Ask yourself what your problems are, not what your solution is

Designers provide a service, but in many ways, they are problem solvers within their field, just like you are within yours. Offer an expert your problem, and if they know how to, they’ll to solve it. Offer an expert your solution without making them aware of the problem, and they’ll either not solve it at all, or create more problems for you.

First off, know what you want to achieve, or what problem you have that needs to be solved. “I want a logo and a website” is not a marketing strategy, and nor is it demonstrating awareness of your business. “I’d like to raise brand awareness, and I think we should develop and expand our customer base” is more like it. “Customers don’t seem to respond to our marketing, How can we improve sales?” is also better than “We need a logo”. Decide what you want to achieve, identify your problem, and you’ll make your designer’s job a whole lot easier.

Collaborate, don’t dictate

You’re employing the services of a designer. Hopefully, you know your business inside out, and you know what you want to achieve. Hopefully, your designer has mad design skills, and is itching to get creative. Unfortunately, these two different sets of knowledge often don’t get the chance to mix. The client knows their customers, and the designer knows their techniques, and the end product is something that is glossy and shiny, but has no real purpose or function.

Think of it as a collaboration. You are both working towards a common solution to a common problem. Inform your designer, educate them as to what you know about your business and your customers, your ideals and your USP. Let your designer educate you, as to the best methods to create new customers, and keep them. Often, designers use a custom questionnaire, or a series of very simple questions, to find out some important information about you and your business. These are questions that are worth answering truthfully and freely.

Also, if your designer suggests something you disagree with, explain your reasons for disagreeing, but do listen to why they think differently. They might have a different opinion, or a different outlook on the issue; It doesn’t mean they are wrong. They might have considered something you have not, or they might not fully understand something that you have considered. Communication is key, and that brings me onto my next point.

Your graphic designer works for your customers, not for you

While you might be paying their invoices, it’s your customers that pay yours. You have a responsibility to your customers. Therefore, a designer’s primary goal is appropriate communication with your customers, to find what influences your target market. Try and see your brand through the eyes of your customers. Sometimes your personal aesthetic tastes don’t match those of your customers. That’s alright, we’re all different! Try and keep it in mind that your aesthetics and your customers’ might not match, and that if you like something, it doesn’t mean your customers will. This is the line a designer treads when they create for a target market.

What Not to ask from your Designer

Don’t expect your designer to have an intricate knowledge of your business from the outset. Hopefully, they will have a good knowledge of your industry, and will have worked for similar companies with similar problems in the past. It’s important that they know relevant information about your company, so help them out. Let them know about the history of the business, and your mission statement. Again, it helps if you know what you want to achieve.

Don’t expect them to generate written content for you, unless that’s a specific service they offer. The primary role of the designer is to provide the framework, style, and function of your promotion, and if you haven’t got any images or creative copy of your product or service, your designer should be able to source an appropriate provider for you, but don’t assume that it’s included in their quote.

What to expect from a designer

Once you’ve found the company or individual you feel best fits your requirements, don’t rush into it. You’re still a long way from your finished marketing, and if your designer is any good, they won’t be rushing either. The most crucial part of this process is the initiation. Your designer should be asking you lots of questions, poking their nose in, and finding out what they can do to best serve the needs of your business. Be very wary of anyone that jumps in with two feet, or that tells you the answer to your problems before they’ve even heard what they are. No two businesses are the same, and no two problems have identical solutions. What may work for one business might not help the other at all. You and your designer should set some goals and deadlines for your project, and you should expect to stick to them. Bear in mind though, that the deadlines will apply to you too! A lot of a designer’s job revolves around your content, so if you’re late in providing it, they’ll be late in providing your designs.

I’d really appreciate it if you could take the time to vote for my design, by clicking on the link below:

It’s my first submission to the website, and I’m really pleased with it. The design is inspired by Nordic/Inuit/Finnish symbolism, and more specifically, Finnish mythology. The name “Linktukoto” refers to a mythical place on the edge of the earth where birds fly for winter.

I’ve been designing t-shirts for a few months now, as a side-project to my main designs. Hopefully, you’ll see more and more of them as time goes by. I design some sports and humour stuff for Toffee Monkey, and work on my own designs too. I’m working on a nice project with some friends of mine, and if you grew up with me, you’ll probably see those designs in the near future.

How about an analogy? If your business is a person, your logo is its face, and your brand identity is its clothing. People will judge you on it, and make their choices based upon it. Large businesses lose big if they make bad branding choices; Just look at the 2012 London Olympics, the Tropicana rebrand, or in the 90’s, “New” Coke.

Logo design is a specialised field of design. Successful logos should simultaneously communicate multiple business values, inform the consumer of the appropriate business sector, and should influence the target audience’s opinion. They should work as well in monochrome as they do in colour, and they should work as well on a business card or email footer as they do on a billboard. That’s a big ask. Get it wrong, and you can communicate all the wrong things. Get it right, get the consumer on your side, and the battle is all but won.

Don’t leave it too late

Although branding is crucial, unfortunately a lot of entrepreneurs overlook it in the rush to get their business up and running. If your business has a strong image from the outset, you’ll save a lot of hard work in the long run, and by the time you start to get known, you’ll already have a strong, consistent, and balanced identity.

Don’t Use Stock Logos or Follow current trends.

Your brand should be unique, and should express the values of your business. To create a strong, functioning visual identity takes time, a bit of thought, and a good designer who understands your business and the industry sector that it’s aiming for.

This isn’t something that can be solved by using a “stock” or “customisable” logo, or a website template. These are things that can and will be used again and again by other companies, and possibly your competition. Without their separate branding, Coke and Pepsi would taste the same, and you wouldn’t know which was which.

Likewise, often stock logos follow “design trends”, which often involve adding effects to poor design to mask its ineffectiveness. Not only will this result in a poor logo, but in three years it will look dated and cheap.

I realise I’m biased, being a graphic designer, but I guess it depends on your business principles. I’m a believer in the “buy once, buy right” philosophy. If I need to buy something, I’d rather spend a little more, and buy something that I know will last. Invest in your branding, and you’ll not only save money, it will most likely make you lots more.

Your Mother Lied to You.

