Learn how well they might perform in the future and create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists together once you’re signed into your AdWords account click the Tools, drop-down menu and select keyword, planner. First, let’s look at how to get new keyword, ideas, let’s say for a used car campaign, click search for new keyword and AD group ideas fill out one or more of the boxes that appear, including a description as well as your website.
Url lets you filter larger sets of ideas. Then click get ideas. Next you’ll see a list of AD group ideas to find your keyword, ideas, click, the keyword, ideas, tab you can decide which ones to add to your plan by reviewing the historical statistics in the table. Click, the double arrows to add an ad group or keyword idea to your plan when you’re done building your plan, click review estimates you’ll see a graph with several estimates like clicks impressions, average position and cost you can use this information to set your bid.
Now. Let’s look at another way to use keyword, planner. Let’s say you already have a list of keywords and you want to find out how popular they are. You can see how your keywords are performed by clicking get search, volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups, enter your list of keywords, one per line or separated by commas. These keywords won’t be added to any of your existing campaigns.
Yet click get search volume; next click, the keyword, ideas, tab to see historical statistics like monthly search volume or competition data. You can also see these keywords grouped into ad groups by clicking on the ad group ideas tab in your results. Perhaps you want to get estimates of how your keywords might perform. Click get traffic estimates for a list of keywords to see click and cost estimates or impressions enter your list of keywords or upload a CSV file.
Then click get estimates to see traffic estimates. For your keywords, finally, let’s take a look at how to get new keyword ideas by combining multiple lists of your keywords. For example, maybe your used car business has several locations. You can have one list of keywords just for locations and another that describes your business start by clicking multiply keyword, lists to get new keyword. Ideas enter each list of keywords in the list: 1 and list 2 boxes.
Next: choose whether you want traffic estimates or search volume for your new keyword. Phrases by clicking the appropriate button will combine your keywords from both lists to create new phrases like New York used cars. Now that we’ve shown you how to use the main features of keyword, planner try using these tips to find the keywords that will help you reach the right people for more information about keyword, planner and other AdWords features visit the AdWords Help Center.
Com, because I signed myself now I got ta say something man you’re going to read who you get your advice from, and I don’t mean this in. Even a negative way, but there’s a piece of advice that I’m seeing a lot more frequently lately and by lately, I kind of mean, maybe over the last four or five, maybe six months, and I think artists have to be able to take it.
With a grain of salt here, it is, and I’m going to put it into context. What is the advice singles are better to drop then albums or EPS. Now I understand where it’s coming from. We all know that in this era of music right singles are a huge driver of streams, especially when we consider consumer behavior. The way platforms are working, yada, yada, yada, yada yada, I get it, I get it. I get it and people are telling a lot of artists that yo, so you need to drop singles and one of the huge reasons I hear people talk about doing that.
So you don’t waste music and all those things, but at the end of the day, a lot of the people who are saying that are working for labels or have some experience with labels. Where a lot of the artists that they’re working with our labels and there’s nothing wrong with that, this advice is not incorrect advice. However, there’s a lot of context that is required, because an independent artist needs to move differently dinner artist at a label that should be implied.
That should be assumed. However, we forget to consider what perspective a lot of people are coming from when they give their advice. So let me just break it down from my personal perspective. Yes, when we’re talking about hacking out of the rhythms getting the most out of one song, just for your resources and doing things when it comes to the charts, then pushing a single is extremely beneficial and there’s some more reasons I could cite.
But those are just a few of them, but when you talk about an independent artist right, I always talk about the value of time and the value of a tension. So the thing is once you get people’s attention, we always talk about that catalog. That’s that we’ll! Never like not applies once you get people’s attention, you need to be able to hold that attention for as long as possible right you have that window, it’s time to sell.
How are you going to convince them? How are you going to close the deal? How much music will they be able to consume before they say? You know what you know this person isn’t for me, and maybe you only have a couple of songs. We already know where that’s going to go and for those of you who have seen me talk about the fact that you should drop singles and I do promote dropping singles as a strategy.
