#stoic design

[dirt-str1der]

I cannot believe this. Kim was designed to find harry funny ??? Like you ... like yeah. Sorry yeah he was , and it shows. He really does.

[thiefpodcast]

Service Design Principles for Small Content Creators

I sometimes struggle to talk to 1-person-shop content creators for whom some kind of financial metric is important - get some patrons, pay a bill, pay all the bills - because it seems to me that many in the community think of themselves as artistes rather than as business owners.

If the business metric is secondary and the art is primary, great - I am not talking about you. But if the business metric is important, I want to share some axioms I hold true as a primer for operating within this space - not as an artist, but as a business owner.

Obscurity

1. Your first problem is obscurity. The quality of your intellectual property is secondary -- even the quality of your game mechanics/writing/sound design ... -- to the fact that nobody knows about it. That's the first problem to solve. Being good probably won't solve it.

The "obscurity" problem can be thought of as market alignment. Product/market viability is just a fuzzy measure of whether enough people care about your thing for you to derive your strategic success. Want advertisers? You need a big audience or a niche audience with money.

A sprawling audience probably isn't required. Paraphrasing Amanda Palmer, a thousand fans are enough to leverage to pay some bills.

User experience

2. User Experience is critical unless you're the only one in the niche. When, for an internet product, distribution is free, businesses compete over consumer user experience. There's an industry dedicated to probably overthinking UX, but the idea's this: care about your users.

UX is fuzzy but it can be quantified. You can use things like the Kano model to map the features of your product to customer satisfaction. Ask: what are the basic expectations of an actual play podcast - and am I meeting them?

What features about your game, podcast, writing, or art go beyond basic expectations and are attractive? These are your differentiators. Differentiation can help solve the obscurity problem.

Now, software companies and other designers mess up all the time when they're thinking about UX for one core reason: they're not actually talking to their users.

"This is an [attractive feature]," one says. But you need proof or you're lying to yourself. If you over-invest in an attractive feature that prospective users don't actually want, then you're just burning capital - even if all you're investing is time.

Service, not product

3. The "product" matters less than the "service" you provide. A key tenant of service design is that, well, products don't matter, they're just the vehicles of service provision. Your actual play podcast isn't the thing people want in and of itself. It's something else.

There is a concept I really like called "the job to be done." The Job To Be Done is the reason for a user's choice to adopt a service. You don't go to Home Depot to buy a hammer, you're buying the thing that hangs the family portrait best.

You're not buying a drill. You're buying the mounted TV on the wall. You're not buying a milkshake. You're buying something easy to consume one-handed while driving in heavy traffic. You're not buying a book, you're buying the escapist moment.

You're not subscribing to Critical Role. You're subscribing to the sense of belonging to a community; the escapism; the distraction from the chore. That's your job to be done.

@criticalrole provides that service - through a bunch of products: the actual-play, the comic, the show ....

So for your writing, your art, your podcast, your maps ..., what is your audience's job-to-be-done - and how is the thing you're making solving that? There can be many jobs, this doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, but identifying that job is critical to success.

The product, then, is a means to an end - and that can be humbling to take to heart. The novel doesn't matter in and of itself, what matters is the efficacy with which it solves the readers' jobs to be done.

If it solves those jobs-to-be-done well, and if it so happens that many, many people have those jobs, then you'll find your market fit.

"Business"

4. Don't get too hung up on "business," instead think of this just in terms of "mission success that requires other users." I'm a librarian, and librarians are always like "ew we're not a business" and eschew excellent product design best practices.

Choose words that you need to feel right but good user experience design applies to just about everything: whether it's a business, an activism campaign, battlemaps, lo-fi beats.

Good UX = Good Mission Metrics

If the end-user experience doesn't matter - then cool, business doesn't matter. It's that frank.

You can be an artiste - but you can't be an artiste for a living if you don't care about your users.

Probably.

Edge cases are outliers. You're probably not an outlier.

The takeaway

Epilogue. The maps, writing, podcast, videos ..., you provide aren't an end unto themselves, they are the vehicles of a service. You are providing a service to people who - need you.