Remember showing your mom that drawing of a pirate ship that you did, and how she told you that you were awesome at art? She lied.

If you actually were any good at art, by now you’d be a struggling artist, a struggling illustrator, or a graphic designer. The fact is, you’re probably much better at something else. Hopefully you’ve positioned your business around leveraging the things you are good at.

Lots of entrepreneurs think that they can cut a few corners, and save time and money by designing their own logo. “But I have Photoshop!” you say. “How hard can it be?”

Branding relies not just on logos, but maintaining visual consistency. If I receive an email from you in orange, shiny web 2.0 layout, but your business website is a clean, grayscale, minimal layout, I’ll think they are two different companies, that the email you sent is possibly a scam, and that I won’t buy what you are selling.

It’s also hard to design for yourself. You know what your business does, but others don’t. You might know your business inside out, but it’s the job of a designer to sum up your business in one little sign. That takes skill, and experience.

All this is sounding pretty negative. What should I be doing?

It’s not all doom and gloom. Your options are varied, and there are many different options available to you, depending on your budget and the size of your business. If you’ve got a good budget for brand identity, advertising and marketing, you might consider hiring a design or PR agency. If your budget is tight, a freelance designer might be a better option. You should never buy a stock logo, or run design competitions; the results are often amateur, and will rarely be a good representation of your business.

In the next instalment, “Clients guide to Designers” we’ll look at the do’s and don’ts of hiring a designer, what you should expect from them, and what you can do to ensure your brand identity is strong, healthy, and making you money.

This post was originally written for the Maxiwill blog, and can be found here: Brand Identity for Entrepreneurs

More specifically, astounding pictures that strike an elegant balance between art and logic. Which makes sense, as Tom is an ex-physicist who now fills the role of Technical Director at one of Scotland’s leading digital agencies, tictoc family.

Whenever possible Tom’s experiments are interactive and if you ask him nicely, the source-code is available for download. Which is handy, as the software he writes produces some amazingly intricate visuals. He created several plugins for Adobe’s Pixel Blender, Photoshop, and Aftereffects, which are capable of rendering intricate fractals, and applying Escher’s Droste effect.

He has also graciously made several experimental flash-based image generators available on his site.

He’s also my hero for successfully re-appropriating a beautiful set of images, Ernst Haeckel’s “Artforms of Nature”.

I’m still playing with his plugins, and as yet, haven’t produced anything worth showing with them.

Or, “La Potenza della Chiesa”.

Silvio Berlusconi is a joke, an embarrassment to Italy, and a slimy toad of a man who has bought his way into power, and amazingly has held onto it, presumably because his media empire still churns out thinly-veiled propaganda about him. Take a look at some recent news stories if you’re still doubtful as to his joke status as a “world leader”.

Well, I though I’d have a little fun with some third-party javascript plugins for Illustrator, and while I had half an hour to kill in an airport just outside of Milan, I thought a topical subject would be Berlusconi’s recent brush with the church. A marble replica of quite a specific church, actually.

And while I hate Berlusconi for his crimes against the Italian people, I’d just like to say I don’t condone or support violent protest. I just think it fitting that the object that anti-abortionist, catholic, right wing Prime minister gets assaulted by is a model of the church.

If it’s your thing, you can buy a copy of this poster through Zazzle.

Photo by Frederick de la Faille, via Flickr.

Why your travel guide is not a bible.

Travel guides are often the first thing on a traveller’s list of “must-get” items. They are undoubtedly useful for finding your way in an unknown land, providing the weary traveller with everything from a list of recommended hostels and restaurants to contextual references and historical background. Used well, they can help a journey go smoothly, providing a swift, accessible insight into a location and leaving you more time to enjoy yourself. But used incorrectly, they can create disappointment and can even promote a lack of inclusion and provide a barrier to communication.

Choose well

Select your travel guide well. Choose an up-to-date one, and choose one that suits you. This is quite important, and by way of an example, Rough Guides tend to be just that, with less information, but are more rapidly accessible than Lonely Planet, which tend to be packed full of information, on more places, but tend take more involvement to fully access it all.

Pick a guide based on your journey

If you’re travelling across Southern Africa in a few weeks, but only stopping at major touristic cities, a generic guide to the continent might suit you better than buying three in-depth guides to the countries that you will visit, whereas if you intend to travel to remote and inaccessible locations within one country, a country-specific guide will serve you better than a generic guide. It’s common sense, but you’d be amazed at how many people buy the wrong guide.

Know yourself well.

Are you the sort of person that likes to plan where you are going months in advance? Or do you love the spontaneity of turning up in a village with just a backpack and a smile, leaving everything up to chance? Are you all about the destination, or all about the journey? Are you planning on taking a 90L backpack filled with gadgets, or are you travelling light? These are all travel concerns that influence how you use a travel guide.

Don’t be afraid to get lost.

The people who know the areas best, are those that live there. Talk to people, talk to fellow travellers. They have far less of an agenda than travel guides, and they don’t have to legally provide safety warnings like travel guides do. I’ve been many places that travel guides advise against visiting. You should too. Be sensible, but not paranoid.

Travel guides aren’t bibles.

Don’t take their word as gospel. If you visit a hostel because the guide says they have internet connection, don’t sweat it if they don’t. If the guide gives you a price for something, treat it as a guide for haggling, and not as a concrete certainty.

Learn from it

Putting yourself in uncomfortable or strange situations isn’t bad. It’s healthy. Just because you’re all grown up, it doesn’t mean you should stop learning, and a great way to learn about yourself, other people, and the world, is to encounter new and unusual places, people, and scenarios. Ticking all the sight-seeing boxes might impress your friends, but they often are no different from other places you have been, and they won’t gain you anything other than a nice snapshot to put on facebook. Teach yourself something. Isn’t that why you wanted to travel in the first place?

Don’t be afraid to visit places that your guide doesn’t mention.

If someone recommends a town, event, or area that isn’t in your guide, count yourself lucky; It’s probably the very place you’re looking for.

Some will trigger nostalgia, while others are more an experiment in a special, geometric kind of visual assault. Click through for more.

And this is Lars, hard at work.

Lars Holdhus has a Christmas Sweaters Collection.