Here’s the clarity on what I’m referring to. Usually when I’m talking to artists and talking about hey, you know you should drop some singles for a while. It’s always around the idea of them getting better at marketing themselves. When I say focus on one song and now you’re building your systems around that song, you’re building your experience and ability to market, because a lot of these artists right, independent artists are actually doing their own marketing.
So that gives you an opportunity to not just waste and gives you the opportunity to learn. So I’m talking more about marketing singles one at a time versus marketing a project at a time, that’s a slight difference, but we do want to make sure that you’re building a catalog relatively quickly and the more quality music that you have when one of these songs. Finally, does take off the better off you will be now, of course, you might want to actually save some songs that you feel like should be hit hits because at the end of the day, you want to make sure those get certain amount of attention.
But if you record a hundred songs, you should have a solid. You know, let’s just say twenty, I’m going to throw a number out there right. You should have a solid twenty to forty good songs that are worth putting out versus maybe the five songs or the two songs that you think might be huge songs and I’m going to wait and hold these off right. There should be other music. That should be good enough to leave start building some band and again bringing it back to the beginning.
In this whole idea of just dropping singles just dropping singles, because it works better for the streaming gear and all that kind of stuff. That has nothing to do with the general artist, the independent upcoming artists, because they don’t have the resources to actually leverage that thing right. They don’t have the resources or even the care to be thinking about charting or a gaming. The streaming system, that’s far less important to an artist.
What you need to be focusing on is building a real fan base, especially if you want to move as an independent artist, not just until you get a deal but move as an independent artist like forever right or for a very long period of time. Until you find something that makes sense, you need to be thinking a lot more about what is going to get me, the most fans for the least amount of action versus how do I game this system and get certain things popping virally? So no, it’s not a lie: it’s not horrible advice and it’s not even coming from a bad place when people say just drop singles, but a lot of these people are thinking more so from a general industry perspective when you think from an indie perspective, especially a Loan in the artist perspective, oftentimes, a lot of things are counterintuitive to what those people have to move like at the labels to become successful.
They have a lot of factors that do not apply to you and vice versa. So as always, this article is brought to you by brain man network.Com, because I saw myself if you like this article go ahead. It like button B like he might as well share it. If you’re not subscribed, you know what to do. He dares subscribe. You
Jim Davis. You ever noticed your DM a little drunk on power and maybe needs a designated driver to take the campaign home. Well guess what we’re talking player, driven campaigns here on web DM player, driven campaigns? Why do you want to put the players first as a DM? What’s the benefit to me, the benefit of a player driven campaigns is bringing the rest of the table in and it’s less about, like poor Dungeon Master doesn’t have any input.
They don’t get to have any say in how their campaigns going. The players are just going to dictate the way everything happens with the setting. Oh woe is me all of the great wonderful imagine of things that Dungeon Master’s get to do. I don’t get to do it. There are games that are like that, where, where world creation and world building are collaborative and group based and and there are even some games, that everyone’s a GM basically yeah – we’re not really talking about those right here.
We’re talking about making your traditional sort of mainstream fantasy and and whatever other games, that you’re playing more player focused and using certain techniques to bring the characters front and center into the campaign and to make sure that the decisions that the players are making are centered. In that campaign and that the dungeon master, our game, master referee or whatever you want to call them, is not like subtly, nudging and and moving the campaign towards some predetermined end, but is instead letting the campaign breathe and and go where it goes as it goes.
Introducing new things into it to keep it going and keep it moving and and sort of keep it vibrant, but the players and their decisions and the characters and their their backgrounds and personalities and goals are the both of the motivator. The driving force behind the campaign and and sort of the center of it right, the opposite of this style, would be we’re playing through the diems novel. It’s the straight-up railroad, although to be fair, a hyper focused campaign with characters that gel together that they they have a goal in mind that they want they pursue it without.
