the themes of falling in love with the wrong person (Suguha/Leafa’s feelings for her brother/cousin Kazuto/Kirito) and unrequited love (Recon to Leafa, Leafa to Kirito) albeit in a different way than the original story.

3) Phantom Bullet arc & Sonezaki Shinjuu 

- The classic kabuki play Sonezaki Shinjuu (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki) is a story about close acquaintances/families/lovers being tangled in conflicts of opposing sides, with the main couple performing a double suicide ending so they can be husband and wife in afterlife (just like Kyouji & Sinon). In SAO Kyouji tried to force the double suicide on Sinon but it failed.

3) Alicization arc volume 9-14, Eugeo’s story & The Little Prince

- When people see Alicization cast many might think of Alice in Wonderland first. However Eugeo's whole story in Alicization 1st half was most likely inspired from The Little Prince, with Eugeo as the Prince, Kirito as the Prince's wise old buddy and also the story's Narrator, and Zuberg as the Prince's Rose flower in his homeland which he loves so much but was separated from for so long. Only Alice S30 is the Alice in Wonderland, which is why she isn't the one Eugeo looked for.

- Friendship between the Narrator & the Prince is somewhat similar Kirito & Eugeo, in how the Prince is the only one who truly shares the world view of Narrator. In stories of his own journey, the Prince met a lot of adults, each of them showed their greed, selfishness, ugliness in their way, and the Prince's pure heart couldn't understand or withstand most of them. Just like Eugeo's naivety and pure heart can't accept even the littlest unfairness and evils of his world.

- The Prince thought he didn't love his rose in the correct way, and during his journey he knew his rose isn't so special because there are millions of beautiful roses on Earth. But later he learned that it's the time and space that he spent nurturing his rose that made the rose truly special and distinct. Isn't that similar to how Eugeo learned that love is giving, like nurturing flowers continuously?

- However, the Prince agonized then because he was in a place too far from his home and he left his rose for too long that it might have been eaten, like the distance and long pining towards the Alice in Eugeo's past that killed him inside, while his childhood has long gone.

- In The Little Prince's ending, the prince followed a poisonous snake's offer that if he lets it bite him, he would be able to return to his planet with his beloved rose (Quinella's deal, anyone?). The narrator realized what would really happen but couldn't stop the Prince. Before following that offer, the Prince told the Narrator please look at the stars to remember him, if it looks like he has died, it is only because his body is too heavy to take with him to his planet. The next day, the Prince's body couldn't be found and in his later journey, the Narrator ask the readers if any of them have seen the Prince. In Eugeo's story though, instead of creating an ambiguous ending, Reki presented both ends of the Prince's fate literally. Eugeo died in a sacrifice of his choice, and at the same time went into the light with the little Alice in his past (aka the Little Prince's rose).

- Kirito, just like how the Narrator who believed the Prince didn't die, continued to live in his own world of darkness like the time he spent with Eugeo hasn't gone.

4) Alicization volume 13-18, Alice Synthesis 30′s story & Alice in Wonderland

- Alice Synthesis 30, from an empty knight who has no knowledge of the world with a forced Knight identity, was thrown to the unknown in War of Underworld and had to fight off everything and figure her self-identity out on her own, has parallels with Alice in Wonderland. Original Alice fell into a rabbit hole into Wonderland when she followed the White Rabbit, while Alice S30 fell from Floor 85 of the Cathedral when she fought after Kirito, both Alices learned about the mess that is happening in the world they're in after this.

- The original story is more about all kinds of creatures and humans in Wonderland rather than just about Alice herself, while War of Underworld is also more about people participating in the War rather than just about Alice S30.

- Kirito is the cheshire cat who guided her somewhere along the way but left her on her own device at some point. There are pig-lookalike creatures called "Rath" in the original Wonderland story, and in SAO we have RATH company who is monitoring project Alicization as well as the pig-lookalike Orcs in WoU. In many versions of Alice in Wonderland the stories involve a coup d'état towards a tyrant queen, in Alicization we have a Quinella as similar type of ruler whom Alice S30 and her friends fought against.

- At the end of both stories Alices left the mess in their "Wonderland" to get to real world. Though for OG Alice it's getting back to reality, while for Alice S30 she just got thrown to another "Wonderland" where she has even less attachment to as well as being shunned by most other humans without being able to go back to the UW she knows.

5) Kirito’s character arc in Alicization & Yu Boya and Zhong ziqi:

Kirito's character arc in Alicization was inspired by the story of Yu Boya & Zhong Ziqi, whose story has invented the words 知音知己 ("2 souls who understanding each other's tone & self the most") which usually get translated to English as "bosom friends", Chinese usually called them the epitome of friendship/ companionship. In Japan their names are translated as "Haku Ga" & "Shou Shiki".

Full story can be found here:

http://chineseaesop.blogspot.com/2012/09/yu-boya-and-zhong-ziqi-romance-of-guqin.html

Summary: Boya was an accomplished statesman from the Kingdom of Tsin and also an expert musician who played the "qin". One day as he played a musical piece on the river when he sailed to the Kingdom of Chu, he met a woodcutter named Zhong Ziqi, who might be poor but is very knowledgeable about music & what Boya's soul wanted to convey through his music. Being very happy that he could find a partner who can so quickly clicked with him, Boya & Ziqi stayed with each other talking for 3 days. Though Ziqi eventually had to go back to support his parents so they had to part with a promise of seeing each other again. The next year Boya went to find Ziqi, only to hear from Ziqi's father that he had died while trying to both work to support his family & study to catch up to a successful man like Boya. Boya played his last piece of music in front of Ziqi's grave and then destroyed his beloved musical instrument and swore to never play it again, because the life friend who could understand his heart & soul was no longer in this world. He then told Ziqi's father that he would adopt Ziqi's parents and support them like Ziqi did, saying "I was one with Ziqi and he with me. Do not think of me as an outsider."

So Kirito = Boya who are both accomplished in life (battles/social hierarchy), Eugeo = the woodcutter Ziqi who's inexperienced but wise and shared a love of something (swordmanship for Kirito & Eugep/ music for Boya & Zhong Ziqi) with the other man, both died young before they truly accomplished any of life goals. Their deaths devastated their friends, Boya destroyed his own musical instrument and his own musical ability, while for Kirito even though he was right at the chance to wake up from coma, due to the guilt of Eugeo’s death he intended to use his sword to stab himself, but having no sword so he tried to destroy his heart instead.

In the end though Kirito was stopped by a fragment of Eugeo’s soul, who give him the strength to stand back up again.

