#or think about anything beyond aesthetics and buzzwords | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

northwest-cryptid · 1 year ago

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I get what you're saying and I don't mean to upset you by mentioning that you've gone and cherry picked a great example but might I request you broaden your scope slightly to perchance understand what the people saying tumblr is an echo chamber are actually talking about?

Because it goes beyond just "my mutuals have interests that I don't" and is closer to the fact that, yea no shit it's an echo chamber people are going to flock to people they agree with. This isn't actually the problem to be focusing on; the problem comes from the inaction that is taken when we never speak outside the echo chamber.

Alright listen sometimes I see a post that's like "hey signal boost this it's important" and I look at it, and it's basically a bunch of stuff like "hey trans people are people and deserve basic human respect" and I go "yea no shit dude, want me to show this to the 200 other people who agree with this so we can all agree with this and nothing will really come of it?"

Like that right there is "the problem" if there is one.

The idea of using "echo chamber" as a big scary buzzword is stupid.

Why do you follow the people you follow on this site? On a site with no visible follower counter, with no need for shit like "follow for follow" and bullshit like that.

You follow them because you likely agree with the bulk of what they're discussing; or because you enjoy the same shit they do; or because you found common ground.

Common ground is going to breed an "echo chamber" it's just that simple, you typically won't follow someone if they're spouting bullshit you don't personally believe in or agree with.

If I saw someone I was following being fucking racist or bigoted or whatever; I'm probably not gonna follow them for much longer. That does mean that if you ask any of my followers a question on a topic that matters, like the genocide in gaza, or anything about gender and sexuality, or even shit about race and racism. You're probably more than likely going to get the same if not very similar answers from all of them.

That's because we all agree on those sorts of important topics. However I follow people who blog exclusively about sentai shows from Japan, I follow people who blog exclusively about video games I don't personally play, I follow aesthetics blogs that show off a lot of aesthetics I may not care for among some that I do.

The idea is that I follow those people because they make their posts fun to see on my dash; it's something I may not be interested in but I do feel some of their interest rubbing off on me when they enthusiastically blog about the new episode of some Kamen Rider show I'll probably never see.

But if that same blog goes off saying some racist shit or something I'm just done man, that's it. There's a difference between having interests and shit that we don't agree on, and having important opinions on dare I use the words "social justice" and humanity as a whole that we disagree on.

I can handle someone I'm mutuals with blogging about shit I may not find as interesting myself, perhaps they're a friend, maybe I enjoy the aesthetic but not the thing; maybe I find some kind of weird amusement in seeing people talk about a certain tv show or something I don't care what it is, I can follow someone who likes something I do not.

Where the echo chamber comes in is when we start talking about bigger topics, more important topics; the sort of things that make you look at someone and go "...oh you think that?... like unironically? oh... okay..."

I don't think all my followers are into Mabinogi, Speedcore, and Ultrakill, but they likely have other things I blog about or enjoy that they also enjoy; or they might like me as a person. That's perfectly valid, but I assure you we more than likely have the same or similar views on racism, on gender, on sexuality, on trans rights, on cops, and laws, and the genocide.

THAT is what people mean when they say "tumblr is an echo chamber" we curate our own experience, we only really follow people we like and agree with and that's fine there's literally nothing wrong with that.

The biggest problem this causes if any, is that very often you're not getting the word out and convincing anyone who disagrees with you of anything you are trying to. There's times when mutual aid and signal boosting works because it's about raising awareness to help a cause most people agree with within a circle. That's fine, that's great!

However if you're trying to get word out to people who may not be aware, or who may not agree at first glance, if you're trying to convince someone of something; or show someone something new. It's unlikely to "breach containment" as they say. If the people who follow me have the same views on gender and sexuality that I do, then me reblogging a thing about gender and sexuality isn't going to bring a new perspective to someone who thinks differently, it's just going to reaffirm those beliefs for the people who agree with me. Again there's nothing inherently WRONG with that, but it's not like twitter where people who disagree are likely to see it and maybe be swayed by what it's saying.

This actually is a case where unless you're specifically going out of your way to follow and try to become mutuals with people who you specifically disagree with on important topics; yes the experience is universal; because the experience is human.

If you're not intentionally following people who disagree with you, then you are in some way shape or form participating in an echo chamber, congratulations it's not that deep.

It's ironic that this post has as many notes as it does, because it means that at least a couple thousand people have "not had this universal experience of being part of an echo chamber" and if you can't rationalize why that's ironic and funny for yourself I'm not going to be demeaning and rude about it; I'll just explain it.

This post in and of itself is trying to say "maybe you all participate in an echo chamber but some of the people I follow and am mutuals with like things I do not and therefore the experience is not universal" and yet thousands, THOUSANDS of people have reblogged this; they have felt that way; there are thousands of people who are saying the same thing and the same thing is about saying how different they are.

This is similar to when being hipster became so mainstream that hipsters didn't know how to be hipster because the idea of being hipster was about not being mainstream and being hipster had become the new fad.

People really view things as extremes, they think being part of an echo chamber is necessarily inherently bad, it's not. It's just part of being human. If you look at all my closest friends they'll all have a lot in common, one of the main things is that they're either trans or they support trans individuals; you'll notice most of them are gay or support gay individuals; you'll also notice that they all listen to different music, enjoy different games, enjoy different media and hobbies and have different interests; and yet if you sat the lot of us in a room together and go "Cops good?" we would all go "no cops bad actually" and suddenly that IS an echo chamber. BECAUSE THAT'S HOW HUMANS WORK, we flock together with those of similar mentality and beliefs.

“tumblr is an echo chamber where people only see opinions of other people they agree with” please be serious. i have longtime beloved mutuals who are swifties. your experience is not universal

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arrcontractors · 1 year ago

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Why ARR Contractors Is Your Go-To General Contractor in McKinney, TX

When it comes to home renovation or building projects, choosing the right contractor can make all the difference. In McKinney, TX, one name that consistently comes up as a top choice is ARR Contractors. Known for our reliability, excellence in craftsmanship, and outstanding customer service, ARR Contractors has established itself as the leading general contractor in McKinney, TX.

Here's why they should be your first call for any construction or renovation project:

1. Extensive Experience

With years of industry experience, ARR Contractors has handled a wide range of projects, from simple home renovations to complex commercial builds. This breadth of experience not only means we're well-versed in various construction techniques and materials but also that we are adept at navigating any challenges that might arise during the construction process.

2. Comprehensive Services

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Commercial Construction: We understand the unique needs of commercial clients and deliver projects that meet these demands without compromising on quality or aesthetics.

3. Commitment to Quality

At ARR Contractors, quality isn’t just a buzzword—it's a foundational principle. We use only the best materials and adhere to the highest standards of construction practices to ensure that every project is durable, beautiful, and functional. Our attention to detail and insistence on quality craftsmanship means you can rest assured that your investment is built to last.

4. Transparent Pricing

Nobody likes surprises when it comes to costs. ARR Contractors prides itself on transparent pricing and detailed contracts that clearly outline the scope of work and associated costs. This transparency helps in building trust with clients and ensures there are no hidden fees or unexpected charges.

5. Exceptional Customer Service

Home renovation projects can be stressful, but working with ARR Contractors is anything but that. We prioritize customer service, ensuring that communication is clear and consistent and that every client is kept in the loop throughout the entire project. Our professional team is always available to answer any questions you might have and to provide updates as your project progresses.

6. Local Understanding

As a local McKinney, TX business, ARR Contractors understands the local codes, weather conditions, and architectural styles. This local expertise not only facilitates smoother project approval and compliance processes but also ensures that your project feels at home in its surroundings.

7. Positive Customer Feedback

Don’t just take our word for it—ARR Contractors's reputation in McKinney and beyond is backed by numerous positive testimonials from satisfied clients. Our commitment to exceeding expectations has built them a loyal client base that continues to grow through referrals and repeat business.

Conclusion

For your next building or renovation project in McKinney, TX, choosing ARR Contractors means opting for a seamless, stress-free experience delivered by a team of professionals committed to excellence. With ARR Contractors, you’re not just building a project; you’re building a partnership. Whether you’re just starting to think about a project or are ready to break ground, give ARR Contractors a call and discover how we can turn your vision into reality. Your dream space is just a phone call away!

ARR Contractors https://arrcontractors.com/ 9021 Pleasant Hill Dr, Plano, TX 75025 (972) 266-6677

#general contracting

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romantic-moments-poetry · 2 years ago

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An essay / poem / rant about truth and hatred

I can never stop myself from reading through her journals—her mail, her essay pieces, her.

Her. A letter sent to her by you, or that you sent to her, complaining—because (for) that’s all it was, really—of the trite pandering of the modern poet. For two pages at length (on typewriter, no less) you insist on the sanctity of the aesthetic. That the political, the literal, the mass-appeal media disgusted you. You go on and on about the failings of modern day intelligence. Intelligence. That the feeds and the posts are dumbing down our minds, dulling our senses, encouraging our downfall as a human race. You praise the not-so-ancients, claiming that they would be burned at the stake for their racism today, and so may too you. They are your martyrs. Martyrdom has always felt strange to me, though.

As I read, I can’t help but think of my friends—the ones who read in Rupi Kaur and adore Slam Poetry—the simple mass appeal and the political essay. The two things you deem most reprehensible (in the world of modern poetry.) I come to hate you, to hate your hate of the creations of others—one cannot claim a ‘point’ to art, can they? A distinction that makes some things true poetry and others merely new wave shit?