You know a lot of tangents or getting distracted and they communicate that clearly to the DM. The end result of it looks remarkably similar to a railroaded campaign, write it. The end product looks as though it’s it’s. You know that they were always doing the thing that I am one of them to do, and but if they will only bought the ticket for each leg of that journey, sure maybe that’s what they’re all like forcing people on a railroad right.
They want to walk across the country and you go no, no. You need to stay back on the tracks right guys, stay back on the strikes. That is true, you know and linear play, which is a less. You know derogatory way of saying railroad. Interrogatories right, listen, incendiary way is built, the country we’re talking more of the you know. What are we going to do with the campaign? Let me let the players.
Okay, take the take the initiative here and and lead what some ways that a DM can keep the players in the driving seat and keep their hands like on the wheel natural one of the big things to me and – and I experienced this as I will like Prepare a campaign is I’ll, get to a point where I’m like. I cannot do any more prep for this campaign until I know who the players are, we need something here. We need to know who are the actors that are going to be in this right? Who are the characters? What do they want where their goals, what are their backgrounds, if I’m over here, creating like an intrigue heavy urban campaign with light, combat and lots of politics and and messing about in the criminal underworld? And things like that and and my players are over here – going like man we’re psyched to play these like mighty feud warriors who are going to do battle against their enemies, then that’s a mismatch there and and I’m wasting my efforts in preparing a campaign based on, Like intrigue and politics, and and backbiting and scheming, and things like that, when I’ve got a group of players who are itching for a game of kick down the door D & D or vice versa, right, maybe they’re really feeling like.
I want to play this thief to the best ability climb the ranks of the Thieves Guild talking to the players before the game starts before there’s even a session zero, and just like communicating this information to them. Many DMS do this right, like they’re like oh hey, this is the kind of campaign I’m thinking about running like what do you guys think? Are you interested you know what what about the next time we play is this campaign I can run.
This is the a good time to start asking specific questions of your players and ask them like what is it about your character and it’s connection to the game world that that player enjoys? What are the things in the players or sorry. The characters background that the dungeon master can use for play that they can mine and look and see like okay. Well, wait a second. This looks like something that you could spin a whole adventure out of, or this thing right here is like it happened in the characters background, but but who else was involved with it? Maybe we can bring these elements to the floor later on and and what you have is as you’re reading, through the backgrounds of your of your of the characters where you start taking notes like this thing seems like a secret that’ll come out later, or this thing Seems like something that we could tease out later into an adventure.
Maybe you know a secret from the characters past that they don’t want discovered or an event that happened to them, that that that’s going to come back later, they think is resolved, but instead it’s going to come back later. Sometimes you see these elements refer to as knives and as I’m not sure where that exactly comes from, but I’ve had a couple of DMS use that technique now and I kind of like it right.
You’re you’re, asking the player character. Your ass on the player like show us what your characters got. What are the things in the backstory that we could potentially use in the campaign or that’s potentially there? Now you don’t have to necessarily do that. You could just like ask for a regular player background, and then you find those themselves. You know you find the things in it that you can use, or you can like just straight-up ask a player hey when you show me your character sheet, that you include some kind of list or description or something about the things in your characters, background.
That would be interesting to include in the game those kind of different approaches to to just getting that information. Well, then, you get to take that information and basically seed the campaign with all of that info. Exactly exactly right. So let’s say you’ve got a map of your area of play and you’re, starting with you know, sort of a locality. You know maybe there’s a town or a village. There’s a couple of adventure sites nearby, maybe a full-on dungeon or bandits.
You’ve got your encounter tables and all these other kind things it’s now time to take those elements, and hopefully you have left room for the characters in in your prep. You haven’t detailed everything out to such a degree that there’s no room for the player characters to enter into your world and start changing things up. There needs to be a moment where the DM and the player sit down together and go okay.
What’s, in your character, background right? Well, this in my world, these things work like XYZ. Do any of those things sound interesting to you, or do you think they’re relevant to your character background, it’s a back and forth and maybe there’s a little bit of compromise where the dungeon master goes like well, I know it doesn’t have to be this way. That was just sort of my initial thought if you’re a character or if you have an a different idea, or you want something different for your character that we can find a place for that in the world.