Personal thoughts:

- I find it interesting that Kirito is very apt for 2 different roles in the Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Prince, more than any roles with other heroines. In Aincrad/Progressive he is the hunter who managed to protect the Riding Hood Asuna from the wolves and in one way or another lead her to her own happy ending. In Alicization he is the best friend to the Prince Eugeo, he wanted to show the Prince the world and lead him to happiness too, but ended up having to watch his Prince walking to his own death.

- Mother's Rosario is treated as a side story in the original Web Novel and not a full-blown arc, so it doesn't have classic references. But Reki said in an interview along with the author of yuri manga/anime Bloom Into You that it's the most yuri-esque story he has ever written (despite not being technically yuri).

[creativecoding]

What is beyond the future of Augmented Reality

[Pre-visualisation experiments of the AR experience as part of the 3D Digital Design Degree at The University of Greenwich, by Pria-Rose Rodriguez]

 Augmented Reality is a steady growing trend in today’s scope of technology. It didn’t quite sky-rocket to everyone’s lips as intensively as Virtual Reality did, yet AR seems to have taken a much more functional approach to everyday life. Augmented Reality is already a useful daily tool throughout global activities. IKEA for example, the furniture store, offers an AR app called IKEA Place that gives the user freedom to plan their space with the furniture they can buy from the store in advance. Historical sites, like Italy’s Pompeii, let the user bring ruins back to life through Augmented Reality projections. Neurosurgeons, airport crew and even football broadcasters use Augmented Reality to enhance their jobs.

The future of Augmented Reality promises the replacement of the mobile device, in exactly what way has yet to be determined. As of now, this would be at a halt due to the seemingly never-ending chase of user privacy with Augmented Reality which seems to surreptitiously capture, record and contain personal data and footage.

What is this modern, technical invention besides what we see of it through examples in Iron Man or ideas that conjure up the goggles in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell? Well, it simply is an interactive and multisensory experience. Typically, Augmented Reality is performed in real-time and is often combined with heads-up display (HUD). The most common description of Augmented Reality finds itself partnered with the ever-more popular Virtual Reality. This inescapable comparison between the two is somewhat valid as they can be considered ‘related’ technologies but the natures of the two provide worlds of difference in the user experience. To quickly sum up the versus between AR and VR, we can say that Augmented Reality provides an immersive addition to the immediate environment of the user using technological enhancements (phone, glasses, tablet) with no real detriment to the senses whilst Virtual Reality provides a world encompassing experience that does not interact with the immediate environment but rather, allows the user to interact within a virtual one. The distinguished difference of experience is that VR eliminates the world around you and therefore has the down-side of altering with the user's perception, balance and ability – the function to perform activities within VR are still far from replicating real-life as the industry so desires. But, back to Augmented Reality which deserves a title, reputation and essay of its own.

The first sign of Augmented Reality appeared in 1992 with the US Air Force Training system. Today, AR is being used in a myriad of ways already in ordinary day to day life through apps such as Snapchat, Instagram or those that help people find their car in a parking lot or virtually try on clothes without leaving their house. Augmented Reality can be one of two things, constructive (which adds to the natural environment) or destructive (which masks the natural environment).

Before touching on the subject of the benefits and successes of Augmented Reality, let’s first uncover the dangers of Augmented Reality. The first being the deaths and casualties caused by the popular AR experience in 2016, Pokémon GO. The injuries rose to over 29,000 and fatalities were over 250 in the 2016 year alone. The second concern for the danger of Augmented Reality lies no doubt in privacy. The debacle of data, legality and ethics of personal information in the last few years (Cambridge Analytica Scandal for example) have led more and more scrutiny to be cast on any user interactivity on platform or device. Augmented Reality can access information about environment, facial recognition and social media. In 2017, however, The Code of Ethics on Human Augmentation introduced by Computer Engineer Steve Mann, became ratified at the Toronto conference for VR. Ray Kurtzweil and Marvin Minsky in 2013 had refined the code that Mann originally introduced in 2004. Mann is well-known for creating the first wearable computer in 1980. Nearly 40 years later in 2019, Microsoft released the HoloLens 2, the Augmented Reality headset which brings holograms into the real world through constructive (additive) AR.

Like many advanced tech trends, it seems that there is no shortage of professionals, articles and projects or research to enlighten the most common layman about what to be impressed and/or intimidated by. However, despite the many projects of Augmented Reality, those that make money, steal data or provide an immersive experience, what sets them apart? If they are all using the same technology and giving their audiences what they want, how could there be a hierarchy and why? Entertainment, education, capitalism – the reason behind most media and content we have in today’s world. And like many businesses, the question should be “If your business is not helping to solve some of the world's problems, the business is harmful”. To an extent, this is true – like everything, it is debatable. To an extent, this applies to Augmented Reality, which at this stage seems to be exercising its creative freedom through its fresh stages in media through many hats and many collaborations. TED, MIT even L’Oreal have had their share of AR fun. Though what the world needs from Augmented Reality is a question worth asking. If there is a responsibility of creators, engineers and designers to understand the impact of their work on the population at large, surely, there must be an equal responsibility for the medium to deliver it’s very best to drive mankind forward. Otherwise, why bother retelling stories and experiences through a new medium. As the now infamous Lasseter once said, art should challenge the technology and the technology should inspire the art.

The fundamentals of Augmented Reality are pretty straightforward, which is the most enjoyable part of computing – at some point, it’s 1+1=2. User Interface design (UI) and User Experience design (UX) fall into place along with the design and interactivity sensibilities that one would find unavoidable. Asset creation, programming commands and the perfection of ‘to obscure, to not obscure’ placement control. Eventually, through all the research it seems rather redundant and trivial. Why it is being made and what effect that has on the improvement of man or man’s ability to understand himself or the universe is far more fascinating than lines of code or tricks of light.  

[webdevelopmentcompanyindia]

Web Development Trends to dominate in future

Many factors rapid web development and layout, and trends come and move based on technology, evolving tastes, and new iterations on past methodologies. Looking ahead, we will anticipate seeing trends that stand up from the developing emphasis on UX, mobility, and visible marketing. Let's check what we will expect in the future.

1.      The Spread of Material Design 

Material design refers to Google's unified technique of the invention. This is supposed to evolve and consist of best practices and implement them as requirements throughout the board. The basis of this system is the mobile device. However, there's each intention of including the mouse, keyboard, and voice as inputs. These factors do far more than pleasing the eye. They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus. 