Two things can be true at once. I hate you and your gatekeeping—a buzzword for the ages, but I hope it has not lost all meaning—of the art you adore. I hate it! If you love it then why must you complain of others doing it ‘wrong’ when THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT! To be wrong and write and, as you said, do it for yourself.

And maybe this poem—essay—is loaded by my personal attempts at poetry, for how could it not be? At some point I chose to write a poem that fit “all of the above” on your list of sins. So how could I not abhor you? Your attacks on my art without knowing the most crucial detail: I LIKED it. I LOVED it. It was mine. Personal. Maybe it was shit and meaningless but I think you of all people might understand the worth of art beyond meaning.

And as I read your, rant, honestly, if anything, I find myself craning my neck to read the next page of it, upside-down on her wall. It is your art. I hate it and I love it.

Two things can be true at once: I hate you. This is true. I also write this poem, impassioned by you. Poem. A metacommentary analysis of art as a poem, I can’t decide whether you would hate or love it.

I despise you for all you are and yet when I made that list of inspirations that I hung up on my bedroom door to see every day I couldn’t stand to keep you off of it. It was all done. Done. You are my enemy, but I don’t believe in those. Older, hated, better. Three words that may or may not describe you. I hate it when someone just says “it’s nuanced” and moves on. But two things can be true at once. Maybe I hate you. Maybe I don’t. I don’t know.

But I’m still going to write my fucking poetry.

#poetry #poem #writing #mine

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endcant · 4 years ago

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aimless musings on subgenre, citypop, and internet subcultures

theres something very interesting about watching citypop become very mainstream in korea and watching that feed back into both western listeners’ opinions and also into the sometimes-cynical efforts of a variety of kpop producers

a lot of people in the youtube/kpop sphere talk about the growth of citypop as if it were a spontaneous wave that appeared out of nowhere with mariya takeuchi’s plastic love getting picked up by the youtube algorithm in like 2018 or whatever, but thats a very like online-ignorant view of the interaction between vintage japanese music and worldwide online EDM production. citypop has been used in future funk and vaporwave for almost a decade by now, and, as a result, a number of citypop songs took off on social media here and there before plastic love’s acceleration— dress down by kaworu akimoto is one of the big examples off the top of my head, but there’s likely many many more.

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“Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi (1984). if you haven’t heard this yet, you’d better listen to it now. The video that first went viral was uploaded in 2017

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“Selfish High Heels” by Yung Bae, Macross 82-99, and Harrison (2014) is a popular Future Funk remixes of Dress Down by Kaoru Akimoto (1986)

people who haven’t been very aesthetically literate online over the years— musically or visually, since those things are tied in subcultures— treat things like they come from nowhere. there are ongoing subcultural conversations that lead to certain aesthetic choices, and when someone tries to cash in on a trend without understanding what the trend is, that leads people to call bullshit. calling bullshit is not meanspirited, in my opinion, because it very much is like somebody who can’t speak a language getting up in front of everybody and saying “hey, i’m fluent!” and then speaking some vaguely that-language-sounding nonsense. of course people who genuinely speak that language will be outraged instinctively. it feels like being mocked.

that’s why the difference between music producers picking up on a trend cynically and music producers picking up on a trend with earnest interest in that trend’s origins feels different, even if the producers are similarly distant from the original subculture that produced that trend.

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“Lady” by Yubin (2018) committed hard to the 80s JP citypop aesthetic, musically and visually, down to the sets, all fairly early in the major resurgence.

i’m sure that anyone with a passing familiarity with citypop and kpop can ascertain that not all kpop producers know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is that it is on-trend and they have to make it. not all kpop listeners know what citypop is and what makes it citypop. all they know is their idol said citypop as a buzzword in their little prepared statement. all this results in some interesting moments for me as a Music Fan, Online.

here is where i get to the thing that spurred this post: loona “did a citypop” for their japanese comeback. it doesnt sound like citypop.

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“Hula Hoop (Citypop Version)” by Loona (2021). It has very odd percussion rhythms and mixing for citypop, no real attempt at a citypop verse, and strangely sparse gestures towards citypop in the form of a few seconds of bass and some synthesized orchestral embellishments that were taken from the original mix …all in spite of a very disco-inspired melody that should have worked perfectly for citypop

this is not a very big deal, and im not mad about it or anything. when a kpop act i like gets saddled with an unfortunate B-Side track i dont tend to take it very hard. however, it did raise a little bit of musical discourse in the loona fandom— in the form of remixes.

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“hula hoop if it was actually a citypop song” by loonahatetwinks and Olivia Soul on youtube. this one has an original instrumental that is spot-on for contemporary k-citypop

My most favorite one of these remixes is a futurefunk remix by ZSunder, one of the very best LOONA fan producers. The fact that ZSunder thought to make a future funk remix at all speaks more to an understanding of the mutually supportive relationship between citypop and EDM genres than most kpop citypop producers or fanmixers seem to care to know about.

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“Hula Hoop (Future Funk Mix)” by ZSunder is futurefunk made and mixed with such love that it has the infectious summery energy of a polished, big-name future funk hit

in the comments of this video, some people seemed to get the citypop-future funk connection and some didnt. many did get it, don’t get me wrong! but also, its not all that surprising for some kpop-focused listeners to not know much about EDM subcultures and the reasons behind various trends among producers, since kpop as an institution tends to take influences from any genre and culture it likes and then decontextualize those influences by just having their names used as buzzwords in the blurbs the idols have to recite when variety show hosts ask them about their latest single. this isn’t a criticism of the genre or the fans really, it’s just a part of the kpop industry that is used to add shine to an endless firehose-like stream of polished pop tracks. there are some issues with using whole genres and subcultures with complex histories as buzzwords, but god help us if we ever want a pop industry to give its influences their dues.

anyway, the intention behind ZSunder’s future funk Hula Hoop remix happened to remind me me of why i love Yukika’s discography so much, especially the Soul Lady album. I’ve seen some reviews online baffled by parts of Soul Lady, because the album in general is an exploration of that relationship between citypop and modern/internet EDM. i’ve seen plenty of Soul Lady reviews especially baffled by pit-a-pet, saying something along the lines of “what’s with the modern-sounding dance track in the middle of a retro album?”, but i think that pit-a-pet is a futurefunk-inspired track, at least in the chorus. considering both that and the Chill Lo-Fi Interludes, it seems like estimate’s team put together Soul Lady for Yukika in a way that shows that they love citypop and understand the online-specific electronic music subcultures that led to citypop’s resurgence.

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“pit-a-pet” by Yukika (2020). the stacatto, bass heavy chorus is futurefunk enough, but the soaring orchestral part in the final chorus seals the deal for my interpretation.

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“All Flights Are Delayed (1 hour version)” by Yukika (2020). Estimate literally released an hour-long youtube mix of one of the Lo-Fi interludes on Soul Lady as part of their promotion, clearly inspired by “Lo-Fi anime beats to chill out to,” which is another example of online producers from around the world using Japanese samples as a focal point of their music

Estimate, in the end, is still a Kpop production company, just the same as BBC, so they have no inherent claim over citypop, but the way that their exploration of subgenres clearly comes from passion and interest on the part of their production staff makes it so that their work with Yukika rings true. on the other hand, i really appreciate Ryan S. Jhun’s work on LOONA’s JP comeback, as well as on Not Friends, but the citypop mix thing was so clearly an afterthought to the point where fans of Loona who like citypop seem mostly just irritated by the cynical-seeming attempt.

heres one last good modern kpop citypop MV that has nods to the internet culture that led to its revival in the form of the videography— vaporwave, future funk, lofi, and other internet genres along those lines tend to have videos consisting of looping anime and vhs clips. future funk in particular is known for this, especially since a lot of future funk music, esp early future funk, is just loops of very short, catchy segments of citypop and disco songs. it’s all about the loops

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“My Type” by Yoon JongShin ft. Miyu Takeuchi (2019). This song is so dedicated to the retro JP citypop sound that it’s almost beyond my personal taste. The singer, Miyu, was a headlining act at a seoul citypop festival and sang this song as part of her act (:

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this video of “Only One” by Conscious Thoughts (2015) has a looped clip as an example for comparison with My Type. it also has a pulsing sidechain compressor working in time with its drum beat in a way that is common for future funk and that i think is a good example for my pit-a-pet yukika comparison to future funk

i guess the takeaway here is that media is more and more online, and the creation and propagation of digital audio and video content has been in the hands of literally almost anybody who wants to do it for the past two decades thanks to garage band and fruityloops and audacity and tiktok and youtube and bandcamp and soundcloud and myspace and newgrounds and p2p file sharing and so on and so forth. and therefore like… as with all things, the consumer class more and more is also the creator class, and therefore every member of an audio-visual subculture will have the ability to discern what is and isnt made with knowledge of the audio-visual language of that subculture

#me using elder millennial phrasing for Loona Did A City Pop to imply how out-of -touch it is kfhajfhs #mine #music #long post #Youtube

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behindthebridgeblog · 8 years ago

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Teaching Philosophy, Part One

by Danny Ziemann

I’d like you to think back to your private lesson experiences as a student. What do you remember working on with your teacher - executive skills, etudes, pieces, for example - and how did you go about it? Dig even deeper—what was the first thing you remember learning? What is the first thing that really clicked with you; something that guides you even today?