Let’s take, for instance, like you’ve got some sort of character that belongs to an organization or something like that, maybe like a wizard’s guild or monastery or a fighters dueling Club or something right like what you have is is a an opportunity for the burst off of The player character to influence the world and they can say like alright, we didn’t know that there was going to be a fencing school in this location.
But we’ve got a you know: a fighter who’s like all about dueling, and there should be someone here that that fighter can latch on to in a sympathetic, NPC a source of potential quests, a source of interest for that fighter. Who can then go to the fencing school and feel like? Well? Maybe I want to join up. Maybe I want to become an instructor. Are there any jobs or anything that needs to be done there like? Maybe they want to take it over and you’ve got kind of a whoosh of martial arts sort of like the outside instructor, comes in challenging the master to combat and takes over and that spawns a whole sort of vendetta and and so the cycles of violence.
They just continue those cycles of violence. This is where you take a look at your map and you go. Is there anywhere on here that can be connected to the player characters background? Is there anything in the player characters background that I need to be sure to include in this player, and then you go do that with the with your NPCs? Are there any NPCs here who might be a good fit for something that happened in one of the PCs background? If it’s like a local going to ruler or something like that, then that’s a good place to do it.
Maybe a mentor of some kind, that’s in their background or an enemy. Those NPCs have a place in your world, and you you owe it to yourself and to the player to like really take a look and see like okay can i? How can I work this into the campaign world? How can I embed this NPC in that campaign, world and and like have it be a part of it, but it’s there for the player to interact with as they choose player, might completely ignore these things and do something completely different.
I know I have made characters where I was like. Oh man, this is the backstory. It’s going to be this and that and the minute we start playing. I forget all that and then I’m playing the character as they exist right now, and it’s not about what? What I came up with for backstory or anything can’t move forward. Looking over your shoulder, Jim Davis, just kind of soldier looking backwards, is actually kind of good advice, we’ll run into something: that’s kinda, what we mean when we say seed, your sandbox or your location or your setting or whatever it is with your player, character, backgrounds.
We’re talking about matching locations matching NPCs. Is there something in the PC background that jumps out at you and goes like who I can make an adventure out of this then like? Let’s, let’s do that like like put that in there and and work through the players? Stumbling across it or that becoming an active element of play, you know as the game unfolds well, sometimes that can actually, instead of just seating, an adventure like you said with the fighting school thing like if it’s the traditional, like, oh my my master, my whatever was Killed that can be like the whole source of a campaign that can focus your campaign and, like this character, their whole goal is to get to the end and kill that guy right and it just so happens the rest of the party like oh yeah, that’s the Guy, that’s the baron, that’s subject like suppressing this land and we need to take him out anyway right right if you’re, creating a dynamic campaign world where things change and things develop, and your NPCs have plots and motivations and goals that are going on in the background And you’ve created like a timeline for your campaign, that’s like: if the players do nothing XYZ events will happen.
If you have something like that in mind, maybe it’s an actual like timeline for your campaign. Maybe it’s just a general idea of what’s going to happen, then you start kind of creating these moving elements. The person who slew the fighters master at the fight school is now the baron. Well, that’s a problem right because you can’t just walk in and kill the Baron yeah, that’s going to be bad news, and so you now you’ve spawned this whole other thing.
Well, what if the Baron is also has a tie to the background of another player character. You’re looking for connections that you can potentially make and it’s a skill that you’ll have to develop as a dungeon master. This is this not how I used to run games. This is something that I’ve learned to do really over the last few years is really kind of focus in and make players the the center of a game.
First off I hated reading big wall character backgrounds. It was difficult to get to the game. Ax balem owns in a multi-page handwritten gym. I had an opus he’s going to write it when you use des sins, and I know – and it’s one of those things right. I always kept my every my that’s very true. My stance was, I’m just not going to read them like write them all you want not. I don’t feel like reading a bunch of stuff.