2.      Flat Design is Here to Stay 

Responsive design has quite much taken over, and it brought flat design with it. The flat design ensures that pictures are smaller and simpler to study on mobile devices while maintaining a pleasant aesthetic. A sans-serif flat font has been proven to reduce the brand's size on sites by greater than 50%. This type of design can be used on icons, images, and many different factors to reduce image size, decrease load times, grow SEO ranks, and decrease bandwidth load on a company's servers.

3.      Cinemagraphs Will See a Rise in Popularity 

Each photo was taken with the brand new iPhone additionally facts a 2d at the front and end of the picture, developing a concise animation or a dynamic image. Users can choose to showcase the default or live photo, and we're presently seeing the stay versions flooding social media. Advertisers and content manufacturers have additionally started the usage of live images.

4.      Design Will Become Modular 

Mocking up whole layouts and comps when designing web pages is an issue of the past. Instead, web design will shift towards modular and element design. This is because many aspects see repeated use on plenty of screens. Modular and component design will ensure that every one of these elements works independently and are smooth to combine in exceptional parts of a website 

5.      An Emphasis on Function Over Form 

With the brand new wave of standardization in UI, the form will take a backseat to function in web design. The new standards, which might be poised to dominate in the future, will assist developers in creating unique websites really by following procedures. Furthermore, customers have emerged as a lot savvier and might spot a dysfunctional website from a mile away. 

Conclusion 

We can assume the future to be dominated through Website Development Company which originate at the mobile tool more and more. We also can see the rise of standardized best practices throughout a large number of devices and a web development process that is extra streamlined and more accessible. We can't possibly understand what the future will hold; however, it's secure to assume that we're transferring towards more speed, greater engagement, and a higher UX without overburdening our web development teams.

[architectnews]

Ten architecture projects from National University of Singapore master's students

A floating fish farm and a water-based Parliament for Bangkok in 2100 are included in Dezeen's latest school show by students at National University of Singapore.

Also included is a project to repurpose telephone exchange buildings as infrastructures of counter-surveillance and a park with architectural inventions added to recreate the spatial language of cruising.

National University of Singapore

School: Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment Course: Masters of Architecture

School statement:

"The NUS M.Arch Show 2021 showcases the thesis projects of the graduating Master of Architecture students from the National University of Singapore; a collection of bold questions and propositions displaying the expertise obtained in architectural education. A year-long undertaking, the thesis is an arduous yet joyful journey, where conversations, critiques and references gently nudge students towards certain contemporary and relevant trajectories, organically converging into communities of practice where the works collectively resonate with one another.

"Convergence occurs along five discursive threads, which form the five clusters of the show: Critical Architecture, History & Heritage, Sociopolitics & Geopolitics, Technologies and Urbanism & Environments. Each cluster is uniquely positioned to probe the limits of the discipline, and to respond to the demands of wider society.

"Critical Architecture interrogates the discipline itself. The thesis work in this cluster seeks to identify and challenge architectural convention, forming propositions of design that provoke, satirize, or gently disturb the expectations of architecture and what the field encompasses.

"History & Heritage gathers sites and stories that were lost in the pursuit of rapid development and urban progress. The theses of this cluster anchor onto overshadowed historical and cultural artefacts; through this they consider a spectrum of strategies and positions that navigate the tricky entanglement between the oft-conflicting demands of the past and present.

"Sociopolitics & Geopolitics deliberates on architecture's capacity to contribute to the public good, at the crossroads of policy, ideology and society. Fieldwork and research bring to light fissures in the built environment that emerge from manifold agendas. The theses take aim at these socio-spatial injustices. Alternative hierarchies, boundaries, notions of work, welfare, and education are imagined – potential futures in which these status quo might be destabilised through optimism and design.

"Technologies argues that architecture, entwined with making, doing and craft, cannot be divorced from the techie which influences it. Thus, technology, no longer mere device for representation, has become a tool for thinking, optimising and materialising ideas into form. The theses featured in this cluster capitalize on these advancements, offering a window into architecture's future.

"Urbanism & Environments takes the position that architecture is inherently ecological, mediating an extensive network of relationships beyond our immediate, perceptible senses. The cluster recognises the need for new economies to emerge; its propositions suggest new ways of living amidst large scale forces such as increasing urbanisation, the pandemic and global warming.

"Moving through the five exhibitions of our show, the five threads intersect and overlap, creating a hazy cloud of interrelationships and connections that we find as interesting as the individual work themselves. As thesis projects turn into continuous research embarked by the authors, it is also paramount that these ideas flow and are made public, to be reinterpreted and to exist in the future work of others. Our show will gather people and audiences through several events for this purpose, and we hope that the conversations that avail will appeal and excite the community."

How To Live With Another

"This thesis begins at home, with my grandmother and her helper Asri. It ends by testing the potentials of architecture – its epistemological and professional capacities to address the production of space speaking to social and class-based proximities.

"Three devices are conceptualized through household materials – bamboo laundry poles, used teabags, recycled magazines, and methods – knotting, weaving, sewing, crossing over from domestic chores into the architecture studio.

"Presented from occupants' perspectives through photography and ethnographic videography, how to live with another is politically gendered in its concerns for architecture's intersection with, and manifestation of, equity and voice."

Student name: Anthea Phua Yi Xuan Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Lilian Chee

Normal Architecture

"This thesis treats the banal practice of architecture as an aesthetic project. Through the simple set-up of a game, three scenarios in practice are played out, mainly focusing on the performance of client and architect in the design of a residential programme.

"Normal Architecture reveals the compromise, friction and fighting activity hidden behind the perfect facade of architecture. This performance is a simulation of practice, a team sport rather than an artistic activity, taking shape directly to impact form and aesthetics. By exaggerating these moments into strange details, the entangled stories of architects, clients, and engineers are told."

Student name: Ong Chan Hao Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Prof Erik G L'Heureux

A Higher Calling

"A Higher Calling is an attempt to repurpose telephone exchange buildings as infrastructures of counter-surveillance. The improvement of telecommunication technology has led to the demolition of telephone exchanges despite their architectural rarity and heritage significance.

"While these infrastructures heralded in a new era of mass communications, they also expedited the onslaught of unwarranted and widespread surveillance. Building upon their characteristic architecture – island-wide geographical placement, visual inconspicuity, underground inter-connectivity, and windowless disposition – the thesis argues that networks of telephone exchange buildings should be conserved and repurposed as spaces of refuge and avenues for recourse, against an increasingly inevitable surveillance climate."