Let's talk teaching materials. Did you primarily work through a book? What was the process--linear (you must finish page 13 before attempting page 14), or were you able to skip around freely? Did your teacher create their own learning materials? What about your relationship with your teacher—did you connect well or was each lesson pure drudgery? Were you happy with your overall success? Was there any sort of teaching sequence or methodology that you could discern; maybe even a teaching philosophy of some type?

Hopefully this trip down memory lane wasn’t too traumatic! Chances are that your private lesson teacher had some sort of philosophy or framework that they were guided by. And if you plan on doing any type of teaching, crafting a philosophy is an excellent way to help organize your thoughts and provide an underlying structure to your methods. You may even have something similar already! Philosophy has always played some role in music education, stemming back to Plato in Ancient Greece with the Quadrivium. Philosophy first helps us justify “Why should we study music?” without resorting to misguided claims like “music makes us smarter at math.” Philosophy can also help educators understand the big-picture goals, objectives, and inherent themes that exist in our teaching methods.

Always be thinking about your students’ musicianship after your formal musical relationship is over.

A philosophy of music education can be rooted by something as short as “I want to foster _________ in my students,” or it can also be as detailed as Bennett Reimer’s aesthetic A Philosophy of Music Education and David Elliot’s praxial Music Matters. Philosophy is indeed a useful tool, but the role of a philosopher is to ask “Why?” and not necessarily “How?” Your job as the teacher is to put the rubber to the road and put philosophy into action! In the next two posts, we will go through the process of crafting an effective sample teaching philosophy and discuss putting it into practice in your own teaching life.

The first step

If this seems overwhelming, fear not! The first question you should ask is:

“What do I want my students to know and accomplish upon completion of our lessons?”

Notice that the question is phrased with terminal language. Always be thinking about your students’ musicianship after the formal musical relationship is over. For the sake of our example, let's aim for a fundamental skill that is often the focus of beginner instruction; something like…

“Upon completion of our lessons, I want my students to know all of their major scales with correct fingerings and various bowings.”

This is a common learning objective and certainly a worthy skill to instill in your students. Let's create a line of questioning that will better help us understand implicit biases and shortcomings in our learning objective:

Does completion of this task indicate anything about the student’s musicianship beyond their executive skills? How are you engaging their ear throughout this process?

What if the fingerings are correct but they can’t hear if the scale is in tune? Have they succeeded if they can play their scales but don't understand how scales work or their harmonic implications?

Does this teach them anything about how functional harmony works on their instrument?

Are playing scales by rote a creative endeavor? What's the first scale you teach? What's the second? When do you teach minor scales?

Will you use notation?

Will you relate this task to familiar and unfamiliar repertoire?

Is the idea to teach a functional layout of the instrument, or are you hoping to talk about intonation, time, and bow use throughout development of this skill?

What does this do to foster a love for music?

One simple statement really brings up quite a number of diverse questions! This line of questioning can get us closer to understanding precisely what we’re teaching and why. Try it within the context of your own teaching and see what you can conjure up! Defining nitty gritty learning objectives (with detailed insight!) allows us to explore our potential philosophy. Now, let's zoom the focus out and revise our previous statement to reflect our philosophical inquiry:

“I want my students to be able to play scales in tune with harmonic understanding, aural awareness, varied bowings, and a supportive, focused tone. I want students to understand their role in the music they play, seek out and connect with unfamiliar music, and feel empowered to improvise without fear.”

Notice the educational buzzwords in our statement: understanding, awareness, thoughtful, empowerment, and improvisation. We started off with a singular skill and are now dealing with larger ideas, building a deeper understanding of what is important to us as teachers. The focus here seems to be on creating autonomy and confidence. Great!

Zoom out even further—what’s the largest single umbrella term you can use to connect all of these terms?

How about creating independent musicianship?

All of these learning objectives—development of harmonic understanding, aural awareness, and especially empowerment—are signs of developing innate musicianship. Empowerment refers to autonomy, defined as freedom from control or influence. Helping students become musically autonomous means they will continue to learn after our formal time together ends--our exact learning goal. This will be the foundation for our philosophy!

In our next post, we’ll dig further into this idea and talk about putting it into practice.

Danny Ziemann is a contributing writer for Behind the Bridge and adjunct professor of bass and cello at SUNY Oswego.

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filipeteimuraz · 6 years ago

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The Psychology Of Color

Color and visual cues can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. On Quick Sprout, for instance, the Hellobar — a red bar on the top of the page accounts for 11% of all new leads.

The same is true for KimberlySnyder.net — she generates around 20% of her revenue through a bright, red Hellobar.

This tool may not be beautiful. In fact, on some websites, it looks like a total eyesore. But it stands out.

You see, audiences online have limited attention spans. They’re powering through websites (and digesting information at a million miles an hour). The only way to grab their attention is to stand out from everything that is competing for their attention. That is where color comes in.

Color has value beyond aesthetics. Yes, we all have preferences, but why? The answer to that question will directly affect your online marketing and conversion optimization strategy. Color is something that’s always around us, but we rarely think about how it impacts us. In this chapter, we’re going to overthink it. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about color will be captured in the next 20+ pages.

Color Theory

There is a clear science to picking colors that work together. There is a definite element of subjectivity involved (culture, generational perspectives, and personal preferences), but there is also a set of best practices that psychologists and designers will stick to. Colm Tuite, a user experience designer, breaks down color into the following framework.

Pures, Tints, Shades & Tones

PURE COLOR

These are colors that are not mixed with other hues. They’re usually incorporated into bright designs. Anything youthful, summery, cheerful, energetic, or ‘cool’ can benefit from using pure colors.

TINTS

These are colors mixed with white. They convey a lighter, more peaceful, and less energetic feeling than pure colors. They’re also considered more feminine. Companies in the health, spa, and beauty industries could benefit from using these colors.

SHADES

These are colors mixed with black and are effective in communicating mysterious, dark, evil, or dangerous moods. Shades can work well with gradients when used with either a pure color or lighter shade.

The Meanings Of Colors

Certain colors are tied to cultural, emotional, and social connotations. Here are some meanings of colors in the western world.

Tints and shades can help influence the feelings that color conveys. For instance, a darker shade of blue would convey more security and integrity. Lighter shades of blue would convey more tranquility and peace. Some colors have developed a particular meaning over time due to use from certain organizations (i.e. a branding effective).

For instance, the Catholic Church uses deep shades of purple and red, giving the colors a spiritual meaning. Pink has also become associated with femininity. Countries have also adopted certain colors as their own (for instance, Ireland and green).

Maintaining Simplicity

A common mistake when working with colors is to use too many of them. It is usually better to use one prominent color that is offset by a neutral color like white, gray, or black. When you use too many colors, you may end up conveying too many feelings or messages at once — something that will potentially confuse the person viewing your design.

Contrast

For the most part, dark colors are strong complements to bright colors. That is why most books are designed using white backgrounds and black text. Each color has a contrast value (white is the lightest and black is the darkest). Yellow and green have light values (so they would be difficult to read on a white background).

Example

Let’s say that a client approaches your (hypothetical design) company looking for a logo. The company is a beauty spa, which uses natural, organic products. The target market is women, and she is trying to convey a peaceful messages, rather than an energetic one. So, she knows that tints are the best route to take, as opposed to pure colors or shades. Colors to convey tranquility and femininity are pink, yellow, purple, and blue.

The client really wants to drive home that products are organic. One option is green, which conveys thoughts of freshness and the environment. The following shade of green, however, is not very feminine:

So the shade would need to be a little light

If you also want to convey a bit of tranquility, you would add a bit of blue.

Color And Conversions

Here’s the quick facts on how colors impact conversions:

92.6% of people say the visual dimension is the #1 influencing factor affecting their purchase decision (over taste, smell, etc.).

Studies suggest that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of initial viewing. Up to 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.

One study found that magazine readers recognize full-color ads 26% more often than black-and-white ads.

Heinz changed the color of their signature ketchup from red to green and sold over 10 million bottles in the first 7 months, resulting in $23 million in sales.

Here’s some additional facts on how color effects purchase decisions:

When marketing new products, it is important to understand that consumers place visual appearance and color above other factors when they shop.

85% of shoppers place color as a primary reason for why they buy a particular product.

Color increases brand recognition by 80%. Brand recognition is directly tied to consumer confidence.

Colors are not universal in nature. Colors that entice in North America are different from those that entice in India. See the infographic (below) to see how different colors affect online consumers in North America.

Color is not the only element that influences consumer behavior. For online shoppers, design, buzzwords and convenience also affect the need to shop.

Color affects us in countless ways, both mentally and physically. Psychologists have suggested that color impression can account for 60% of the acceptance or rejection of a product or service. A bad color combination can have the same user experience consequences of poor copy or slow page load times.

Gender

ender is something we’ve talked about in the last few sections — but it’s important for us to call out specifically. At any given time, your audience is some proportion of men and women. For the sake of argument, we’re going to say 50/50, but the reality is that this number can fluctuate depending on your business and industry. If you’re not careful (and create gender-centric marketing imagery), you could end up losing out on up to 50% of your web traffic and conversions.