While it’s an apt website for this time of year, it’s also undeniably another collection that treads a fine line between joyous nostalgia and web-based retinal violation.

If you save images using Photoshop, then the File>Save for Web and Devices dialogue can save you a little memory with your images, but there’s only so much it can do.

Punypng is a free web service that promises great lossless reductions, (more so than smush.it even!) of up to 44% reduction…it supports .jpg, .gif, and .png, and dirty transparency. Check out their benchmarks for a side-by-side comparison.

After a lot of hard work, auto-didactic self-discipline, and cups of tea, I’ve managed to finish and upload my portfolio website. I had designed several self-promotional pieces, but was hanging fire with the printing and distribution until my folio site went online.

Well, the wait is over…as of this friday, http://xanderashwell.co.uk is now live!

(I strongly suggest you check out the hire page too, if not only because I’m wearing a fetching little number on that page)

I’ll now be concentrating on thonlyshape.com, my new zine, featuring loads of creative geniuses.

I’ll also be revamping this blog at some point, as I hate having a generic theme.

The sensible way to install Snow Leopard is to get Time Machine to back up all your files just before you upgrade to Snow Leopard, use the Install Disc to run a fresh install, and then restore your files using Time Machine. It takes half an hour longer than an upgrade, but it’s worth it, trust me.

Snow Leopard is a welcome new OS upgrade…It smoothly and silently supports 64bit processing, it’s been ported to Cocoa, and makes native apps launch and run like Usain Bolt.…and it frees up about 6GB from your harddrive.…not bad eh?

However…

I spent a few days wrestling with my Macbook after the upgrade, and it was obvious something was up…opening itunes took literally hours, forget about any Adobe software…and I could tell just from listening to my Macbook Pro that the processor was working overtime just to provide the Finder interface.

After some detective work through console and Terminal, I discovered that a preference list file called coreaudiod (path /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist ) was eating up virtual memory all the time. If your macbook is having a simlar problem, there’s a pretty simple solution: delete it, and restart your Macbook…problem solved!

Enjoy Snow Leopard!

For me, they are often brought about by witnessing a fantastically special moment, often involving nature, and often involving a sense of the absolute honest scale of our home. Most recently, I was sitting on a plane from Rio de Janeiro to Salvador da Bahia, shortly after sunset, watching lightning storms dance across the sky all around the aeroplane, and seeing several shooting stars drifting across the sky. The sudden sense of proportion, not just in physical dimensions, but also in terms of sheer power, was awesome.

Those who wish to believe in something might give this moment a name attached to their beliefs; a religious experience, or a moment of enlightenment.

I choose to see these moments as a tiny ricochet of realisation, bouncing off the surface of what is real. We are trapped by our senses and physical being, obeying the boundaries of our capabilities, but every so often we can get a brief glimpse of life outside these senses, raw power and life energy.

Witnessing nature’s brute-iful (sic) power is incredible, and reminds me of just how diminutive and feeble we are, despite our technological advances/advantage. Experiencing the serendipitous nocturnal display from a “safe” distance accentuates this; I only had a long-distance insinuation of what those lightning storms were like, and even that was incredible.

Less than a week after I experienced this in-flight spectacle, Air France flight 447  was brought down by a similar event. Nature is gigantic, and powerful. It’s easy to forget, sitting in a cotton-wool country such as the UK, where only flu and adders threaten us.

In this super-simple tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to turn natural skin tones into a golden hue. Ad campaigns such as the recent Chanel “J’adore” have used this stylization to good effect. Not to second-guess that production team’s workflow, but I’m willing to bet that the vast majority (if not all of) of this effect was done in post-production. The technique I’m about to show you can’t reproduce the high levels of glossy chiaroscuro that come from actually painting a model in high-gloss gold (think bond girl); This would require some seriously advanced retouching (digital painting, for want of a better term), and would look pretty obviously retouched.

This retouch is a “cheat”. The company I was working for at the time didn’t have the time or money to set up a shoot for just one image, so they asked me to come up with a solution.
Be aware though, you can’t polish a turd. If your starting point is poorly lit or doesn’t have a wide enough dynamic range, you won’t get great effects. Try and get the best results in-camera first. Another word of advice: Retouch until it looks like you wanted it too, and then tone it down a little. This helps maintain “believable” images, rather than obviously altered.

Ok, let’s begin!

First things first, for workflow’s sake, I always open a copy of the original, and duplicating the background, so I’m editing undestructively, and can always “strip back” the layers if need be. I’ve chosen this image for it’s composition and it’s skin tones.

So, let’s make some changes. Here, I’ve used the “Colour balance” adjustment layer to edit the Mids and Shadows towards the yellow/magenta bias. Don’t be afraid to go a little crazy here, as we’re going to tame things down and reclaim our luminosity later on; we’re just injecting a little of the right colour range right from the start.

All I’ve done here is duplicated the whole image (Select > All, then hit Edit > Copy Merged, then Edit > Paste) and overlaid it using the “hard light” transparency mode, set to about 28%: This is to lightly increase the contrast over the Highlights/Upper Midtones, whilst maintaining the golden colouring.

Here, I’ve converted the background image to grayscale using the “calculations” dialoguebox, in Image > Calculations. Play around with the blend spaces and channels to get the right feel; I was looking for a high-key contrasty effect. Save this, change it’s colour mode to grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale), copy the result, take a couple of steps backwards in your workflow, and then paste it in. Set the blend mode on this layer to Luminosity, at around 75%.

Lovely, now we’re getting somewhere! The next bit is purely down to your taste, but as I was going for a super-soft look, I wanted to add in a little smoothing and softening, a little bit of glow. If you were after a harsher look, you can skip this, but I think it adds to the hyper-real softening effect. Duplicate the whole image (Select > All, then hit Edit > Copy Merged, then Edit > Paste) again, and hit Filter > Distort > Diffuse Glow. Play with this setting, and then blend it back into the image, using a “soft light” blend mode, at around 25%.

You know I mentioned earlier that it was tricky to add chiaroscuro to the image, to make it look glossy? It is, but we can add a little soft sheen, to add to the golden effect. I’ve simply made a new layer, and painted a soft, thick, 45% opacity white accent to the areas of the model’s body that are “raised”. Here, that includes thighs, stomach, collarbone, cheeks and forehead, and forearms.