Student name: Jonathan Yee Chenxin Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Adj Asst Prof. Ho Weng Hin

To Food, With Love: Architecture of an Intangible Culture

"Despite being intangible, hawker culture is indeed very much dependent on the spaces used to produce, distribute, prepare, and consume food. But what does it mean for the architecture when what is deemed as important heritage is not the building, but the activities contained within?

"Culture is not static, and neither is our culinary landscape made from just kitchens and dining tables. Yet we remain fixated on an idealised physical manifestation, the hawker centre, as the sole space of hawker culture, disregarding other spaces and processes. What then, is the scope and role of architectural design in conserving hawker culture?"

Student name: Sim Wen Wei Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Chang Jiat Hwee

Transient Dormitories in Singapore Water

"The transient nature of workers housing and the growing demand for locally farmed fishes in Singapore provide temporal considerations to this architectural exploration. The co-location of worker dormitory and a fish farm on a floating platform is a hybrid architecture that capitalized on the coastal environment, mutualism as well as time-sharing arrangement of space to rethink better dwelling for the workers.

"As the demand for migrant workers in Singapore decreases in the future, spaces in these floating platforms can be transformed for fish farming or redeployed for other sea-based economic opportunities."

Student name: Loo Quan Le Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Cheah Kok Ming

Pleasure Fields: Negotiating Queer Space and Time

"The Pleasure Fields is a park that negotiates queer space and time in Singapore. Research into local cruising spaces concludes that the queer body's existence depends on its spatial and temporal context. Thus, the project proposes a counterpoint to how the body is state-programmed to reproduce future citizens via the heteronormative family unit.

"On an urban scale, the proposal experiments with how architectural interventions could ally with the site's trees and topography to gradually de-closet the queer body. Five architectural typologies then illuminate the spatial language of cruising through layering and appropriating spatial configurations previously known only to the cruiser."

Student name:  Ahmad Nazaruddin bin Abdul Rahim Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Tsuto Sakamoto

Deconstruction / Reconstruction : An analysis of architecture through the lens of Structural Optimisation

"Deconstruction / Reconstruction is a thesis that attempts to relook at architecture through the lens of structural optimization and digital fabrication. Reacting to the zeitgeist of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Carpo's Second Digital Turn – the thesis deconstructs architecture into its elements, applying breakthrough structural optimization methods to the process of their design.

"Through a study of Topology Optimisation, Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (ESO), Graphic Statics, and Stress Line Analysis through recent work by Block, Xie and Akbarzadeh – the thesis studies how current design processes could be augmented with these structural toolkits and fabricated using digital fabrication methods such as 3D printing with the aim of reducing the material utilized in construction."

Student name: Lee Lip Jiang Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Rudi Stouffs

Rebirth 重生计划

"The project tackles the issue of the emerging 'Useless Class' in China. The Useless Class, coined by Yuval Harrari, are low-skilled factory laborers that are being replaced by robots and AI. The project proposes a new way of spatial and social design approaches that helps the 'Useless class' to embark on a new beginning in life.

"Instead of monetary gains, the residents accumulate social credit through participating in game-like e-waste recycling quests which gradually help them to rebuild their sense of purpose and fosters community bonding."

Student name: April Zhu Weijie Course: Masters of Architecture Tutor: Ar Chaw Chih Wen

The Water Parliament – Bangkok City 2100

"The thesis is built around a fictional realm of the inhabitable landscape of Bangkok city in the year 2100 where a new Water Parliament is situated at the ancient Rattanakosin Island that pertained to the commons of water and subjected to the groups of people living on the island that represents the culture and people of the Thai city.

"It celebrates a different aspect of water and engages the traditional water culture with more advanced technology and infrastructures. It demonstrates that the environmental crisis of sea-level rise is potentially a new opportunity for them to reshape the city through participation."

Student name: Tyler Lim Course: Master of Architecture Tutor: Adj Assoc Prof Khoo Peng Beng

The Material Field: Recycling Infrastructure for Indeterminate and Emergent Material Practices

"This thesis originated from an investigation of assemblages in informal cardboard collecting – culminating in a study of how material assemblages gradually reconstituted themselves across different scales. Expressed architecturally as a recycling centre, the thesis seeks new emancipatory findings and possibilities for man, architecture and informal recycling through object-oriented perspectives.

"Specifically, studying how these objects exist, aggregate and affect the body across different scales yields new understandings and approaches to architecture as a mediator between body and object. It suggests a direction to look at architecture from the material itself first, rather than asking first how it serves us."

Student name: Valarie Yap Course: Master of Architecture Tutor: Assoc Prof Tsuto Sakamoto

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and the National University of Singapore. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Ten architecture projects from National University of Singapore master's students appeared first on Dezeen.

[treason-and-plot]

OC MEME

Originally created by xFroggiii. I was tagged by @lyrea. Thank you, babe!

Rules:

1. Pick one of your OCs. 2. Fill in the questions/statements as if you were your OCs. 3. Tag at least four people to do this meme!

Tagging: @romeo-and-simulet @lilsisterg @mysimsloveaffair and @twinsimskeletons.

I chose Raj Patel. Q&A under the cut. 

1. What is your name? Raj Patel 2. Do you know why you were named that? Raj is short for Rajan, which was my father’s name, and my father’s father’s name, and so on. 3.Single or taken? Single. 4.Have any abilities or powers?   I am an astute businessman. I’m also very skilled in the art of lovemaking. 5. Stop being a Mary Sue! I beg your pardon? Has it escaped your attention that I am male? And a very virile and handome one at that, if I do say so myself. *winks* 6.What’s your eye color? Steel grey. 7.How about hair color? Dark brown. Very hard-hitting questions these, aren’t they? What are you going to ask me next, the colour of my underwear? 8. Have you any family members? None that are still living, no. 9.Oh, how about pets? No. As a journalist-in-training, weren’t you told never to ask questions that could be answered just with yes or no? Okay, then let me give you some advice. You should always ask an interviewee open-ended questions such as “So, tell me about your relationship with your parents” rather than ones to which the subject can give a yes/no answer. Try it. It will help you in social situations as well, and you, my friend, look like you need all the help you can get. 10. That’s cool, I guess. Now tell me something you don’t like. See, you’re doing better already! Hmmmm. I don’t like people who aren’t genuine, who put on a false front, or who hurt other people or animals ; men who abuse women or children are scum of the earth who deserve a slow, agonizing death. Something like the Brazen Bull. Have you ever heard of the Brazen Bull? No? Let me educate you. The Brazen Bull was a torture and execution device invented by the ancient Greeks. It was cast in bronze, and hollow, with a door in one side. It was made in the form and size of an actual bull and its head was designed with a complex system of tubes so that the prisoner’s screams were converted into sounds like the bellowing of an infuriated bull. The condemned were locked inside the device, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside was roasted to death.