You need to figure out why, and if you can align your product to that, you'll do well.

[Edit: changed the title]

[vaguely-concerned]

the mourn watch background gives you such a GIFT in having other characters notice and call out on-screen that rook code switches like a motherfucker. the whiplash of hearing my snarky 'heeey I'm just a little guy! :>' funnyman rook speak the heightened ritualized phrases of the mourn watch with perfect seriousness and gravity completely naturally and/or break into an academic tone that can keep up with emmrich at the drop of a hat never stops giving me such endless delight. truly their real mind is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside some hideous mourn watch casual wear

[starflungwaddledee]

Oooo starstruck dee has little stars at the bottom of her feet! Are they just aesthetic or would they make imprints into the ground? (like pawprints)

exactly like that! though she's not the only one...

edit: might need to add some additional dialogue to this to make it more clear, but a clarification in the interim; he knows about his own footprints. he's just surprised to see something similar already there when he knows he's only just landed. he lifts his own shoe to confirm that they're not identical (and also to reveal this to the viewer). seems his stoicism beat off the clarity in this one, sorry 😭

[temeyes]

WARM UP!!! drawing other ppl's personas made me realize i'm So Shit at character design cuz MY OWN PERSONA is just me but as Man AHSAHSAH

[xmrnothingx]

Morrigan Aensland from Darkstalkers and Spider-Man from Marvel Comics

With Marvel Vs Capcom finally back I got in the mood to draw my favorite chill succubus: Morrigan. Found some cool official art for Morrigan while looking up references and thought she looked really cute with her original eye-bags and cool in that one anime ova. Also Spider-man

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OH ARTHUR BENNETT.. such a gorgeous and intriguing character. terribly burdened by a GRUESOME set of crimes, his light suffocated by a HEAVY century of GUILT. so tragic, so dark and broody, and yet PAINFULLY awkward in any social setting ever

[solei-eclipse]

random: while I was drawing the azure birthday comic I had to change the way I drew him a few times because he was looking a little too similar to haku from spirited away 😭

[descendant-of-truth]

Boruto wearing so many pins and necklaces arguably clutters his design a bit but I think it's entirely worth it for the emotional damage they give me

Like. at this point, Boruto hasn't been able to go home in three years. he's regarded as a traitor to his village and family by nearly everyone. there are orders to have him killed on sight. most of his friends hate him and almost nobody remembers him for who he truly is.

But despite all of that, he doesn't let go of what he had. He wears a badge of the village symbol that cast him out. He wears a necklace of the Uzumaki crest, despite the people saying he doesn't belong to that family anymore. He has a pin of the design that was on the back of his first coat, as if to say that's still who he is.

And the one that makes me go insane the most - he wears a sun symbol, of all things. A reference to Himawari, possibly, whose name means "sunflower"... but seeing as it's not a flower pin, I have a feeling that it's actually a reference to Mitsuki.

Mitsuki, who always said that Boruto was like the sun. For him to now wear a sun on his coat, I can only imagine that he valued being seen that way by him more than he let on; enough to include it in what's functionally a compilation of the symbols of his identity.

He's Uzumaki Boruto, from Konoha, and apparently, the sun in Mitsuki's sky. I am never going to be normal again

[indeedgoodman]

[milkbreadtoast]

looking back at the yjh webtoon screencaps i have saved and giggling... hes so cute... moe... my pookie ^___^ 🥰🥰 poor little meow meow woof woo- *eliminated where i stand*

also these poses are sooooo... 꺄아악🖤🫣🫣🫣🫣

[slymanner]

Masked characters who never reveal their face/you rarely see their face my forever beloved i know u have a face under there but that mask is your face and I'm giving it a kiss even if you don't feel it

[shalpilot]

how to get a bad grade in Kiril

[starrysharks]

chapter 1 of reassassination's nearly done script-wise! hopefully the next chapters won't take like 6 months of on-and-off work to complete lol

[mandoart]

ok im tired of working on this --- Eos, of course, w her new black hair (and optional makeup)

edit: decided to give her gold eyes at least in fantasy settings

[malo-mart]

I hope the next zelda game returns to more TP style character design 🙏