Do exactly the same, but with a finer brush setting. This will add another layer of “depth” to the highlighting we’re creating here. Set the blend mode on both these highlight layers to “screen, and around 24% opacity. You’ll end up with something like this:

That’s great, now a couple of little touches. We’re going to sharpen/ increase the contrast ever so slightly, and then we’re done! I like to sharpen through the high pass filter, as it seems to add a bit more depth than “smart sharpen” or “unsharp mask”. Duplicate your whole image again, (Select>All, then hit Edit>Copy Merged, then Edit>Paste) and select Filter>Other>High Pass. Set the pixel radius to about 5px (less for web, more for print) and hit “OK”. Set the blend mode to soft light, and the percentage to around 50%, or whatever suits. Et Voila!

Congratulations, you now have your finished image! Why not show off your skills by printing it off super-big, pasting it to a board, and parading round town with it proudly hoisted high above your head, or by emailing it to every single one of your work colleagues?

Disclaimer:

The original image was shot by the very talented Mark Cant and retouched by Matrix, for Fantasie Lingerie (my employers at the time), and as such is © Mark Cant/Eveden LTD. If either parties wishes to have this image/tutorial removed, I will happily acquiesce to their requests. The retouching here was for print work, and as such was part of an experimental set of images that I tested through soft-proofing to get the colour right; no matter how well calibrated your screen is, colour, gamut, and contrast will vary from screen to screen, and definitely from reflective and incident media. This image was used as part of a nationwide “Golden Ticket” campaign for Eveden LTD, the promotional POS was printed in CYMK with a Pantone metallic gold spot, to add to the feel of the promotion.

This technique doesn’t make full use of Selections through the use of channels; this, along with selections through paths, will be covered in future tutorials. I do not consider myself a professional retoucher, (although I have been paid for my retouching work, both freelance and through contract) and if anyone knows of more efficient, effective, and standardized ways of achieving the same, or similar results, I’d love for you to share your knowledge with me! Likewise, if you have used this technique anywhere, please leave a link in the comments and share your work with others!

It´s a cliche, but Rio (and Brasil) really is a city of contrasts. One minute you will be surrounded by rich suits, and take fourty steps in a specific direction you can trip over someone sleeping on the street, with literally nothing to their name. One minute you can be surrounded by massive polished marble skyscrapers, the next, seeing people living in wooden shacks smaller and more rickety than your garden shed, perches precariously on a hillside, surrounded by jungle. The avocados are the size of melons (I shit you not) but coffees are smaller than even italian espressos.

The most fantastic of these contrasts (more of a contradiction actually) is deep-fried sushi in batter, something that surely should never have existed.

Beaches

The beaches here are no less part of the city than the metro or the park; lives are lived here, and it is a space that is used for much; vendors walk past sun-worshippers, selling everything; suncream, kites, prawns, fried cheese, drinks, biscuits, jewellery, cloths, clothes, hat s, fruit, etc. They all have their own mantra, stating the sum of their wares, sometimes with such a unique style as to set them apart from their contemporaries; I´m talking about the pineapple man, with a wide, flat basket of abacaxi (pineapple) balances on his head, bright yellow washing up gloves on his hands, who sneaks up on unsuspecting sunbathing ladies and shocks them awake with a yell, brandishing a half pineapple at them, smiling all the while. The beach is used for surfing, bodyboarding, bodysurfing, volleyball, football, futevolei (volleyball with everything but your hands) peteka (think badminton with a feathery ufo and no rackets or net), running, acrobatics, and lazing about. Some homeless guys sleep under palm trees on the beach, pissing behind them, weaving bracelets to sell and collecting empty coke cans to sell for scrap. The beach sustains all walks of life just as sufficiently as any neighborhood, the difference being the lack of buildings.

Capoeira

Capoeira in Rio is hard to find, but not inaccessible– you have to look for it nonetheless, it´s not quite as prominent as I imagined, here at least. Training is held in buildings just on the edges of favelas, just within the boundaries of society, maintaining its history of social periphery. The level of game is higher than the UK, they play closer (in general) than we do, and are more efficient and swift with well-placed kicks and sweeps; it seems that we play to miss slightly, whereas they play to hit, and will only pull their kicks at the last minute, if at all. Training in the heat is hard, but emphasis is placed on music just as much as the game, which is refreshing. My girlfriend and myself have been writing down as many sequences trained as we can remember.

I don´t want to use this blog as a ‘this is what I’ve done´ space, but I have little time to formulate opinions properly, and my time is spent experiencing, assessing levels of safety or otherwise, planning, and most of all, enjoying and relaxing. I’ll try and post some photos up when I get a minute, but they are still on me camera right now.

Much love to you all, be good now,

Xander

Travelling also gives you a sense of yourself, what you truly need, what you simply require, what you possess through a need to consume and own, rather than simply what keeps you going. It gives you a sense of what you use most, what you don´t need at all.

Seeing street kids in Rio, living truly hand-to-mouth, with no thought for the future, no sense of planning ahead or a potential for anything other than the immediate need that the present demands, brings this home to you with a thud. They live only for the now, and as a result, they are disparate, hopeless, angry, and confused.

A future is a true luxury.

Not that I’m complaining, about any of this. Galatea and I have been planning this trip for over a year, scheming, dreaming, and willing it into reality. Now that it’s less than two days away from being real, I wouldn’t change anything. We’re going to see Brazil, the country the size of a continent. We intend to play, train, and watch, the beautiful game of capoeira. We hope to mooch our way up the coast, swimming, sunbathing, mucking about, and generally enjoying ourselves. Sounds fantastic, no?