In our everyday lives, we see the world as individuals. We need to change our perspective and start seeing the world as marketers instead. Color is out of the ways to market to people who aren’t like us.

In general, research says that gender associations with color are ambiguous.

Some observations that some analysts have made:

A review of color studies done by Eysenck in early 1940’s notes the following results to the relationship between gender and color. Dorcus (1926) found yellow had a higher affective value for the men than women and St. George (1938) maintained that blue for men stands out far more than for women.

An even earlier study by Jastrow (1897) found men preferred blue to red and women red to blue. Eysenck’s study, however, found only one gender difference with yellow being preferred to orange by women and orange to yellow by men. This finding was reinforced later by Birren (1952) who found men preferred orange to yellow; while women placed orange at the bottom of the list.

Guilford and Smith (1959) found men were generally more tolerant toward achromatic colors than women. Thus, Guilford and Smith proposed that women might be more color-conscious and their color tastes more flexible and diverse. Likewise, McInnis and Shearer (1964) found that blue green was more favored among women than men, and women preferred tints more than shades. They also found 56% of men and 76% of women preferred cool colors, and 51% men and 45% women chose bright colors. In a similar study, Plater (1967) found men had a tendency to prefer stronger chromas than women.

What’s important to keep in mind is that cultural and social contexts are changing all the time. There is so much variation in the population that you’re not going to be able to appease everybody with just one color scheme. You could read all of the psychology studies in the world, but if you sit around trying to be a perfectionist, you’re never going to get anything done.

The best way to figure out if you’re excluding men and women in your marketing? Talk to people in your target customer base. Research some of the color schemes that your competitors are using. Don’t leave the decision to guess work, but don’t dwell on finding the “right” answer either (because you probably won’t).

The best answer is in your data. In addition to conducting qualitative research with your target customers, make sure that you’re running consistent A/B tests.

Accessibility

As you’re designing your website, keep in mind that your audiences perceive the world differently. Even if you have perfect vision, the world doesn’t. The W3C Web Accessibility initiative has put together a list of resources to help website owners ensure that their websites are accessible to people with disabilities. Here is a guide to help you establish checkpoints for accessible colors.

Brightness

rightness, for the purpose of this discussion, is defined as the intensity of light illuminating an object. It can be calculated as the arithmetic mean of the red, green, and blue color coordinates. The W3C suggests using the following formula to determine color brightness:

BRIGHTNESS = ((RED X 299) + (GREEN X 587) + (BLUE X 114))/1000

A visible color should be brighter than 125

Color Difference

Color difference is the variation in hugh between the foreground and the background color of your website. Here is a formula to help you calculate the color difference:

RED = MAX(RED FOREGROUND, RED BACKGROUND) -MIN(RED FOREGROUND, RED BACKGROUND)

GREEN = MAX(GREEN FOREGROUND, GREEN BACKGROUND) -MIN(GREEN FOREGROUND, GREEN BACKGROUND)

BLUE = MAX(BLUE FOREGROUND, BLUE BACKGROUND) -MIN(BLUE FOREGROUND, BLUE BACKGROUND)

= (RED) + (GREEN) + (BLUE)

Background and foreground color are visible if the color difference has a value greater than 500.

Rules Of Thumb

To make sure that your website is accessible, start by following these best practices:

Use font sizes that are large enough to read. While this tip is not directly related to color, it is important to keep in mind. Ultimately, color is not a standalone concept — it works together with other elements of your website, advertisements, and landing pages.

Keep paragraphs short so that information is easy to digest (and readers don’t feel like they’re looking a giant block of color).

Use complimentary but contrasting colors between your background and foreground. You can use a color wheel to figure out which colors will potentially work well together.

Relevance To Sales

When you’re choosing colors for your website, landing pages, and call to action buttons, you’re not just choosing colors for the sake of aesthetics. Here is a chart from Ren Walker at AdPearance that gives an overview of colors within the context of call to action buttons (in the Western world):

Wow. That’s a lot of options. Which one should you choose? Even if you’re a color psychology expert, it can be tough to decide on just one color — for a form button, for instance. What if you want to create a sense of urgency but also trust?

The most important way to narrow down your options is to consider the context of your form. What type of information are you looking to collect? If the potential lead needs to include personal information beyond basic contact details, you might consider choosing a calming color like green or blue. You should also consider what the rest of your page looks like. A red button, for instance, won’t stand out on a page that is based on the same color. Choose contrasting colors so that your call to action (CTA) buttons stand out on your landing pages.

Capturing Audience’s Attention

Take this commonly cited A/B test, for instance:

Performable — an email marketing platform that was acquired by HubSpot, experienced a 21% boost in conversions when the company changed its call to action button color from green to red.

The effect of the color change has everything to do with the CTA’s context.

The page on the left is very-much geared towards a green palette. The green CTA just blends within the page’s surrounding context. Red, however, presents a drastic visual context. The button truly stands out from the other elements on the page.

Website Elements Affected

In a blog post for CrazyEgg, Stephanie Hamilton put together a comprehensive list of website elements impacted by color:

Text Links

One solution for drawing attention to monochromatic links is to give them a faint background to lift them off the page. This technique helps to remind users where they are on your website. Check out how AppZapper makes the “overview” link by highlighting it in green when the user is on the page.

Navigation

Bronto uses saturated colors to bring attention to its website navigation. This helps focus the reader’s attention to this extremely important (but small) part of the website.

Buttons

Use colors to make your website’s call to action (CTA) buttons stand out from other elements on your website. Large, vibrant buttons will help your users understand what actions they should be taking on your website.

Headings

Vibrant (but minimal) headings can help illuminate the most important concepts that you’re trying to communicate on your website.

List Items

If you want to draw attention to a certain feature or section of your website, you can use colors in a way that don’t overwhelm the rest of your page’s design.

Complement Your Brand’s Personality

Brand personality is a concept that we’ve talked about earlier in this guide. Color presents a powerful opportunity for self-expression. Use colors to accentuate your existing brand identity, and make sure that you piece together a cohesive style. At the end of the day, color is only one part of your branding equation and ultimately needs to complement your voice, persona, tone, and company values.

Here are the steps that we advises marketers take:

1. Decide which emotions you want to convey

This decision will help you decide what color(s) you want to pick and whether you’ll need to create a blend with others. You’ll need to pick a range of colors from the following options:

Monochromatic: stick with colors that belong to one color family (such as brown or blue)

Analogous: use two or three colors that appear next to one another on the color wheel

Complementary: Chose two colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel

Triadic: Chose three colors, equally spaced around the color wheel

2. Choose the palette that best communicates your company’s style

Warm and Comforting Browns Browns evoke home, hearth, comfort, and warmth. You can combine different shades of brown with grays or blues to create a highly comforting vibe.

Playful Greens If your brand is playful of energetic, consider using a palette with greens, blues, and oranges. This color scheme combines a pleasing, down to earth vibe with high energy.

Serious Blues Blues are calming and serious You can combine your color scheme with gray, tan, or orange, but you’ll want to keep secondary colors toned down so that you’re not overloading your audience with a chaotic look and feel.

Energetic Reds Reds provide a burst of energy. If you’re not careful, however, you’ll risk overwhelming your audience. Offer plenty of white space to give your users’ eyes a break.

Know Your Niche

Your industry has everything to do with your website’s color scheme and brand personality. A finance website, for instance, should be down to earth. If you move too far from the established path, you’ll risk confusing or causing cognitive dissonance with your customer base. Here are some examples of color schemes that work well for finance sites:

This color palette relies on greens that users are used to seeing with financial institutions. The gold switches it up a bit, and the black gives the scheme a foundation of strength and authority.

This is a strong color combination for a financial brand because it goes beyond the obvious association with money (green). Gold and black reinforce the concept of wealth and provide a sense of stability.

Here is an example of a ‘cool’ color palette that uses traditional financial colors (green and blue):

By using these colors in lighter, brighter values, the brand associates itself with the finance world in a way that looks modern and youthful rather than heavy and overbearing.

The use of white space gives the website a clean, light feel. This is especially valid for a finance site, which drives business by building trust with its user base.

Key Takeaways

Color is something that we could seriously talk about forever, but there are still many more topics that we need to cover in this guide. Now is a good time to step back, reflect on key concepts covered, and prep our brains for what’s coming next.

There is a clear science to picking colors that work well together. Pure colors, tints, and shades are some of the most basic color variations that you’ll be working with. Know the moods and feelings that your color choices are likely to evoke.

Colors come with social and cultural connotations. Remember your frame of reference when you think about how your color choices will affect your audience.

Remember that people are reading your content from different perspectives. Eyeballs were not created differently. Some of us have perfect vision while others strain to read text on a screen. Make sure that your text is easy to read by using contrasting colors.

Red and green are the colors most affected by vision deficiency, especially among men. Be careful when you’re working with these colors.

Color can help you boost conversion rates. When creating your CTAs, pick colors that contrast dramatically from the rest of your color scheme. This boldness ensures that your visual cues stand out. Remember, people on the Internet have limited attention spans and are flaky. The more that you can (quickly) capture their attention, the easier time you’ll have engaging them.

A/B testing should be a part of your conversion optimization process. Instead of debating which colors to use, let the data decide for you.

Pay attention to standard color schemes in your industry. If you choose something that is too out-of-the-box, you risk causing cognitive dissonance among your audience. In other words, people will have no clue what your brand is about.