For me, that was a reaction to character backgrounds. I was getting at the table where it seemed like the most important things that had happened to that character had already happened, yeah that the most adventure that they were ever going to have had been written into that character background, and to me that signaled, a breach Of trust that the players who were playing these characters didn’t trust that cool awesome, amazing things would happen in their campaign, and so they felt the need to write this into the play to the character’s backstory instead of just saying like yeah.
Well, you know maybe some exciting things have happened to my character, but the best is yet to come and let’s figure out, what’s going to happen through play, and so I really focused then on making sure that in the moments of play there were interesting things for The characters to do now I try to do that as well as tie in what they’ve given me for the backstory to create the elements of play that we’re going to use.
Let’s use an example right running Warhammer yeah right now on on encounter RP, their twitch blog. We got a Wednesday game. You know I have a mini sandbox that I have packed to the gills with heretics and witches and mutant and chaos and all sorts of things for a witch hunter to salivate over and want to fight. And then it’s then we get the five player characters. The witch hunter – and you know its followers and it’s now time to look through the backgrounds of each one of those player, characters and go alright.
Alero is an elven, you know it’s a high wood, elf, Ranger type from you know: who’s had this tragic backstory with a hag or a Crone of some kind that that caused Alero Pruitt’s character to to sort of commit this atrocity. I already knew that there were going to be witches and hags and sort of like chaos, sorcerers and the like in my campaign. Well now one of them has to be Alero switch because otherwise, what’s the point of Pruett telling me that there’s a witch in his characters background when he’s with a witch hunter, you said I’m saying like there was a time whenever I would read a background like That and I would go like why you can’t tell me to put a witch in my game like there, whereas I’m thinking when I wrote it on like over a bunch of witch hunters.
This is perfect right. So now I look at something like that and I go oh well. This is perfect, like it makes sense, and – and I try to do this – you know a lot now where, where it’s like, if there’s something in a PC background, let’s like bring it to the center of the game – let’s put this in there, and this works really Well for very short, focused campaigns, but it also works well for like longer running ones as well.
Let’s talk about choice and how real those choices are because, like you said you know, sometimes demons don’t want to be forced to do anything in their game, determined by the players. Things like that. But what we’re talking about here? Players, if they’re in the driver’s seat and they’re going to be directing, where we’re going right, yeah and so when they make choices, to go places and to do the things in the world that you that the DM has set down like.
How do you ensure that that actually matters there’s a school of dungeon master, ring and game, a stirring in general that that you’ll see sometimes refer to as illusionism and this school prizes, the illusion of choice, the illusion of a living breathing world that reacts to player Decisions and prizes the illusion of all of these things and they use techniques diems, who sort of like this style and like this kind of play, use a lot of techniques with what we might call a quantum encounter.
There’s something something was prepared. An encounter was prepared, but it floats around the map. It’s not nailed down yet the reason why I personally really dislike this style of play is you illustrated by like you’ve, come to a t-intersection in the dungeon. You can go one way or another. If you look at for clues as to what’s in either direction, you realize that to the left there seemed to be clues, suggesting one type of monster or enemy, and so instead you go towards the right and the dungeon master goes and looks goes well.
You know I put that encounter. I was thinking it might be to the left or something like that, but they decided to go against it, the others I’m just going to move it, I’m just going to move that encounter right. The everyone knows that the bandits attack people that take the left fork in the road. The players take. The right fork in the road bandits attack them anyway, it’s at any time where, regardless of what the players say or do, regardless of the decisions they make and the choices that they that they they make or the past that they follow.
If the dungeon master goes, this thing is happening, no matter what that is an element of illusionism. Let me take a step and say there are some times when that technique is useful. I use it all the time in one shots, because you’ve got two to three hours to play, maybe a little bit more you’re trying to deliver a certain experience to to to make sure that the game is is whatever it is, particularly if you’re like doing a Focused one-shot or something like that right, you know, but you want a beginning, a middle and a beginning.