There is a massive knot in my stomach, one that has sat there for a week or so, gradually getting bigger and bigger, more and more domineering, like a spiteful unborn fear, wriggling and twitching it’s mean little dance inside my stomach, beating out the jumpy rhythm of its fear on my torso, and manifesting my apprenhensions in a tight, ropey ball of the unknown, wedged in my midriff. Ironically, the only times I have appeased this little black hole is by playing capoeira, in the two rodas we played to celebrate our departure. The closer I get to flying, the bigger the fear gets. I don’t know that much about it, other than it is borne from the unknown, from a thousand decisions as yet unmade. Brazil is (so I have heard) a dangerous country, especially in the cities. Armed gangs, muggings, robbery, scamsters, etc, are all prevalent. But it isn’t this I fear. (although I might be wise to fear it)

It’s the thought that I, and I alone, am responsible for my journey through life. It’s the thought that I am padded, insulated by the country I live in, and that I might well get a short, sharp shock as to how life is. I’m aware that I’m naive, but exactly how naive is yet to be told.

Wish us luck, we’re about to be beach bums for a few months, and we need all the luck we can get!

Doodling is a wonderful source of relaxation. It’s escapism, therapeutic distraction, and a very instinctive time-killer. When it comes to drawing, my sense of depth or perspective is pretty limited, my aptitude for anatomic proportion is childlike at best, but when it comes to abstract, organic shapes and modular forms, I like to humour myself by entertaining the idea that I’m not that bad.

“Anyway”, I tell myself, “If I was any good, I’d call myself an Illustrator. I don’t lay claims to that level of greatness. Doodling isn’t even a real hobby, I don’t have to be good at it, I can just scribble away and hope it looks nice”

Whether it’s to kill a half-hour waiting for a train, to clear my mind of the busy busy to-do list at work, to zone out for ten minutes, or simply as a brainstorming aid, doodling needs little more than a pencil stub and any sort of paper…and even that’s not strictly necessary. Doodles are time-fillers, little visual panaceas, and the catalysts for countless unborn inspirations.Which leads to the next beautiful thing about the doodle;  it’s a higgs-boson particle, by it’s very nature a tricky thing to capture. Usually it’s scrawled onto some hitch-hiking scrap of paper, destined for glories in strange unseen places, reticent to be owned by anyone. Often that scrap turns into a makeshift bookmark, sometimes it fulfills it’s role as a napkin, other times it dies a slow, quiet death in a pair of trousers somewhere, seeing out it’s last days as the base material for the pocket-fluff composite.

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Above: some of my doodles, in varying levels of refine.

The good news is, it’s usually the best doodles that get saved; the ones that are simply too good to level the wobble on that café’s table or to scribble your phone number on for that smoking hot beauty… the best doodles get promoted to a drawer somewhere, maybe to be scanned in and refined, maybe to be given as a present to a friend, maybe to be stuck on a wall. It’s visual darwinistic selection at it’s most honest. And I love it.

If after all this e-waffle, you’ve got a yearning for real illustration, and not just doodles, check out my buddy Rich’s work. The scratchy moments he builds are filled with potential occurences and akward beauty. He recently did an editorial for the guardian newspaper, and if you ask me, is destined for greatness.

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I woke up at an indiscernable point in the night. My toe throbbed like a fleshy, vicious alarm clock, warning me into awakeness, waking me up with dull but unrelenting pain. I had inadvertantly created a tourniquet, a little cotton valve, and turned my toe into a minute bloodbank cul-de-sac,a little sacco di sangue. I unwrapped the thread gingerly, and at that moment I experienced something; then, it felt fresh and blunt, but now, while not common, is certainly not unusual.

It’s hard to describe the sensation I had; it was more a lack of sensation, combined with a huge awareness of self. I couldn’t hear anything at all apart from myself, I could only just make out shapes in the darkness, and only felt the cocoon of my bed and the duvet. I felt sensory deprivation as it should be; unexpected and brief, without immersion tanks and salinated water; without. Above all, I felt a sense of dread; a feeling of instant and unshakeable mortality. I understood, albeit for a short second, that I wasn’t unbreakable, that I wasn’t God, and that I was lacking in any sort of immortal superpowers. This intense realisation caught me unawares and sleepy, and I think at the time, I was more aware of the sensory deprivation that was felt than the realisation of my mortality. I went to sleep with wild thoughts and a toe that tingled with new oxygen.

The two distinct senses, one external, and one internal, continue to strike me from time to time, always independantly, but one often tinged with the insinuation of the other. The feeling that grabs me most, now that I understand it more, is the one that I cannot quantify. Sensory deprivation is easily acheived and explained; the sounds of your various biological systems keeping you alive can be repeated ad infinitum with a stethoscope, or even with the naked ear, if you reduce the background noise of the world around you (by the way, technological “noise reduction” systems can’t acheive the same effect). No, the feeling that stops me dead (har, har) is the one I can’t replicate, the one I can’t explain away; the feeling that, yes, my thoughts are bigger and grander than the fleshy vessel that contains them, and no, I won’t be having them thoughts forever. Yes, the casing of my abstract thought is temporary, and no, I can’t replace it. The marvelous wonder of evolution and biology that allows me to do so much, to acheive such magnificent acts as the use of tools, the creation and grasp of the abstract, (and fuck, the ability to create life) is also so cruelly restrictive. The simian shroud that I call “me” is seemingly so enabling, but god-fuck-a-monkey, it is also the swift and definite disabler.

We are all made of Stars

Try as I might to believe in an afterlife, some saving grace of a deity, or the re-integration of your posthumous self into the universe as we know it, I’m a cynic at heart. I believe that if you study it intensivley enough, everything is made of exactly the same thing. Call it what you will; energy, stardust, “god”, or “The Great Mohoboho, she who is wise and cruel”, we are all exactly the same as everything else, manifested into ever-so-slightly different configurations, and pidgeon-holed by our tiny minds in an attempt to understand it all. I believe that the belief in anything other than our rotting re-appropriation into the earth is a desperate attempt at silencing the deep knowledge that life as we understand it is swift and finite. If I was to extend my cynicism further, I would say that by simply living, going about our daily routine, is a grasp at silencing this un-escapable truth.