Remember that gender can have a significant impact on color. One way to play it safe (and appeal to a wide audience) is to choose blues and greens.

When buying new products, consumers are heavily swayed by visual appearance. Don’t take any shortcuts with your color choices and design. There are professional designers and branding consultants who can help you figure out what works well together and what doesn’t. Ultimately, everything should complement your brand personality.

Color can help you accentuate elements on your website (like navigation, lists, certain buttons of content, etc.).

Color has the potential to increase brand recognition by 80%. Choose color schemes that are memorable (but for the right reasons). A carefully chosen color scheme will help your identity shine.

When in doubt, ask your customers what they like. Take a look at the colors that brands catering to the same audience are using. There are so many free and creative resources out there — you’re never just jumping in blind

http://www.quicksprout.com/psychology-of-color/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-psychology-of-color.html

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lindyhunt · 6 years ago

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Meet “The World’s Most Comfortable Shoes”

Last spring, I found myself walking the streets of San Francisco—from historic Jackson Square through Chinatown, over to Little Italy and back—for hours, thinking to myself, ‘I never want to take these shoes off.’ Now, I love shoes as much as the next girl. (Okay, maybe more than the next girl.) But this was a new sentiment, even for me. Turns out, it wasn’t hyperbole when TIME magazine dubbed sneaker start-up Allbirds—which launches its Canada e-retail today—“the world’s most comfortable shoes.”

But that’s not the only thing that sets them apart in the very crowded sneaker space, which has acquired somewhat of a cult patina over the past few years. Allbirds’ USP lies in what their shoes are made out of. No, it’s not some high-tech performance material developed in a lab. No, it’s not some newfangled Silicon Valley-generated synthetic fibre. It’s… wait for it… Merino wool. Since March 2016, the company’s impossibly soft wool lace-up sneakers and slip-on shoes have been flying off shelves, attracting everyone from tech leaders like Google co-founder Larry Page to Hollywood A-listers like Emma Watson and Mila Kunis to world leaders like Barack Obama. Allbirds has since expanded beyond wool, launching shoes made from a lightweight and breathable fibre spun from eucalyptus tree pulp last spring, and flip flops made from sugarcane in the late summer.

Photography via Allbirds

You’ve probably caught on to the fact that Allbirds is no ordinary shoe company.

From innovation to sourcing to design to packaging, every aspect of their decision-making takes the environment into consideration. Sure, sustainable is the buzzword du jour, and it’s led fashion brands across the globe to hop on the bandwagon, often at the expense of good design. Unfortunately, this means consumers have come to expect a sad compromise when it comes to ‘green’ goods—low on style, high on conscience. But that’s precisely the landmine that Allbirds’ founders, former New Zealand footballer Tim Brown and renewable materials expert Joey Zwillinger, have managed to neatly dodge, with a brand philosophy that leads with design first, sustainability second. What’s the point of being an eco-friendly business if no one’s going to buy what you’re selling?

Photography via Allbirds

The initial idea for Allbirds began germinating in Brown’s head around 2009-2010 with a “pure design vision”—a singular, logo-free, minimalist sneaker. The idea of crafting them out of natural materials came later.

“In a previous life, I had a sporting career,” says Brown. “I was playing in the Australian Soccer League. I was sponsored by Nike, and everything I had to wear had logos on it. But around that time, there was a big shift happening in apparel and fashion. You were seeing that unbranded, simple, Everlane aesthetic starting to take over in a way it hadn’t before. And so I thought there was room [in the market] for a simple sneaker.”

But as he immersed himself in the workings of the footwear industry, he became aware of how little it had evolved over the years. The materials used are either synthetic or leather, and its dependence on non-biodegradable petroleum-based products makes the footwear industry one of the worst offenders in terms of environmental impact. That was when the idea of a sneaker made out of natural materials began to coalesce in Brown’s mind, especially given the fact that he hails from New Zealand, “the land of 27 million sheep.” But as a native Kiwi, he knew his perceptions of wool were vastly different from others’. “When you hear about wool as an American or Canadian consumer, you think hot and scratchy. First of all, not all wool is created equal.” Allbirds sneakers utilize 17.5 micron, superfine, New Zealand merino wool. “It’s some of the finest fibre in the world,” says Brown.

Photography via Allbirds

Armed with the idea of a single sneaker crafted out of wool, Brown embarked on a years-long journey, one that involved hundreds of evolving prototypes, which Brown admits were “so bad”; a wildly successful 2014 Kickstarter campaign, followed by “the worst year of [his] life trying to fulfill those orders”; and eventually a meeting with Zwillinger (their wives are best friends), who was working in the renewable materials space at the time and quickly became intrigued with Brown’s mission. With Zwillinger’s help, they secured venture capital funding for their start-up, and with seed money of $2.25m, got to work. They launched in 2016 with the Wool Runner, a lace-up sneaker, followed by the Wool Lounger, a slip-on, and a line of shoes for kids, endearingly called Smallbirds.

Sustainability may not have been their founding principle, but it’s been a core part of their business model right from the start. They regularly conduct LCAs—Life Cycle Analyses—to “understand the environmental impact of carbon footprint of our product,” says Brown, and also achieved B Corp certification. “Instead of taking a shareholder-only approach—that’s the norm for any business in America, particularly with public companies; they have a duty or obligation to their shareholders—we’ve put in the charter of business that we have a public benefit, that we also have as a stakeholder the environment,” Zwillinger explains. “Hopefully long after we’re gone, the managers of Allbirds will be beholden to the environment as well as shareholders. We’ve really baked that into the DNA of the business. We live it every day.”

Photography via Allbirds

Allbirds employs what can be deemed a kind of stealth sustainability – it’s not the first thing they want you to notice about the brand, and it’s not the first thing they talk about when they discuss their philosophy. According to Jad Finck, VP of Innovation and Sustainability, “We don’t want to be a sustainable shoe company, we want to be a company that makes great shoes and we do it sustainably.” They may not be shouting it from the rooftops but the environment is omnipresent, not just in their thinking but even in their office space. A lush green wall of preserved plants with the Allbirds logo emblazoned across the middle welcomes you to their San Francisco headquarters, where meeting rooms are named after New Zealand bird species (Hihi, Tui, Kiwi), the bathrooms are dubbed Birdbaths, and the conference room table is a giant slab of redwood, sanded, polished and assembled by the employees themselves. There’s a playful element running through the company’s ethos, from the name (named for New Zealand, which early settlers, during their first exploration of the islands, discovered was “all birds” and not much else), to the quirky branding and photography, to the names of the seasonal (and hard to precisely identify) colourways their shoes come in—it’s not brick red, it’s ‘chili’, it’s not a greenish taupe, it’s ‘sage,’ and it’s not blush, it’s ‘dusk.’ But behind all that whimsy is serious stuff. Here’s a quick run-down: the Wool line is made of responsibly sourced merino wool from ZQ-certified farms in New Zealand that meet the highest standards in terms of animal welfare, environmental care and social sustainability; the shoelaces are made from post-consumer plastic; and the insole is constructed out of a castor bean-derived polymer. The Tree line, whose upper is fashioned out of eucalyptus tree fibres, is FSC-certified, which means it’s been vetted and approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental watchdog group. “It’s a really holistic certification,” explains the brand’s Sustainability Analyst Hana Kajimura. It ensures they’re “not harvesting baby trees, not taking from endangered forests or places where there are endangered species, and also [considers] indigenous people’s rights as well as things like water quality and fertilizer use.”

Photography via Allbirds

While their sustainability game is solid, it’s not the main reason why the brand has developed a cult following in the short time since its launch. The design is clean, sleek and simple—“the right amount of nothing,” quips Head of Design Jamie McLellan—yet instantly recognisable. They might have started out as the sweethearts of Silicon Valley, beloved by head honchoes at Google, Twitter and Apple, as well as tech magazine editors (apparently “they’re as plentiful as MacBooks at the WIRED office”), but their appeal has spread way beyond the tech realm. I counted several at the San Francisco airport and also spotted them in Austin during South by Southwest. Outside of the United States, though, they’d been limited to Australia and New Zealand—until last March, when they launched their Canadian online presence.

“Our philosophy is: you’ve got to go products first,” says Finck. “You have to make a product that people love, they love the way it looks, the way it feels. We could say ‘oh it’s an eco-shoe but it’s scratchy and falls apart’ but then we’d have no power to change anything. Unless people [want to] buy our products, no one’s listening and no one cares.”

Suffice it to say, people care.

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jessicakehoe · 6 years ago

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Meet “The World’s Most Comfortable Shoes”

Photography via Allbirds

You’ve probably caught on to the fact that Allbirds is no ordinary shoe company.

Photography via Allbirds

Suffice it to say, people care.

The post Meet “The World’s Most Comfortable Shoes” appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Meet “The World’s Most Comfortable Shoes” published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

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thethagtochina-blog · 8 years ago

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Digesting Blogs:

It’s strange what decides to bring people together. What twists and turns they have taken in life to bring them to this very moment. Inevitably we all have one outstanding connection here and it is our writing. The love for it, the loathing of it and our insatiable itch to just do it. Our blogs are diverse in the way we ourselves are but these little thematic similarities are there to remind us of perhaps a culture we are creating. It has all taken something for each of us to be here, and with each person’s unique bravery also comes their unique vulnerabilities. Being a creative of any kind requires you to place yourself in a situation to be scrutinised in some way shape or form. It is clear from each of the blogs that we are finding ways of expressing, overcoming and just embracing this feeling of being vulnerable.