*long pause*

Are you alright, my friend? You look a little pale. Here, have some water.

11. Do you have any activities/hobbies that you like to do? Sailing and boating and water-skiing, scuba-diving...I love any sport involving the water. I also crave intellectual stimulation and I have a need to be constantly learning new things, so it stands to reason that I love reading. I love cryptic crosswords too. But reading is my passion. I always have at least three books on the go at once. On my bedside table at the moment you will find books on such diverse topics as The Art of War, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and The Forgotten Baolis of Delhi. I am very fond of classic literature as well. 12. Have you ever hurt anyone in any way before? Have you forgotten already what I said about open-ended questions? I am fast losing patience, friend. 13.  Ever…killed anyone before? Yet another facile question that requires nothing more than a one-word response. The quality of the questions had better improve or I’m out the door. Capisce? 14.  What kind of animal are you?  Okay, that’s a much more interesting question. But isn’t it obvious? I am a peacock, my friend! Handsome, brilliant, and inspirational. Renowned for my beautiful soul as well as my ability to attract the ladies, haha! Peacocks do have a mean streak though, so do not upset us. We never back down from a fight and will chase anyone down who crosses us. 15. Name your worst habits: I am guilty of arrogance, ruthlessness, vindictiveness, egocentricity, and I also have an intolerance for fools, contempt for the weak, and  a complete lack of empathy for those who suckle at the government teat. 16.  Do you look up to anyone at all? I admire my father, who was as honest and hard working as the ocean is deep. 17.  Are you gay, straight, or bisexual? I love women even more than I love the ocean. The sea is my mistress. But a beautiful woman can make all its treasures pale into insignificance. 18.  Do you go to school?  *slow blink* I am a student of life. 19. Ever want to marry and have kids one day? Of course. Being burned once has not diminished my desire to one day find the perfect woman and raise a perfect family.   20.Do you have fangirls/fanboys? Before I went to jail, before my very public fall from grace, I was like a rock star. I could hardly walk down the street without getting mobbed, without women throwing their panties at me. Men wanted to be me, and the women all wanted to have sex with me. But fame is very fickle, my friend! And nothing more than proof that people are extremely gullible. 21.What are you most afraid of?   My ex-wife, hahahaha. 22.What do you usually wear? I have been accused of having a look that is a little bit preppy, but I like to dress well, and of course I am going wear boat shoes for practical as well as aesthetic reasons, my entire working life has been spent on boats. I also cannot help it if my olive complexion is best suited to preppy pastel tones. 23.What’s one food that tempts you? Food is mostly fuel, but my ex-wife’s key lime cheesecake was the closest thing to heaven that has ever passed my lips. 24.Am I annoying you? What did I tell you about not asking yes or no questions? 25.Well, its not over! *cold stare* 26.What class are you (low class, middle class, high class)? You failed to mention working class. My ancestors were all fishermen, which makes them proudly working class. I see myself as being aspirational working class. Or maybe that should be inspirational working class? 27.How many friends do you have?  I very much like this quote by the great philosopher Euripides: Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in times of happiness. When I found myself in trouble, my so-called friends were reduced from thousands to exactly one.  Maybe now I have 2, or even 3. But no more than that. 28. What are your thoughts on pie? Unless it was cooked by my ex-wife, neutral. 29.Favorite drink? Gin and tonic. 30. What’s your favorite place? It’s a tie between being in bed with a beautiful woman and being out on the ocean. If I can manage to somehow combine both then I consider myself to be the most fortunate man who has ever lived. 31.Are you interested in anyone?~ I am a lifetime scholar of the human race and of human nature. I am interested in everyone. 32.That was a stupid question. … Yes. It was fortunate that I was able to provide you with an intelligent answer. 33. Would you rather swim in a lake or the ocean? The ocean, which should have been evident from my previous answers. 34.What’s your type? In a partner? Female, beautiful, well-read, artistic, with an innate sense of class and  refinement. And preferably not a pyschopath like my ex-wife, hahaha! 35. Any fetishes? None that I would be willing to share. I like my private life to remain private.   36. Seme or Uke? I am not interested in this narrative. It is demeaning. 37.Camping or indoors? Both have their benefits.

[rogueanalystblog]

What is “Digitalization”?

Many things we do call “digitalization” or “digital transformation” are not essentially new: the computer, robotics, connectivity...many of these things have been around for decades. Of course it goes without saying that many of these technologies have improved massively since their introduction as has their presence, but then again, they were with us for quite some time.

So why are people talking about these technologies today as if they were invented yesterday? And what is the mainstream getting right and what does it get wrong about the issue of digitalization?

The main problem is the oversimplifying view that digital transformation is just throwing money at fancy tech-gadgets that may somehow make life or work easier. Yeah, it definitely is a good deal of what it is going on but all in all it is a shortsighted view. Digitalization is in essence then a socioeconomic transformation of which digital technology is an essential part, nothing more and nothing less. 

Now this has many implications as it goes beyond the immediate realm the workplace applications for electronic devices or software. Digitalization itself is a transformative era that is reshaping all aspects of society and which is accompanied by many other structural changes that will in many ways turn the world as we know it on their head.

Digitalization will not only change massively the way we work but also the way we compete, shop, consume, communicate, recreate, procreate, for all sorts of forming and maintaining essential human interaction like employer-employee relationships, government-citizen relationships, romantic or sexual relationships, parental relationships, frienships et cetera. In short: the change can be seen everywhere and with everything.

Now this infers a good deal of fundamental changes that will inevitably make their breakthrough and which in one way or another we all will have to inevitably accept. We will all have to undergo willingly or unwillingly a massive change process, in which old roles, ways and morals will have to be dropped and new ones have to adopted. That will also include the ways bodies of governance work, be it governments of states or managements of corporations.

Digitalization creates in essence a new mindset, a new type of human if you wish, which will not be anymore compatible with values and wisdoms of the sometimes more distant or even more recent past.

Managing affairs on a larger and more complex scale like a country or a multinational then will have to eventually go hand in hand with ceding direct control to the lower hierarchy levels and smaller units,  giving them more autonomy and responsibility. It will also do away with old ways of labour-capital relationships, turning labour more into stakeholders than classical employees., which will include higher rewards but also less job security. It will also mean that the good old welfare state of the 1930s will eventuall start to disappear and will be replaced by a more indirect, smaller and weaker form of government in which bodies of governance and cizitens are rather partners on equal footing than superiors and subordinates. Welfare will be replaced by human capital development and investment, which wlll be measured by the return it creates rather than on some arbitrarily set goal. 