In a million you want a satisfying session of Dungeons and Dragons. Then you use different techniques here, but in regular play in a long-term campaign play overuse of illusionism and and for players like myself. Any whiff of it immediately takes me out, and I know I’m not the only one. I’ve talked to other players who are like this and other people who they do not like in the sense that when they make a decision in game, the dungeon master is just kind of humoring them and whatever the dungeon master wants is going to happen.
They’re just shuffling things behind they’re, just shuffling things behind the scenes moving around and counters, saying like oh, that NPC was always there. I understand the temptation to do this right. It’s sometimes difficult with a group of players who really keep you on your toes. It’s hard to stay one step ahead of them and so keeping things vague and loose and what’s there what’s not, can lead to these moments where you go like well, I’m just going to at the table.
Whatever the players come up with, I’m just going to immediately react to it. It’s going to be like a counter towards it, or this encounter that I’ve prepared it’s going to happen, no matter what we’re going to get to that, because that’s what I’ve prepared! That kind of illusionism that kind of forcing an encounter, it really does damage to the bonds of trust between player and game master if they find out, and if it’s not something that the party was like.
Okay with to begin with, you know well, there’s also a few other things that diems have been known to do and we’ve discussed them before and other shows it’s worth mentioning here again, but like fudging, yeah but dying young. Maybe it’s because you are so focused on the players getting to where they want to go you’re going to fudge just to help them along I’m young easy. Is that even okay, I don’t like that.
You know here’s the thing. Would you accept it from a player? Would you accept the player going like one man? I that’s thirteen looks like an 18 to me. I have to hit you know, I’m ready to hit right now, I’m just going to fudge this dice a little too good to get the outcome that I want. You wouldn’t accept it from players. We would call that cheating yeah with those kinds of players whether it’s like Oh fell on the floor fell on the crack of a book.
It’s a die whatever. It is whatever coded language they use to give themselves. Another role or ordinate get me the first hole that they had. We, you know we don’t like it as Dungeon Master’s when players do that. Well, why would we accept it from ourselves, even if you’re using a screen like let’s say, you’re using a screen, you want to keep your notes secret. You don’t roll on the open because you’re one of those DMS likes just roll random dice in order to make the players think a lot of things are going on legitimate technique, but guys the fake bro.
I don’t overuse it, but it is a legitimate thing. You’re, like you’re gaslighting, the PC anyway, the fudge, the altering of dice, is one of those things where. Why are you rolling in the first place, if you feel the need to fudge, but to me, there’s something else going on that leads you to believe. Like the outcome that I just got with this die, roll was unwanted. Then why did you roll the die in the first place? Yeah, and if it’s something like I don’t want to kill the players right now.
If the dice are just been going against them all night and and what should have been a standard just like walk in the park, combat has got them on the ropes and and you’re running the risk of like a TPK or something like that. Even in those situations, it’s tough for me to say, like oh yeah, you should like pull your punches there and like not have them. You know, be mercilessly slaughtered first off if you’re playing a modern, mainstream RPG, the likelihood of that happening is very low right.
You really got to like go after like really deadly hard combats in a row or some kind of monster. That’s going to like drop a bunch of AoE damage on you or something to like get to that point. So taking that thought and like flipping it. What about altering an encounter like once your PCs roll up in a room? And you get your thought? Oh, this is going to be badass in one round. They just bucket of steamroller for all them in one round and then there’s like a unplanned wave.
That comes in that’s another thing that I’m just not a fan of a style of gaming. That kind of like we’re going to adapt and and and change this scene. You know change the encounter in the middle of the scene or something like that. It’s one of those tools where it’s like there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. I have really never seen it used in a way that makes the game more fun. Like I, you know, there’s a lot of times when the players like just like waste and encounter yeah right just like utterly waste yeah.
Well, they just hit the perfect, spells and attack excite order and just take a freaking enemy down and to me it’s like well sometimes like that. Just feels good, sometimes yeah, hey, we did it right, yeah. You know yeah, and I think it’s one of those things where, if that’s what’s happened, if you know first of it’s a one-off thing, give it to your party if it keeps happening, and you sense that your players are getting bored because you know the encounters that You’re, throwing at them are not engaging and not not fun or not whatever.