In Matt’s China Tour Blog there is emphasis placed on moving past ‘inevitable’ differences and moving focus towards what we will be able to create ‘We will be striving together for something beautiful, and that is enough to bring us together. Or at least, that is all I can hope for.’ In Ella’s Salty Living and Salty Writing she too noticed the emergence of a theme of self doubt. ‘As writers, we approach vulnerability in a number of ways, many of which are unusual. At times we loathe to put ourselves out there.’

Taylah’s post entitled Reflections delineates the struggles we have of finding suitable content, how do we have the right to something we know nothing about? ‘How can I write an honest blog post about these things without having seen the city ((Guangzhou)) beforehand?’. Then not only content but truthfulness, authenticity, Kat discusses this thought in her blog ‘I sometimes get stuck. Am I writing the truth? I know something can be true to me that isn’t true for others’. Ashley’s Take Me Away further explores the position of being faced with another culture that is both inspiring and terrifying, and how exactly we should approach it. ‘The main issue: confusion. what to write about? how to write about a foreign country without seeming offensive?’. Our own sense of otherness is warped into a newfound vulnerability. We don’t want to, mustn’t offend.

However we need to remember to not only move past this sense of vulnerability, our hesitations, but to harness it, as regarding, and acknowledging our weakness will only solidify our strengths. Mentioned in Jacinta’s Ocean Crossing is how we each bring a flair forward that is solely our own ‘I was surprised to find that each of my classmates had injected their own personality into the aesthetics of their blog. This highlights that we each have something different to contribute to this process’. It is important to remember everyone feels this at some point. A hesitation, a pause, but it is something we must learn to ignore in order to move forward. Georgie’s Words/Pictures/Junk expresses that hesitation ‘I think a lot of my own life has been lived in fear of making an idiot out of myself. I have shied away from voicing my opinion and tend not to volunteer for opportunities that require me to put myself out there.’

Lets all start making idiots out of ourselves!

This is a collaborative process, one which would not work if we were to shrivel in self deprecating madness. As stated in Lauren’s Wandering ‘learning is about mentoring and friendship’.

Perhaps the truly special thing about these blogs is how they work as a cohesive whole. In Nat’s Transit she mentions the lingering self doubt when placing her blog comparatively against the class ‘I don’t feel confident in how my blog looks, how it feels to touch visually if that makes sense. It appears two dimensional at the moment, and everyone else’s seems four or even fifth dimensional’. We may need to cease viewing it in this manner. Perhaps none make sense on their own and we must bring them together as a whole to truly appreciate our work here.

As writers we accept a sense of isolation: These are my thoughts, my feelings and are my burden alone. This studio pushes us to move forward, not in a messy disarray of literary angst but as a solid unit that has the ability to work cohesively in order to create something truly magical.

Travis notes in his blog that ‘we all have different reasons for writing’. We may write to make sense of our world or our place within it. We may write simply for the enjoyment of it. Maybe we write because not writing is an intolerable alternative. Maybe writing keeps us sane.

When we collaborate we are forced to ask questions of each other. We are forced to offer small pieces of ourselves in the process. Writing is solitary, but the sharing of writing is not. Yes, there is the fear, the overwhelming, sometimes crippling, fear. As Jess B. remarks in her blog Leaving Footprints, often we question whether we have anything interesting to say. But even as many of us profess to be struggling with how we present ourselves and our writing, our blogs demonstrate a deep passion for our craft.

Inevitably, there are moments when we all write ourselves into a bleak headspace—or perhaps it is the inability to write that causes us distress. And yet, writing is also capable of elating and inspiring us. Writing is a task, like any other, and it can be alternately gruelling and stimulating. Lisa concluded her post about editing with the line: ‘reminding everyone ((myself)) that writing is fun most of the time.’ Sometimes as writers we need to be reminded of this because it is all too easy to simply put down the pen and walk away when it gets tough.

These blogs are a wonderful insight into the processes of our peers. Without even meaning to, we give away so much of ourselves in our posts about writing and our expectations about going to China. The way in which we weave elements of our own personalities and interests into our interpretation of what is happening around us is endlessly fascinating. Through our blogs we see the process of collaboration from so many diverse points of view.

For Shona, learning about Chinese culture has brought to mind the science-fiction film Arrival. For Jess Z., part of the process of preparing for the study tour is reading relevant literature such as Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. Despite attending the same classes and doing the same tasks, we all absorb and react to this collaborative process in different ways. As Pallavi writes in her blog The Backpack Journal: ‘What kind of thoughts I have largely depends on the music I’m listening to’. All of us are influenced by what we read and watch and listen to, and this is apparent in our unique individual processes.

This collaborative program enables us to each bring our own special insights and skills together, and in doing so we are able to create something pretty darn great.

When perusing everyone’s blogs, I noted that many of us found the act of writing a blog post to be a moment of reflection, consolidation and meditation; a space offered as a blank canvas in which we can share our thoughts, feelings and anxieties. I think that the blogs have been important in this way as they work to cement our different experiences throughout this shared journey as well as something to look back on. They also reinforce a connection between not only our writing, but with each other. Connection seemed to be a buzzword that featured in a few posts including Pallavi’s post about culture shock. She stated that she ‘wanted to connect with people across the world looking past language barriers and the foreign’ to create a common understanding. Sophie suggested that authenticity played a big role in connecting with others. Perhaps this is something to remember when editing the works of our Chinese counterparts – to be authentic and to allow the authentic experience of the Chinese work to shine through. While yes, there are barriers, we must instead focus on overcoming those barriers – of language, of inexperience and of culture. But also the barriers that we create. Many mentioned how anxious they were in the lead up to this trip and, to reiterate Travis’ latest blog, we must ‘be brave, be honest and allow ourselves to be vulnerable.’ Another common thread was that of empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Jess Z has written a whole post on empathy as an editor, with a focus on editing cross cultural work, which requires additional sensitivity. She says: ‘although empathy will not impart the practical knowledge of how the rules of grammar differ between cultures, or how their cultural ideologies, values and communication differ from our own, empathy will still give the incentive to the editor to feel. And when we feel, we will invest. And this means investing in how to work with the author and navigate the barriers between cultural differences.’ Jules, while she hasn’t spoken about it directly, employed empathy when communicating with her student, going ‘beyond the written’ as she says, exchanging emojis and images and using google translate.

A few others reflected upon Paula’s anecdote about her friend John and the interest, attention and listening skills he employs while overseas developing cross-cultural relationships. She says in her blog post that ‘a person’s disposition is critical, the inner stance we take – our attitudes, intentions and motivations, our hopes and expectations, our fears and prejudices – have a major impact on our experiences and interactions with others’. I think that this ties in with empathy and reinforces the fact that sensitivity to others, particularly in regards to helping our Chinese friends ‘save face’, will bridge the gaps between cultures.

We look forward to continuing to read everyone’s blogs as we move closer to our departure date and our very own cross-cultural experience. :) Thank you.

Authored by: Me (obviously this is my blog) Georgie Young- https://wordspicturesjunk.wordpress.com/ Jacinta Walsh- http://oceancrossingblog.tumblr.com/

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dawnajaynes32 · 8 years ago

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7 Branding Trends from FINE, an Agency for the Digital Age

Before you tackle your next branding project, up your expertise with these insights from FINE, a brand agency for the digital age that connects brands with customers in the ways people connect today.

1. Back to Sensory Basics

“So much of our world is consumed by tech,” says Josh Kelly, managing partner and chief strategist at FINE. “We all spend our days engrossed in screens, pushing buttons. We see more and more a need and desire for brands to engage non-visual senses offline, like touch, taste, sound and smell, to stand out.” That could mean anything from considering how to orchestrate all the brand touchpoints of a place-based experience to remembering “old-fashioned” tools like print or highly refined promotional schwag.

“For one of our highest tech clients—Cloudera, a company that sells its brand and its wares to chief technology officers to solve the biggest data challenges of our day—we found success with unique, personalized and extravagant direct mail rather than falling back on ubiquitous digital outreach to tell the story,” Kelly says. He adds that when it comes to FINE’s hospitality clients, the team thinks about those moments when people put down their phone, interact with people, pick something up, or see/hear/touch/smell something they’ll forever associate with a brand.

Kelly says they also see this happening in retail. “Many brands shifted their in-store experiences to accommodate flashy tech and digital screens—but forgot to consider the larger impact those tactics would have on the guest experience and long-term relationship. Now we see retailers scaling back on tech and humanizing their environments.”

Brand strategist Emily Buchholtz adds that at a brand experience level, they’re interested in tech that adds value to the relationship and doesn’t distract from it. “Brands must consider all inflection points within the guest journey to understand which demand tech, and which are best served by tapping other senses.”

2. Branding from the Inside Out

Principal and creative director Kenn Fine believes that increasingly, brands do best when they think inside out. “When we begin an engagement, we always start with the core of why the brand exists and what it has to offer to those who will engage with it,” he says. “What is the experience and how does that fit or drive the brand? It’s given us phrases like ‘Brand Is Operations,’ or ‘Deep Branding.'”