“But Xander”, you say, all scared and tiny and pink; “that’s sheer bullshit. I enjoy life, however brief it may be, and although I may not believe in anything great and holy, I’m not afraid to die; I live life to the fullest, and I’m thankful for every day that I’m not yet squidgy fertiliser”

Well, I’d agree. I’d go into the whole cliché about how greatful I am, how lucky I am not to be living in abject poverty, how nice it is to have a working week, with two days off and free healthcare, but you know all that already. I am genuinely pleased to be alive, for the brief moment that I am, but to be honest, the pure and hungry thought of death freaks me the fuck out, and makes me want to act irrationally, selfishly, animalistically. It makes me want to live for the moment, to live in the woods, to fuck off humanity altogether, and live like a beast, insane and uncaring, wild and impulsively. Then I remember that I’ve got to do the washing, and that I must make sure I tidy up my clothes off the floor before my girlfriend gets home, and I forget all about that primal sense of the now.

Eternal life’s not that tricky.

For me, there are two very real methods of prolonging life, or even living eternally. The first, and most obvious way of prolonging life, is doing. Not talking about, thinking about, considering, weighing-up, or pontificating, but doing. Experiencing. Feeling. Making the most of your corpus while you have it and it works; by seeing the world, by feeling the things that you can; by knowing what you can while you still have time. Time is simultaneously precious and worthless; We only have so much of it, and it costs nothing, but you can’t give it away, you can’t trade it or store it. Use it yourself, and as much as you can. Do. I’ll misquote a fantastic Kaufmann film for you here: “…We are only alive for a brief moment, a flicker…the rest of the time, we are dead, or waiting to be born…” (That’s from “Synedoche New York”, a gloriously melancholic film)

The second, is the mark-making, the “remembering”. Some people chose to see the world through the phrase “What we do in life, echoes in eternity” (Maximus, that Gladiator film), although I tend to think that’s a little pompous and presumptuous. Yes, cause-and-effect, No, not eternity, that’s a Fucking Long Time. But you can extend your prescence, for good or bad, by living in the memory of things, whether they are living or otherwise. This is connected to the first method; Do things you’d like to be remembered for. Whether it’s positive actions, or making beautiful things, Do memorable. Mother Teresa is as memorable as Hitler, who is as memorable as Picasso. I didn’t know or meet any of them, and Mother Teresa could have been a heartless bitch for all I know. I remember her name, and I know her face though, and it’s all through hearsay and legend. Become a legend, and base your legendary status on your morals.

The weird toe thing again

Going back to my two feelings; the sense of acute self-awareness, and the resulting sense of mortality; These are inextricably connected. Only once you appreciate how you work, understand a little about the processes keep your thoughts shrouded in flesh, do you realise that you are limited by those processes; eventually and permanently disabled by the constraints of the enabler. I imagine this is a little taster of those I-tasted-death experiences. It’s these feelings that drive my yearning for discovery, for beauty, and for unattainable inner peace. It’s the very same feelings that power the urge for the primal connection to the earth, the muddy, glorious, ignorant, instant self. And it’s this sense of the mortal that weighs me down, a Montgolfier masterpiece chained to the mountain, a white-hot balloon of glorious thought shackled to the weighty mortality of my body.

I’m full of shiny, rosy-cheeked hope for the future, that brutal, beautiful, unknowable thing, that coats even the most cynical rationalities with a glossy sheen, and, joyously blind, guides us ever forward, towards countless anonymous occurences and one gaping certainty.

Na roda da capoeira
Grande e pequeno sou eu

(In the Capoeira circle, great and small am I)

Capoeira, é defesa, ataque
a ginga de corpo e a malandragem

(Capoeira is defence, attack, the motion of the body, and trickery)

Try as one might to classify Capoeira, it’s not really possible to stuff it into one category. Ask any Capoeirista who isn’t a Mestre (Master) to define it, and they’ll stumble over their words in an attempt to describe it’s essence. By the end of their description, they will have told you it’s pretty much everything, and leave you none the wiser. It’s manifestation depends on the agenda of the Capoerista; it depends on the practitioner, their teacher, and the context.

Some will tell you it’s a deadly Martial Art, an amalgamation of West African fighting techniques, transported across the sea in slave boats as seperate traditions, and fused by oppression in the Senzalas of Bahia, Brazil, with a kicking technique evolved to suit those who’s hands have been shackled.

Some will tell you that it’s a dance, a primal and ritualistic communication between two bodies, symbolic of one’s path in life, the circle of people that envelope them representing a duality; the physical world and the Ouroboros or maybe an invocation of the spirit Orixas (Gods) of Candomblé.

Some might tell you it’s an expression of liberty, the freedom of movement, the freedom of expression, free will triumphing against fate; or perhaps that it is the domination of others, the strategic attack and defence, a game rather than a fight.

None of these descriptions are wrong; all of them have their place in Capoeira.

So what is it then?

Well, maybe a cold, analytical description of a game of Capoeira might help.

Capoeira is played predominantly by two people, surrounded by a group of people forming a circle, usually between 2 metres and 5 metres in diameter. A small part of the circle is a group of musicians, playing mainly percussive instruments. The leader of the musicians plays an instrument called the berimbau, a one-stringed bow. It is he (or she) that “leads” the whole group, in a similar way that the conductor of an orchestra might; he sets the pace and the rhythm. He also initiates the songs; starting with a “ladainha” (similar to a lament), the songs soon move on to call-and-response “corridos”. These might be a comment on the progress of the game, the abilities and characteristics of the players, or a narrative with a moral. This group of musicians is known as the “bateria”.

After acknowledging the “leader” of the circle, (and maybe invoking the protection or power of a spirit god, if they are practitioners of Candomblé)  the two players move into the centre of the circle, often with a cartwheel, and begin to play.

So do they kick each other then? get to the good bit already!

Well, what happens next depends on the speed and rhythm of the music, and the lyrics being sung. There are many different “toques”(literally “beats”, meaning musical patterns or rhythms) that dictate the pace and style of the game. For now, we’ll concentrate on the three main toques, commonly known as “Angola”, “Sao Bento Grande” and “Regional”.

Angola is often played low, and slow, but is most often characterised by the “feel” of the game; it’s movements are often very defensive and “closed”, with the Capoeiristas often playing close to each other; this is a game of trickery, of ritual and illusion. The Capoeiristas are wary, trying to trick each other into set traps, trying to catch each other out. Kicks are often feinted, and expressively slow. Attacks, when they aren’t faked or “expressed”, are rapid and unexpected. Here is a great game of Angola.