It will also change the way we work and parent, with old ways of dividing up childcare and work going down the river, and old ways of forming family bonds being transformed into looser bonds with more emphasis on individuality, equality and responsibility. Traditional monogamy and marriage start to disappear on a larger scale while people adopt new forms of cohabitation and raising their offspring.

Now of course one may decry this as the end of culture or the end of the industrialized west or “what about the children” or what have you, but when all is said and done, there is nothing that can prevent this transformation from happening. You can either move forward with it and speed up the process of readjustment or you can throw precious ressources at maintaining old and outdated industries, family ties, ways of employment and institutions.

But then again, the more you stretch the rubber band the more painful it will be when it eventually will snap back in. I guess that kinda narrows it down with regards to how many sustainable options we have on the table.

That means the only way forward then is to let change happen, remove legal and instituational barriers that slow it down and strengthen institutions that speed it up. As we are not possessing the full knowledge of all the different new forms of social self-organization that will emerge, with some of them vanishing again and some persisting, it would less wise to set goals or targets, but more sensible to open the gates and tear down the walls that try to keep the rising floods of change in check. 

People will find a way as they have always done, that is if you let them.

[mrtouchthesky]

Kanye West is not only a rapper, but also a fashion designer, songwriter, and businessman. Kanye's ego and unpredictable nature have won him many haters in the last few years, however, I fell in love with Kanye in the beginning of his career. There is so much that he has achieved in his life and I don’t think he’s as appreciated anymore. Kanye is one of those artists that has been through so many detrimental life events and yet still comes out on top in whatever he puts his mind to. It’s hard to even know where to begin when talking about this phenomenon. Kanye is one of the best-selling artists in the 21st century and most awarded artists of all-time. Popular music is one that blends musical and socio-economic characteristics and his music doesn’t fall short of that. His beats, lyrics and overall tone of his songs have an eclectic taste. Whether he wants to take a more hip-hop, rap, electro, trap, religious, provocative, emotional, political or societal spectrum, they still become the top hits of their time.

Early Life

Kanye West was born in Atlanta but soon moved to the South Side of Chicago after his parents' divorce. Kanye started rapping in the 3rd grade and composing his own songs in the 7th grade. After graduation, he attended Chicago State University to drop out only a year later to pursue his music career.

Portability

Kanye West’s music can be available on multiple devices and apps. In a mobile music handbook, Gopinath and Stanyek talked about how music needs to be “everywhere and anywhere” or ubiquitous. Whether it’s on laptops, phones, iPods, or CDs, Kanye’s music can be listened to anywhere. Spotify, YouTube, Vimeo, Tidal, Apple Music, Pandora SoundCloud, and more have also made it easier to access his music in the 21st century. 

College Dropout

My favorite Kanye album was released on February 10, 2004. I was only seven years old when it released, but I instantly fell in love with his music. Of course, having older brothers really introduced me to different genres of music outside of religious songs. After producing songs for multiple artists, Kanye wanted to start his own career which catapulted just by this very album. What also really pushed West to record this album was his almost fatal car accident in October 2002. In this album, Kanye combined hip-hop, soul, religion, and the “chipmunk soul” (high-pitched, sped-up vocals) as reflected in a couple of his album covers.

“Jesus Walks” expressed Kanye's religious faith and not being afraid to share that on a musical platform. It also reflects how lucky West felt after his accident and his denial to conform to the world’s sin and not talk about religion. This song surprisingly won a Grammy for the Best Rap Song of 2004. I really liked this song because it encompasses beautiful orchestral instruments, gospel, and inspirational lyrics.

“Through the Wire” was literally sang through Kanye’s wired shut mouth after being released from the hospital. In the accident, his jaw was severely shattered and he had to be wired shut in reconstructive surgery. If you listen closely to the song you can hear the struggle he has just singing the lyrics and the pain reflected in the song. This song was Kanye's therapy to pursue his own path of becoming that famous artist that he always dreamed of.

Late Registration

Released on August 30, 2005, the most popular song from this album is “Gold Digger” and may undeniably be Kanye’s most known songs. What made this song a hit in 2005 was its simple lyrics, happy beats, and wit. If you asked, I’m sure everyone knows the lyrics to this song even if they aren’t a Kanye fan. I still regularly jam to this song because the beats are willing people to dance to it called “call-and-response”. The instruments aren’t as complex as his usual work, but I think that was the objective of this song - to make everything simple and catchy enough for everyone to relate as many music scholars realized back in 1989.

In case you were wondering where I got my Tumblr username from:

Graduation

On September 11, 2007, the world saw a subtle shift in Kanye’s style of his songs. College Dropout and Late Registration almost sound similar, but Graduation has a variety of different styles. Graduation has a more electronic tone and hard-hitting songs like “Stronger” that was a popular song from this album. I think "Stronger" reflects popular music because as David Suisman says in his book about American music, it "uplifts- elevates the mind, body, and character of individuals and the spirit of the nation". The lyrics repeatedly chant, “Now that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger” meaning that you shouldn’t conform to the norms of life just because of what others say. 

808s & Heartbreak

This album, released in November of 2008, was the first album Kanye had released since his mother, Donda West, died in late 2007 from a heart disease. This album reflects his devastation over his mother and breakup with his fiancée, Alexis Phifer. This had a huge turn in his career and personality. This album doesn’t really have any rapping, rather him singing his heart and being masked with Auto-Tune. “Love Lockdown” and “Heartless” are pretty much the only dominant songs in this album.

Even now, Kanye still contributes his outburst and mood swings on his mother’s death. This is reflected when a year later he embarrassed Taylor Swift at the VMA's to state his opinion on who really should have won Best Female Video. This time is when he became rude, egotistic, confused, and angry at himself and the world.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released on November 22, 2010, and shows a complete 360 turn from 808s & Heartbreaks. I absolutely loved this album and can agree that it showed a completely different side of Kanye. This album is beautifully and maniacally crafted and shows how Kanye can come back from his past with an even stronger album. Rolling Stone said that "nobody halfway sane could have made this album" which is so true, after all, he had been through, what else would you expect? “All of the Lights” was an international hit and was my favorite song from 2010-2011. The song encompasses beautiful orchestra instruments like trumpets, violins, pianos, drums, bass, and sick lyrics. The instruments follow a syncopated pattern with the tone of the song. What made it so amazing was how it featured Beyoncé, Drake, Rihanna, Elton John, Alicia Keys, Fergie, John Legend, Bon Iver, and many more legends of our century.