This process also often aligns consumer branding and employer branding. “We also say that increasingly ‘Employer Branding is Good Branding,'” Fine says, noting that the messages you use to lure and guide employees are often the same as the ones you use to lure and guide customers—as they should be. For this reason, some of the best brand work today is going into the key challenge of shaping companies through hiring and training the people most responsible for creating the product and experience.

“Each employee needs to understand the larger vision and have a clear sense of purpose in bringing that vision to life,” Fine says. “Developing a methodology and training systems to empower is what makes people want to work there, and what helps them create customer experience.

“We found this with Ten-X, a Google-funded real estate venture, where the company’s vision of ‘changing the state of real estate’ was the key selling point to prospective employees, customers and even investors alike.” Fine points out that this is apparent too in the agency’s hospitality work. At Kimpton, for example, the term “ridiculously personal experiences” inspired people, and McKibbon Hospitality rallied around the idea “Hospitality Begins With Me.” All joined by a mission, vision and shared purpose.

3. Quiet is Speaking Louder

“From a brand and design perspective, more and more of our work is about stripping away layers to allow very simple messages, images, names, experiences, and impressions to come into full relief,” Kelly says. Of course, this has always been somewhat true, but as new customers like millennials come along, Kelly notes that making things that seem less noisy and busy and brand-y is becoming more important. “We’ve even used the phrase ‘un-name’ and ‘un-brand’ to describe what we do in helping to rethink brands. Removing artifice, being simple and honest, creating whitespace, minimizing visual and textual clutter.”

Kelly notes that they’ve observed this trend with their business-to-business client M3, which is simplifying complex business services, and with their client Kimpton Seafire Resort + Spa, which offers respite from the noisy commercial world as a core benefit.

“Consumers are constantly inundated with distractions,” Buchholtz adds. “Brands are competing for attention and only causing more noise and anxiety. When everyone else is shouting, we see tremendous opportunity in a personal whisper. There is power in operating at a lower volume that cuts through the noise and adds simplicity versus chaos.”

4. The Un-Commodification of Design

Digital creative director Tsilli Pines suggests that we consider more closely the commodification of design in the digital space and beyond. “It’s happening through the proliferation of tools and platforms—like, Squarespace, Virb, 99 Designs or even Wix—that enable a baseline of visual standards.” she says. “These companies sell accessibility. And that’s really important.” But what it means is that designers will increasingly focus on the aspects of their work that cannot be commoditized: custom interactions, insight-driven design, content strategy/IA—not just grids, type, color and images, but true solutions to your actual brand challenges.

5. Honest Branding

Fine says that we’ll likely see the continuation of “honest” branding as organizations confront what they really stand for and craft their brand in line with that to build engaged and dedicated communities. “Look for more brands bundling activism of some kind with their product or service—connecting with meaningful issues that matter to their customers, and/or avoiding socially charged negative associations that disconnect with their audience—to gain meaningful traction. More than ever, it won’t be enough to try to be all things to all people. Brands will now need to examine and reflect their ethics on a continual basis.”

Buchholtz adds that there is a key consumer trend that tracks with this: the idea that we live in a “post-truth” world. “There is a lot of information but little credibility,” she says. “We are constantly questioning the motive and have developed a skepticism around individuals, platforms and authorities who used to hold clout.” As traditional role models and cultural perspectives struggle to express the truth, she notes, brands have a unique opportunity and play a larger role in upholding a sense of truth and a sense of values with which people can align.

6. Being Useful is More Valuable than Ever

Kelly believes that the tone of branding will continue to shift toward service and utility, and that sophisticated and tech-empowered consumers will increasingly avoid sales pitches and seek answers in a world of noise and misdirection. “This plays out in a number of ways, like renewed focus on careful and succinct IA in digital, brand use of wayfinding symbols and visual languages in lieu of clever logos, a paring back of content strategy focus, and an emphasis on product and service delivery as the impetus for brand communication,” he says. adding that as screens and attention spans shrink, we’ll have less room for fluff and bravado and more need to be helpful, useful, and humble.

“It’s about relevance,” he says. “Brands who understand their consumer on a deeper level can articulate a narrative that will resonate with them across myriad moments in their day and across the trajectory of their life. Then, they can meticulously design touchpoints and interactions that punctuate that narrative in a way that is truly meaningful and relevant.”

7. Commoditizing Disruption

Design director Mehran Azma sees a sort of gentrification within brand design in metropolitan spaces. “For years, the buzzword has been ‘disruption,'” he says. “But now we’re seeing the reversal of this trend with brands that want to (and have the tools to) fit in amongst competitors and peers, ideally unnoticed at first to allow for time to assume pre-establishment to the consumer.”

Azma observes that an overall modernized aesthetic has become the norm, with the rise of “hipster logo” DIY kits appearing in just about every design-oriented blog or showcase site. “It’s paved the way for story-less brands for dispassionate business owners less interested in cultivating community and more focused on profit margins,” he says. “Granted, this isn’t the first time (or likely last time) this shift has occurred (see: just about every 80’s mini-mall)—but it is striking at a time when social media serves as a vehicle to extend blasé brands into a greater socio/eco-sphere.”

He notes that in the past, marketing initiatives were fairly localized for small to medium–sized businesses. “Now we live in a boundless commercial frontier, and as a result we’re being inundated with logarithmic advertisements catering to data that doesn’t correlate to our actual sense of ethics, just our browser-history. The end result is an influx of brand everything, and with it comes a proliferation of identities that are drummed up without any actual story backing. They take no consideration of context, and appropriate whatever is on-trend recklessly.”

To counter this, he says, the team at FINE develops brands, like Kimpton, from the ground-up, taking the time to understand the core values of the organization, partnering with them in all avenues of strategy and execution, and then extending that across all associated initiatives.

What do you think? Have you observed any of these branding trends within your own organization? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @HOWbrand.

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mainstreamtags · 8 years ago

Text

Hearts & Other Body Parts Review

Rating: (⅖)

So…. I’ll start by saying...Hearts & Other Body Parts was okay. Not the best of YA fiction but not OVERLY terrible.

I was initially attracted by the cover. Black and red with fun, gothic typography; my aesthetic. Opening the cover to read the synopsis on the other hand, I was hardly as impressed;

“A novel of love and monsters.

Sisters Esme, Katy, and Ronnie are smart, talented, and gorgeous, and better yet . . . all three are witches. They have high school wired until the arrival of two new students. The first is Norman, who is almost eight feet tall and appears to be constructed of bolts and mismatched body parts. Despite his intimidating looks, Esme finds herself strangely -- almost romantically -- drawn to both his oversized brain and oversized heart.

The second new arrival is Zack, an impossibly handsome late transfer from the UK who has the girls at school instantly mesmerized. Soon even sensible Esme has forgotten Norman, and all three sisters are in a flat-out hex war to win Zack. But while the magic is flying, only Norman seems to notice that students who wander off alone with Zack end up with crushed bones and memory loss. Or worse, missing entirely.

Hearts & Other Body Parts is a wickedly addictive novel about love, monsters, loyalty, and oh yeah, a Japanese corpse-eating demon cat.”

Can you see where I hesitated? Around “the nice guy is the only one who sees what’s wrong with his romantic rival and has to “rescue” his crush from thinking she loves the other guy”? Yeah. But hey, I thought, I got through Heartless and ended up liking it more than I thought I would so maybe this one will be a little cringe worthy in the beginning but pull out a decent ending too.

I was half right. There were definitely parts that made me need to lay down for a minute like #GiveUsASnog, the blatant stereotypes masquerading as inclusivity, the frankly alarming overuse of the term “beautiful girls”...

It never managed to pull itself together in a way that made the ending worth it. About halfway through I found the writing continued to lack and there was hardly any substance to keep me there. I powered through purely for the sake of this review. It wasn’t that it was BAD, just all around lack luster. Certainly not the WORST, but just… boring.

Honestly though, “not the worst” is probably the best thing I can say about this book. I can appreciate what it was trying to be. A campy bit of romantic horror that played off of big name monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Witches. Nothing more than a bit of fun. Unfortunately the fun wears off in the first few chapters. A good B Horror relies on being so terrible it’s good, making use of overdone tropes but putting enough twist and creativity into it that it comes together into something memorable even if it’s totally cheesy. Hearts & Other Body Parts fails this on the most basic level. Sure, it’s filled to the brim with all the cliches you could ever want in a B Horror, but it doesn’t have the creativity it takes to bring it together. Instead, we’re left with a collection of poorly thought out characters, a forgettable plot line, and an ending that leaves you wondering if the eight hours it took to read was really worth it.

The answer is no. No it was not and yet I bought it because I was promised a good time.

Side tangent, I’ve noticed a trend in formatting when trying to look up published reviews for books. They paste in a summary of the book and then the writer spends one or two brief paragraphs talking about it in the most ambiguous way possible with a couple of buzzwords like ‘witty’, ‘inventive’, and ‘funny’ tossed in for good measure. You’ll also see the phrase, “I was given a free copy of the book for an honest review.” Honest, yet they don’t tell you WHY a book was funny or inventive, and they definitely don’t tell you if the book was bad, honest or not. Marketing at it’s finest.

So yeah, I’m going to tear this bitch to shreds. I’m going to talk about everything in this book and I’m going to do it in the plainest language I can. It won’t be pretty, but that’s the point. I don’t want it to be filled with flowery language because that shit is hard to write and takes away from the point of the message. No fluff, no buzzwords, no mercy. There will be spoilers, so be warned because I’ll be talking about the ending to this book A LOT.