Sao Bento Grande (or to give it it’s full title, Sao Bento Grande de Angola) is a sort of “medium” Capoeira game. It includes circular kicks, crablike movements across the floor using hands and feet, acrobatic movements, doges, feints, leg-sweeps, etc. The game can be slightly faster-paced than Angola, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. The emphasis on this game is on fluidity, using the most of the space, and interaction. The Capoeiristas can be on the floor in one tangled moment, and backflipping out of danger the next. This game is probably the most “accessible” game for an observer; Here is a good example of how Sao Bento Grande can be played beautifully.

Regional is a fast-paced game. The emphasis is on speed and power, and Capoeiristas rarely “go to the floor”, choosing to kick high, more often than not with circular kicks, and with lots of acrobatic movements; backflips, backwards cartwheels, no-handed cartwheels are all fairly common. This game can often turn into a brawl, especially with “tougher” Capoeira groups. I personally dislike this grappling element to Capoeira, it’s not why I chose to learn. This is a nice example of how Regional can be beautiful, without being thuggish or too aggressive.

How do you win then?

Well, the short answer is, you don’t. There are no “points” scored, there are no winners or losers. The game ends when it ends, usually mutually. You can be kicked, have your legs swept away from under you, get a poke in the eye or be knocked off your feet (and that’s for starters), and that can be quite humiliating in front of a crowd. You can dominate the other player throughout, or catch them out with a particularly cunning or malicious trick, and that might seem like you came out “on top”. But ultimately, you win by improving yourself, your game, and your technique. You win by building your confidence, building your strength and flexibility. You win by gaining respect, friends, and knowledge. Why would you want to “win” by hurting someone simply for the sake of feeling better about yourself? You might want to teach someone a lesson, or you might hold a grudge, true. But to hurt someone else for a sense of self-worth? That’s called sadism.

Anything else?

Yeah, actually, a whole lot else, that I won’t go into now. Capoeira imparts on you a way of thinking about life, a way of being. It doesn’t have many noble qualities such as one might find in Karate or Jiu-Jitsu; it is a gutter-brawling street-urchin philosophy, born from the disillusionment of always getting the raw deal. It shows no shame in its dishonesty or distrust, and holds no faith in the “death before dishonor” outlook. But it also has at it’s heart the most raw ideal of “brincadeira”, or the playfulness of a child (mucking about, horseplay, call it what you will). It’s this playfulness that sets Capoeira apart from most other Martial Arts, and what makes me so attracted to it; it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I want to try it, what do I need and where do I go?

This is the great thing about Capoeira; the things you need to play it, you already possess. Being, as it is, born from slavery, it is a pasttime that needs no tools or possessions to play. Everything you need to play it, you can make yourself; all you need is people.

The music: Everybody has rhythm, they just haven’t found it yet. All of the instruments can be made with natural, inexpensive (free!) materials, and you can make do with just hand-clapping if you really need to.

The movements: You’ve moved ever since you were born, and the movements are almost instinctive, they are that simple.

The singing: It’s call-and-response, so just sing what everyone else sings!

The great thing is, capoeira is spreading! Here are some links to groups around the globe:

Group Senzala | Capoeira Brasil | Capoeira New York | Capoeira South Africa | Capoeira Bali or look for classes near you at Capoeirista.com.

For further reading on Capoeira, get more posts like this by subscribing to my RSS feed, or by reading these great books:

Roots of the Dance-Fight Game | A Street-Smart Song | The Little Capoeira Book

EDIT: I’m off to Brazil soon, to train in Rio and Salvador. I’ll be updating this blog with my experiences, so stay tuned!

I have little time for socialising at the moment; My spare time is taken up with Capoeira, teaching myself webdesign, and getting ready for Brazil. So when I do get a chance to socialise, it’s great.
“Papa Vinyl” is the dj moniker of my girlfriend’s boss, Jim Willis. Apart from being one of the head honchos at the successful design/moving image business (gizza job Jim!) Bulb, and running the fantastic educational Arts non-profit Pedestrian, he finds the time to organise the exclusive “Papa Vinyl” evening, about once every four months.

The basis of the event is simple; you bring five songs with you, of your choosing. Your name gets chalked up on the board, and Jim plays one song per person, working his way down the list, and starting from the beginning (with a new song) each time. It’s an invite-only night, ensuring that there isn’t any gatecrashing by nu-rave cyber-crasher kids or black metal dervishes.

That said, the format is open and democratic; the song choice is entirely up to you, and the format can be anything from 7″ vinyl to an iphone streaming youtube (however cold and digital that might be!). A little Nancy Sinatra and Jesus and the Mary Chain, mingling with Sabrepulse and Hudson Mohawk, should be an indicator of the diversity that a night such as Papa Vinyl guarantees. The venue itself was perfect for the evening, too; a small tavern in Braunstone Gate, a back room no bigger than my bedroom, puke-pattern carpet, real ale and sweet fruity wine, and an outdoor pisser.

My inner-nerd wish for the evening would be; a group Last.fm playlist (or similar, Muxtape for example?) for the evening, for those too drunk or too far from the decks to enquire as to the name of the track or the artist. I’m sure there are a good few tracks I would love to get hold of, if only I knew the names!

You can listen to my choice of songs on Last.fm

Anyway, it was a fantastic night; props to Ski, Stu and Jim for the great tunes.

(Me on my grandfather’s shoulders, my brother on my father’s shoulders, off on an adventure!)

No matter how well prepared you think you are, the unknown can be both exhilarating and overwhelming in equal parts. One finds comfort (and thus safety) in the familiar, whether it’s always visiting your favourite cafe, driving the same route to work every day, or more drastic manifestations such as never leaving your country of birth. “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t” is a phrase that sums this up entirely; it’s far easier to deal with a familiar problem than to have to figure out the solution to an unfamiliar one.

So is this the slow-burning knot in my stomach, that dormant sharp rush of breath, the brief quickening pulse that I feel in the weeks before I leave a country for an entirely new one? Is that really the cause of my tempered anxiety? Surely I should be filled with the curious expectation of sights unseen, relishing the unknown experiences that I have just bought the ticket for?

Prepared shouldn’t mean Over-Prepared.