The beauty of this album is evident in this montage of all the album’s songs:

Watch the Throne

Watch the Throne is one of my favorite albums by Kanye and Jay-Z. This collaboration dropped on August 8, 2011. One could only imagine how great this album was going to be just by hearing that the two biggest hip-hop artists were creating an album. This album went platinum and also features other African-Americans such as Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, James Brown, Otis Redding, and Nina Simone. Kanye and Jay-Z used their platform to make a political statement in terms of racism and institutional racism and had a huge impact on how hip-hop influenced the youth. Music scholars, Starr & Waterman, stated in their book about popular music that the 1950s “invented the teenager as a commercial and cultural entity” so it’s obvious that music now is still targeted towards youth. Even the title suggests how hip-hop culture is seen in the public now and that they have to defend their “throne”. Kanye and Jay-Z are constantly talking about how their careers are going to surpass anyone else in the music business and black excellence.  Songs like “Made in America”, “Murder to Excellence”, and “No Church in the Wild” have very apparent meanings. The most known song is “No Church in the Wild” which beats are in the background of numerous commercials. Timothy Taylor, a music scholar who focused on youth and capitalism in Sounds of Capitalism, said that around 1960, “advertisers learned to use popular music in commercials” to really target the baby-boomers and younger generations. The repetitive and upbeat nature of the song makes you really focus on the lyrics and what that company is advertising. The lyrics of this song is about faults in the religious hierarchy of life and how power certain powers are canceled out like a mob vs a king, a king vs a God, and a God vs a non-believer. Ultimately, Jay-Z and Kanye are saying that they are the gods of the rap world. This album shows that they believe they can overcome any skepticism that the world throws at them because they have already made it big in the industry.

Yeezus

Yeezus debuted on June 18, 2013. This was the same month that Kanye and Kim Kardashian had their daughter, North, after being together since 2012. This album is probably Kanye’s most controversial album in terms of people’s reactions because of the harsh sounds, the electro, and industrial sound it resonated. Rolling Stone even said that this is the “darkest, most extreme music Kanye has made and is extravagantly abrasive”. Despite that, I still really liked a few songs from this album and it reflects how versatile Kanye is. Around this time, Black Lives Matter emerged and I think that’s what Kanye is referencing to in a lot of the songs of the album. My favorite is “Blood on the Leaves” because of the intensity of the rhythm and beats. It talks the detriments of living the life of fame and about drugs. The song starts off on a haunting note with Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” in the background recounting lynching and over events from the Civil Rights era. Kanye is reminding us about the history and taking another social-political stance with his platform.

Products & Advertising

Kanye has done clothing collaborates with Louis Vuitton, Nike, Adidas, and A.P.C. His most known product is the YEEZY collection Back on February 8th of 2015, Adidas confirmed their clothing and shoe collaboration with Kanye with many posters and advertisements. When his brand came out he did fashion shows and music videos and advertising for Kanye’s fashion paralleled with his music which was a very smart move for Kanye. In the video, the youthful models just stand motionless in tattered clothing. His fashion line is another way Kanye reflects his ideas to be different and a true artist. In this interview, Kanye talks about how he wants to be creative in all areas and won’t take anyone’s criticism towards him. The music playing in the background is a sample of a song from his album that would have released a year later. It sets the mood and blends all of his artistry together.

The Life of Pablo

The Life of Pablo is Kanye’s latest album that was released on February 14, 2016. This album originally was only on Tidal so it took a while before it was available elsewhere for me to listen to it. Kanye was the first artists to have an #1 album off of mainly streaming totals. This album came out a few months after Kanye and Kim had their second child, Saint. I think this album reflects all of Kanye’s messy, confused life as he battles psychiatric problems. Kanye explains that the title is a reference to, “Pablo Picasso, Pablo Escobar of course, Apostle Paul. [Paul] was the strongest influencer of Christianity, Pablo Escobar was the biggest mover of a product, and Pablo Picasso was the biggest mover of art. And that mix between message, art, and product is The Life Of Pablo”. I love this album because it reminds me of mixtapes that Chance the Rapper has done. This is no coincidence since Chance actually helped Kanye with this album a lot. One of the most shocking things about this album is the infamous “Famous” video that depicts all of the people Kanye has in “made famous” naked in a bed together. I’m not even sure if he got permission from all of these celebrities to use their replicas, but it definitely has given this album a name with some pretty harsh lyrics. The album has a lot of sampling from hit songs of the time like in “Father Stretch My Hands pt. 2″ which uses Desiigner’s “Panda”. This may make the album seem discordant, but it reflects Kanye’s thoughts and how disarrayed he was at the time. A lot of the songs are contradictory as Rolling Stone said because it’s like a battle of how he sees himself and what he doesn’t want the world to realize about him. This explains why Kanye seems so distant and rude in the public eye. The album features a lot of great artists of this time like Rihanna, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Chance, Post Malone, Desiigner, The Weeknd, Chris Brown, Sia, Kid Cudi, etc.  

Although Kanye’s actions and egotistic behavior has turned many people against him, they can’t deny his talent. Critics will look past his rash behavior and still enjoy his music because someone this talented can’t be underrated. In 2016, Kanye surpassed Michael Jackson for having the most top 40 hits on the Billboards for a male artist, which proves to show that his career only goes up from here. Even David Bowie believed that Kanye was a “messiah of music” and knew he would rise to fame in the future. Kanye blends music, advertisement, entertainment, sampling, portability, fashion, relatability, personality, memorability, and structure to establish his career.

Works Cited

Amaloney. "David Bowie predicted the rise of Kanye West in 1972, according to    this bonkers theory." The Sun. The Sun, 21 Nov. 2016. Web. 07 Feb. 2017.

Biography.com Editors. "Kanye West."

Biography.com

. A&E Networks Television, 22 Nov. 2016. Web. 09 Feb. 2017.

Dolan, Jon. "Yeezus." Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, 14 June 2013. Web. 07 Feb.           2017.

Gopinath, Sumanth and Stanyek, Jason. Anytime, Anywhere? An Introduction to the Devices, Markets, and Theories of Mobile Music. The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. July 2014. Print.

Horowitz, Steven. "Jay-Z Explains "Watch The Throne" Title, Significance To Hip Hop Culture." HipHopDX. N.p., 14 Aug. 2011. Web. 6 Feb. 2017.

"Kanye West Explains The Meaning Of 'The Life Of Pablo' Title." Exclusive Hip Hop      News, Interviews, Rumors, Rap & Music Videos | AllHipHop. N.p., 22 Apr. 2016. Web. 07 Feb. 2017.