It is that you, the players, want out of any counter. That’s a behind-the-scenes thing, it’s time to up your game in terms of like making sure the encounter is challenging for the party. If that’s what they’re, looking for and including like very dinna me types and looking at the tactics that they use and and and altering your own, the way you play the the monsters themselves, those are things to get you a better encounter, but the the occasional like Man, the party really just curb-stomp these these enemies, that’s perfectly fine and in those situations like fudging the dice so that it’s a more challenging encounter first up, I there’s someone will know that one of the players particularly have veteran players or something like that.
They’ll know all right this place that we’ve said it many times. Please don’t fudge dice. We like rolling in the open. We like letting the dice fall where they may, because they tell their own story when it comes to campaigns. Adventures for the DM here. Yeah, PC driven campaigns right can that coincide with what has become kind of the bog standard of fantasy RPG, which is like Avengers type world-saving like the big, the big dam quest, the big dam question yeah.
Does that work like I? I think it can, but it is difficult and there are countervailing factors that that that push dm’s into into what I see as bad practices, a lot of, but not all of them, of the like Wizards of the coast modules that they put out for themselves. Follow this model, you don’t have to play them this way. You can chop them up and use them a lot of different ways, but if you run them kind of, as is, there is a a big threat that requires the party to be higher level to deal with right somewhere north of 10th to 15th level.
From the beginning, the party is going to be dealing with enemies related to this threat and working their way up a food chain and there’s usually a sense of just like the players are the only ones dealing with this world shaking reality altering campaign, changing kind of Threat, there’s a lot of reasons why I’m not fond of that model, but mostly it’s ones where an implication of a narrative structure to the kind of the Grand Campaign sort of a rising action.
The climax of falling action and all those sorts of narrative beats that you know are the hallmark of really good fiction, and – and you know you might might make for a really good story to just like read or even just kind of talk about. They don’t necessarily mesh well with the random nature of RPGs, where you’re kind of here, at least I’m kind of here and – and I think one of the strengths of RPGs – is being surprised that those emergent elements of play that you can’t account for that.
You don’t know, what’s going to happen, you’re you yourself as a dungeon master, will be surprised, but if you’re running this campaign, that requires, like all the players, are on board they’re all unified in this goal. To like stop the big, bad and save the world, and if one of them dies then that’s that can put a hiccup in in the campaign if all of them die that can you know bring the campaign to a complete halt.
If you know, none of them want to do something like that, they all want to pursue other things. They want to go off here and do some downtime activities and they want to do side quests. I think this is like the most common one where it’s like. There’s a sense of urgency to the campaign the soul monger is killing, is killing everyone. Who’s ever been resurrected, the Tia mots going to return or the demon princes or out of the abyss and and attacking everything like.
We must do something now and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for the madcap zany adventures that I find almost all of my like favorite role, playing and Dungeons and Dragons stories are a lot there are comes from just like. We were just messing around and this happened and they opened a portal before we had to clean up this mess, or we were just like we’re poking around this dungeon and found this thing and yeah.
So many things that happen just by happenstance and randomness and chance and dumb luck and and and the weird alchemy that is, you, know, playing the game and letting things emerge from it. That’s going to alter it and something to support that argument. The knocks against the Marvel movie universe and how you can’t have any kind of personal like like Jane, never shows up for Thor and everything he’s too busy saving the world all the time you can’t fit in, like all that, you know personal backstory right right exactly Unless you’ve got a party, that’s like all of them have created backstories that tie into the grand campaign, and you know, you’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes metagame work before the campaign starts to like make sure it merges and meshes that’s a situation where you can, But if you’ve just got like some players, who made some characters and they’re just kind of there to play – and they want a meander and Wonder and do all these things and you keep probably pushing them along for the Grand Campaign – you’re fudging roles, you’re altering encounters, On-The-Fly, you start negating player decisions yeah, and this is one of those things that once a player decides to do something in the dungeon master decides.