Let’s start with the backbone of a story; the characters. Hearts & Other Body Parts switches point of view chapter to chapter, sometimes in the middle of a chapter and sometimes whenever the fuck it feels like it. This would be fine, especially if the characters had strong voices, but everyone in this book sounds almost exactly the same. It makes for stilted, awkward dialogue as well. Jokes made by characters don’t land because the conversations they were having felt unnatural.

The only one who had some semblance of a narration style is Norman. Norman is not the main character but it felt like Bloom REALLY wanted him to be and ends up as the most fleshed out character in the book. Considering that every single character in this book is a high school stereotype, that’s saying something.

The witchy sisters this book touted to be the main players felt like one girl broken into three that had never been raised together. The summary calls them smart, talented, and gorgeous and they’re exactly that, in that order. They all get to have only one thing according to B Horror laws and they can’t possibly share anything. Yes they lived in the same house, yes they sit at lunch together but nothing beyond that suggests that they're actually related. They riff on each other occasionally like siblings might but there are no mentions of shared interests and we hardly get to see into Veronica or Katy’s lives aside from “one is super hot and likes makeup and the other likes fashion subcultures and dogs”. I didn't even know Katy was supposed to be a jokester until another character pointed out that she was. As for Veronica, the gorgeous one, she’s youngest sister and only fourteen. Creepy.

Esme, the actual main character of the book, falls victim to the “sudden rash decision heroine” trope. She’s shown previously to have been level headed and intelligent yet when, #spoilers, her sisters are kidnapped by the book’s villains, Zack and the Ancient, she’s suddenly running into a death trap by herself without a plan. Of course, she’s stopped in the nick of time by Norman who is still sensible because he’s smart and also a man. It’s an exhausting trope to have to read over and over again in YA books with female leads, especially leads that are supposed to be intelligent planners.

In the end, Veronica and Katy just end up becoming a combined damsel in distress trope. They only exist to give main character Esme someone to save and to push along the finale. Afterwards, we hear that they “recover” but we don’t see any lasting effects. Bad Guy Zack is still left alive. How do they feel about this? We just don’t know. Norman is the most thought out character in the book, but really at his center he’s still an obnoxious “nice guy” and his very existence feels almost as if the author was pushing an agenda. “Look girls, he may be ugly but he’s intellectual and kind! He’s obviously the correct romantic choice because he’s a NICE GUY.” Norman himself doesn’t do anything overly untoward but the author pushes Esme and Norman together in the worst way. Bad Guy Zack is handsome and the guy all the girls want but he’s just another dumb jock without substance who will cheat on you. So obviously the right choice is Norman.

Having a solid friendship just isn’t an option and looks aren’t EVERYTHING, until, oh wait, they are. In the end even Esme is so unconvinced of her attraction to Norman that she feels she has to drug herself with a love potion to feel anything and drug HIM with a beauty potion in order to make him lovable--which is ableist by the way--and sends the message to disabled readers, “sorry but if you're not at least semi conventionally attractive, no one can truly love you.” The fact that she feels required to be with him because he loves her says it all, really. Speaking of Bad Guy Zack though, his ending was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. Throughout the story we are shown glimpses of his relationship with his vampiric master, the Ancient. In the beginning we’re told that the Ancient chose Zack for a very specific reason. What that reason was, we’re never really told but I’m guessing it’s somewhere along the lines of “he’s hot” and because he’s hot, it makes it easier to draw in women to serve as food sources. The Ancient coerces Zack into doing his bidding and kidnapping women by enthralling him with the use of his vampiric mesmer abilities. Of course, when Zack fails (or whenever the Ancient feels like it apparently) he’s beaten and tortured for hours. These beating are apparently so terrible that the only thing that saves Zack is his fledgling vampire durability; if he was human, he’d only last for a few minutes.

So to reiterate, Bad Guy Zack is actually Abused Minor Zack forcibly coerced into kidnapping girls by his father figure/master. Yes, he’s a player, yes he strung along the sisters in order to eventually kidnap them but if he didn’t he would be tortured. He’s an abused minor repeatedly shown to have remorse for his actions along with other qualities that could have made for a potentially decent redemption arc but instead he is “adopted” by Norman’s father and instead of receiving therapy or support, he submits himself to to being locked in a cage and wanting to take “any punishment that could be meted out to him,” including his own self harm which was described as “absolutely medieval” in design. The idea that a victim of of this type of psychological and physical abuse would would consider himself guilty and deserving of punishment isn't unrealistic but the fact that self harm to the extent described was being seen as acceptable is laughable at best and disgusting at worst. I’m not sure whether to look to the narration of Esme or the writer himself for this but considering Esme’s upbringing, it wouldn't make much sense for her to see any amount of self harm or abuse as normal. As for the Ancient himself, he suffers from a case of overhyped villain. We’re shown repeatedly that he’s willing to do terrible things and told repeatedly that he’s extremely powerful but in the end, it takes all of 7 pages to take him down and I’m being generous with that number. The majority of those 7 pages is even spent with him TALKING about how he’s going to kill Esme without doing anything to support that. The final battle, if you could call it that, is entirely fluff and any sort of threat that the Ancient might have posed instantly fell short the second he started talking.

Esme also has the support of her not-so-japanese, not-so-corpse-eating, demon familiar Kasha who takes the form of a cat and information dump character right along with demon ex machina for the final battle. There is literally no other reason to this character. The chapter that has him get involved with the fight is literally called “Deamon Ex Machina”. You could have replaced him with a decent google search and the story would have lost nothing. It would have even saved the book from one of its multi-page info dumps and a terrible joke about gophers used 5 too many times. The ending might have even been halfway decent without Kasha. The Ancient might have become the threat he should have been and we could have had an exciting, climactic fight. Instead we got a ridiculous game of cat and mouse that had the terrifying villain reduced to a mess resigned to his fate. Boring.

All of the side characters had this sort of simplification of personality too. The LGBT characters especially suffered from this. Esme’s mother is referred to as a lesbian while also being absent, evoking that age old “gay people are terrible parents” adage. Nick, the background football player, had to be shown by white cis-het Esme that being gay was okay, after which he immediately becomes a fashion obsessed trope despite no hint of him showing interest in it before. You can tell he’s also meant to become a comic relief character, but the jokes are entirely centered around him being gay and effeminate. If that wasn’t the worst, the only trans inclusion comes in the form of the Goddess who offers to show Esme her genitals as proof of being intersex without any prior prompting. Because thats a thing that people do.

Hearts & Other Body Parts was touted for its humor and intelligence but the jokes more often fell flat, and the intelligence came only in the form of page long wiki-esque information dumps and latin terms tossed in for the sake of sounding smart. It fails to be smart in ways that matter. The lack of character depth is one thing, but there were times when I had to set book the book down for a moment because immersion was completely broken by a plot hole or interaction that did nothing to support the character, story, or humor.

For instance, after Esme finally breaks free of Zack’s hypnosis, she makes her way to Norm’s house to meet his father Dr.Frank: a scientist that has important information on vampires. Shortly after she arrives, so does football player, stereotypical meathead Jackson. Earlier he had been in a fight with Zack and left him with extreme anxiety regarding speaking about the fight. Jackson is looked over by Dr.Frank and then given a cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs and narcotics to make him sensible and able to explain who hurt him. Afterwards, Jackson is never mentioned having an issue with panic attacks again. While it’s mentioned he doesn't sleep much, hinting at the anxiety, this doesn't cause him any issue with functioning in general or assisting Esme with tracking the vampires. That is:

A.) Not how sleep deprivation works. B.) Not how anxiety works. C.) Suggests that not only did Dr. Frank medicate an underage child without parental consent but that he CONTINUED to supply this child with medication.

This is one of the most jarringly immersion breaking instances but there are several more like it along with a multitude of smaller instances such as typing an entire url instead of using the search bar, purposefully cooking a brisket until it’s dry, and not considering that other LGBT people may exist outside of the chosen three which would have entirely messed up the “only some men are immune to vampire mesmer“ thing. It leaves one wondering if Bloom thought a lot of this through, or if he simply wrote himself into a corner a few times and had to come up with something on the fly to fix it.

This book was a struggle to read and even now, I’m struggling to come up with anything positive to balance out the negative. The grammar was decent. The sentence structure wasn't bad, but decent syntax only means so much when it’s the content itself that’s the issue. I’m not asking for a serious drama from a book meant to be along the same lines as a Syfy special, but I am asking for at least some effort. The plot was a forgettable ode to nice guys, the humor was flat, the pacing was off, the characters were walking cliches, the representation borderline phobic, and the ending was entirely anticlimactic. The writing wasn’t the WORST but it wasn’t good either. It was as if Bloom had only wanted to get a book published and nothing more so he wrote the most generic crap he could manage then tossed in some black and red with a Japanese cat as a hook. I can't say it didn't work because I spent money on this snooze-fest but damn. Reading Hearts & Other Body Parts was a slog. If it had been terrible, it might have met its B horror mark. It was a slog not because it was bad, but because it was just plain mediocre.

Ira Bloom, nice try but for your next book, a little more effort would be appreciated. Thanks. #SorryNotSorry.

#book review #hearts & other body parts #fiction rants

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