Sheffield, Rob. "Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy." Rolling Stone.          N.p., 25 Nov. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2017.

Sheffield, Rob. "The Life of Pablo." Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, 16 Feb. 2016. Web. 09 Feb. 2017.

Suisman, D. 2009. Selling Sounds: the commercial revolution in American music. Cambridge, Ma. & London: Harvard University Press.

Starr, L. & C. Waterman. 2013. American Popular Music: from minstrelsy to MP3. New York: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, T. 2014. The Sounds of Capitalism: advertising, music, and the conquest of culture.

Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

[einfolgetechnologies]

According to Ruhan Rajput, Director, Einfolge Indian Pharma Inc shifts to high gear in filing patents

Indian pharma is thinking beyond generics and is investing considerably in developing new drugs and filing patents. This change is attributed to the post 2014 drug patent guidelines and facilitation by the Indian government for promotion of innovation, manufacturing and developing India as drug hub, according to Ruhan Rajput, Director of Einfolge (patent firms in india). In an email interaction with Nandita Vijay, he elaborates the current patent scene in the country and challenges the company's face. Excerpts.

In the wake of the government’s efforts to drive innovation and R&D, how would you describe the current scene for patents in India? Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (CGPDTM) under the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Ministry of Commerce and Industry has shown consistent growth over the years. This year, India witnessed an enormous surge of about 30 percent in filling of intellectual property applications compared to the previous year. But in comparison with countries like China, India is still lagging. The Global Innovation Index, 2017, ranks India 60th out of 127 economies where China is at 22. Clearly, India’s innovation performance is abysmal. Proposals for strengthening India’s inventiveness have been made by public policy experts, notably, the World Bank and (World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). Suggestions fall into three broad categories: one is to create and support world-class universities. The second is to cut bureaucratic red-tape, and the third is to foster an entrepreneurial culture.

Recently the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance had appealed to USTR to remove India from Priority Watch List. Your comments? In the last few months there have been many developments which are a pointer to the fact that Indian pharma is thinking beyond generics with a big change in approach. They are investing a lot in developing new drugs and are also aggressively filing patents. This change is attributed to many factors. One such is the post 2014 drug patent guidelines and facilitation by the Indian government for promotion of innovation, manufacturing and developing India as a drug hub. India being one of the biggest consumer markets of drugs due to its high population brings in a lot of competition among the players. Besides domestic pharma, there are also global majors who have made huge investments in R&D and filing patents globally.

What do you have to say about the objections to grant of patents and patent-related litigations in various courts in the country? A patent is an exclusive right granted to the original inventor for a novel product or a novel process that provides, a unique way of doing something, or which discloses a new technical solution to a problem. It provides monopoly rights to the inventor to make, sell his invention or product. Hence it is essential that patent is only awarded to those innovations which justify the exclusive right and comply with the patentability criteria. Opposition proceedings are structured to restrain wrongful obtaining of patents and claiming of the frivolous or petty inventions. Laws provided under Indian Patent Act for pre-grant and post grant of patent are essential to obstruct the unlawful grant of patent. Under Indian Patent Act, there are two provisions when opposition may be filed either via pre-grant opposition or post-grant opposition provision depending upon the stage of the patent.

Do you feel that Evergreening of patents is a bane to the pharma industry? In recent times, it has become a practice by innovator companies to extend the patent term of their innovative molecules to maintain market dominance. The extension of the monopoly term ‘Evergreening’ is a predominant aspect of pharmaceutical patenting. Evergreening refers to different ways wherein patent owners take undue advantage of the law and associated regulatory process to extend their IP monopoly particularly over highly lucrative ‘blockbuster’ drugs by filing disguised/artful patents on an already patent protected invention shortly before expiry of the ‘parent’ patent.

In India, under the Patent Act 1970, the term for a patent is given for 20 years. The Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement also provides for a minimum length of 20 years for any patent. At the same time, Article 1.1 of the TRIPS agreement recognizes every party’s right to implement more extensive protections in their laws. Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) allow for an extended patent term in cases where an unreasonable delay occurs in granting the patent which is Article 15.9 of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that is also compliant with the TRIPS agreement.

From a global perspective how does Indian pharma appear in patent filing? India is a leading producer of generic medicines and caters to the most developing nations by providing lower-priced drug formulations. The industry is also one of the leading filers of abbreviated new drug applications (ANDA) in the US and supplier of finished formulations to the European region. However, it is generally observed that the Indian patent scenario is not robust and is witnessing lower number of patent applications despite the tremendous growth in terms of market presence.

What are the challenges that you see in patent filing by India? The new patent regime in India has raised several contentious issues relating to the right for health, which is in conflict with the economic right of patent holders. It is also likely to restrict access of allopathic medicines to only the affluent, affordable and more privileged class in India and other countries in the immediate future. The institutions associated with enforcement and protection of right to health of human beings whilst upholding the rights of patent holders are faced with the daunting task and challenge of devising ways to fulfill their defined, roles so that the conflict in rights of intellectual property owners and health of human beings is minimized whilst balancing the prevailing hierarchy of human rights to achieve the social and economic objectives.

Could you dwell on Einfolge expertise in pharma patents? Einfolge has a dedicated team related to pharma patents. We have also collaboration with another US pharma contract research organisation: Pharmasci. This brings on table the expertise of their talents who have had many years of industrial R&D, especially in process development for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

We have plans to expand to the US, Europe, China and Japan. These are the biggest markets for pharma patents. We plan to double our employee strength in next two years and a chunk will be pharma experts.

We see a big potential in near and long-term on advanced medical care related technologies and innovation will be a key to all such developments. We are gearing up to excel in pharma and healthcare to handle critical analysis and projections

How important is pharma in the company’s growth plans and what are your future efforts to increase presence in this space? Pharma is one of the key sectors of the economy. We are targeting 25 percent of our work from the pharma sector. We regularly participate in the annual Indian pharma -medical devices expo organised by Government of India. Besides this, we aim at collaborations with pharma focused institutes and research centres. A number of research institutes are contacting us for collaborating on various fronts including educating their staff and students on IPR matters, supporting them in protecting and monetizing the crude research and help them to take it to industry level. In future, we are also planning collaborations with medical research centers, medical device pioneers to shape further strategies in IP protection for the pharma sector. We are also planning to organise pharma patent camps in collaboration with other strategic partners for highlighting our expertise and excellence.

Original Source: Indian Pharma Inc shifts to high gear in filing patents

[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)

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

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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.

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