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(My family, somewhere in southern Africa)

My parents instilled a journeyman’s curiosity in me from a young age, flying me out to Botswana when I was barely old enough to legally travel by plane. I saw much of Southern and Central Africa before I turned 9, travelling deep into the bush for days at a time, traversing vast swathes of desert in Mk1 Land-Rovers, and swimming with hippos. I watched my parents ride white water rapids in Zimbabwe, scare away territorial baboons with nothing but a breadboard, and kill black mambas with a spade. Not to sound too dramatic, but my early childhood was filled with adventure, vast landscapes, and people of many different nationalities and outlooks. So should I be completely de-sensitized to the unusual– shouldn’t I?

Well, I think in a way, I am. I’m not afraid of entertaining the possibility, and will actively do everything in my power to get myself to a part of the globe that I would like to see. I’m good at preparing for a trip, organizing and considering the logistics of my travels. I think I inherited this trait from my father; he is exceptionally good at being prepared for anything, knowing that he has all the tools at his disposal to ensure that when the shit inevitably hits the fan, he’s ready.

And this, I think, is where the trepidation surrounding travel comes from. Always worrying about what’s around the next corner, and whether or not you’re ready for it. The inability to “let go”, to relax and let fate uncoil in front of you. Overprepare for your journey and your mind (and your rucksack) will be too weighed down by your preparations, and not focused on the moment. Ultimately, this is why we wish to see the world in all it’s full beauty; it’s for the fleeting wonderful moments. Do you really need to take your laptop? Your plethora of electrical devices and their chargers? Are those accumulated horror stories of muggings, kidnap and murder preventing you from exploring a beautiful area, even though it seems perfectly fine?

Tread softly and carry a big stick

I’m not advocating a complete lack of knowledge of the country that you’re about to visit; it makes sense to know about it’s weather, it’s geography, it’s current political positioning in the world; it’s useful to absorb the experience of others who know it better than you. I think that turning up in a strange land without any prior knowledge is a very foolish and dangerous thing indeed. If you’ve been woken up by a bear rummaging through your rucksack for that half-empty bag of trail mix, or been chased out of town for talking to an unmarried woman, you’ll understand the importance of understanding your environment, it’s people and it’s flora and fauna. I also think that going anywhere without appropriate clothing or tools is not very intelligent; a little research beforehand should let you know that you need more than flipflops and boardshorts for a month in the Amazon.

What I think I’m getting at, is that travel shouldn’t be a series of expectations or an exercise in preparedness. It shouldn’t be a battle against the inevitable. Things will go wrong on your journey, and often, even though you’re well prepared for it, there will be very little you can do about it. It’s this fear, the fear of letting go, accepting the things that you can’t control, (and enjoying it if you can) that I feel before I travel. I’m not very well versed in religion, but as far as I can understand, Buddhism teaches you that possessions and emotional baggage (and the ego that accompanies it) only serve to weigh you down; too much of either, and instead of owning your possessions, they begin to own you. If you’re going to take one thing with you on your travels, take this:

“Only own what you can carry, only carry what you need”.

How do you prepare for a journey?

I guess every blog must start off with it’s first post; it must be the most common topic. This is mine, and I’ll do my best to make it as painless as possible. I guess the best place to begin is to lay out my intentions, for my sake more than anyone elses.

wossat?

I have a bad track record with journals; my brother was always better than me at documenting his days; I was too busy using up every last drop of energy building a treehouse, chasing an animal, or passively destroying anything interesting that belonged to my father. I always liked the idea of documenting what I did, and as a photographer, I guess I have manged to, but in a visual rather than literal sense. I used to keep a journal on Deviantart, but within a few years I got fed up with the popularity contest/animé fanboy/myspace selfportrait crowd, and gradually switched off. The colour scheme is fuck-ugly too. So, it’s time to bite the bullet and dive into the brave (not-so) new world of blogging.

but why?…

Well, it’s a valid question. First and foremost, I wanted to teach myself webdesign, and as my girlfriend so succintly put it, “There’s no starting point!” (She’s wonderfully Italian and cuts out all the bullshit, it’s fantastic). I guess there is a starting point, (raw, ugly, grey HTML, frames ‘an all) although it’s deathly boring and nothing near design. It’s more like maths, which when it’s that banal, turns me off immediately. Compare webdesign to, say, design for print, and the equivalent starting point would be cave-painting.

& then?

So, I decided it was high time to teach myself how to build a website… one that showcased my photography and design, one where I could inflict upon the world my tedious musings, and one that was visually interesting, standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible, and so on. I came across WordPress, which seemed like a powerful but idiot-proof CMS to learn the basics with. I quickly realised two things, after a couple of attempts at it…

1) Buying a premium wordpress theme isn’t worth it, if you want something unique and you’re going to customize it anyway

2) Websites should have singular purposes, and if they have more, they need clear divisions between them; blog, portfolio, service, should all have room to mature in their own space, and not bambozle the user with a jumbled experience. This is something I guess you should consider before you even start designing; purpose.

so this is it?

Well, not all of it. I’ve been working on building my online portfolio “The Only Shape” too, something that I wanted to keep seperate from my  blog. I bastardised The Horizontal Way template, and (shock, horror) used iframes. It also doesn’t have a CMS, as I wanted to learn how to create a site the “old-fashioned” way. WordPress didn’t have quite enough flexibility, and I haven’t explored Joomla or Drupal yet, although I might, in time. Check it out, and tell me what you think!

what can I expect?

I hope, a lot. I’m intending on posting about new projects of mine, paid or otherwise, my travels and experiences, thoughts on new technology, current events and visual trends. I’d like to post about things that inspire me (not just images pulled from the web, although it’s nice in moderation, there are a lot of sites that do that already) and things I like to do. I’ll do my best not to use this as a soapbox from which to air my grievances, or as a vehicle for self-promotion. If you feel that I’m not doing enough of any of this, or too much of it, remind me to cast my gaze back to this page, and I’m sure I’ll thank you for it.

So, with one hand over my eyes and with a whimper of trepidation, it’s both feet first into the ferociously over-saturated blogosophere.

(I promise that’s the first and last time I use the word “blogosphere”)