I don’t like that. That’s not going to happen and they don’t take a moment to just say: hey player, what you’re doing right now. Is it really it I’m having trouble making it work for my campaign? Can we talk about it if they try to like subtly alter the course of the game, some of the most epic meltdowns at a table? That’s it have resulted from that kind of like attempting to manage the players yeah right.
Well, I mean you’re you’re subverting the player agency in the game. Therefore, there’s no reason for the player to be there to be there right exactly and and if it’s just like running through the dungeon master story, it’s not it’s not a fun engaging way to play. There is a place for dungeon master creativity. There is a place for the dungeon master to interject their own opinions, their own ideas into it.
This is not about completely ceding the field to the players, and you are just the mere passive you know entity at the table. It is about making sure everyone gets a chance to collaborate, and everyone has a chance to have their portion of the narrative that’s being created at the table through play as an element of that, and not just like. Oh, it’s, the dungeon master and the players are left to kind of scramble for some way to connect to the setting and world and then find relevance and meaning in it.
It’s the dungeon master, going like here’s a par baked setting. Let’s get your characters in the mix, finish it off and play we’re going to hit the ground running and some of the most amazing gaming I’ve had has come from this style of game of player. Centered effing, a man deafening I’m like well, and what I love about the sword now is they have enough albums that now I could just keep listening to them and not get tired of them.
Yeah yeah because I’ve even gone back and listening to listen to high country again, and it’s still, my least favorite, but there’s still a lot of fun songs on there like I get what they’re trying to do, they want to do a more mellow, chill rock album And they have every right to do that, yeah lad that they did know. I begrudge artists at all who want to do something different now that it’s like you know, squeeze every amounts of imagination out of your brain and put it up on a article.
It’s just like I’m going to do whatever is exciting. For me, you guys can go deal with it. Yeah there’ll be a article there’ll be another. Album yeah there’ll be another article, another album so yeah yeah, but goddamn use future. So good yeah we were listening to apocryphon while
When creativity flows by itself, all is well When it does not artists and others pursuing Creative and innovative endeavours develop techniques To get unstuck methods to somehow reposition Their minds and get back to their creative work fresh And anew In this documentary we are looking at eight Recipes for creativity, tricks of the trade, how to jump over a wall; twelve meters high When trapped inside without inspiration, Method, one constraints Intuitively one would assume that the more Freedom, an artist, has the easier it becomes to create something interesting, But regularly.
The opposite is true. As we shall hear in the following story, Neil Biggin is a producer of music for article Games He tells me how his compositions were shaped. By technical limitations, when he just started, In the early nineties, because computers could Only spit out bare electronic sounds in a scanty Sequence, It was a fun time of being pushed to be inventive When article games first started Things had just moved on from sounding like a digital read to.
.., to sounding Uh… Like four high-quality digital reades playing at the same time so… In-in theory. It was joyless, but it became Um…, it became a really exciting uh… Challenge. To-To try and create something as… From-from, something as restricted as that. To compete with the other guys that had… That were already out there, So yeah Squeeze in as much… As I possibly could. Out of a very tight situation, It was a lot of joy.
I never sat there bored. I never sat there. Thinking ”Oh, well, there is nothing to do here. There is no…”. There was always something In 1994 Neil got a phone call from the Amiga Corporation, He had produced music for one of their article Games a year earlier, which ran on the Amiga 500 Home computer, They had good news. ”We are about to release our newest machine, the more powerful Amiga CD32.
”. So they wanted a bunch of games. ( lets say ten: fifteen games ) to be for sale on the opening day of the machine, So they picked their favourite Amiga games. And said: “: Okay,,” (, the biggest selling ones ) “. We wan na sell these. So can you remake this game? With CD music, more sound effects,.” And all of a sudden I’ve-I can use a full Studio, I couldn’t believe that opportunity, No restrictions in terms of sound any more.
I could get a guitarist in a singer in Whatever I wanted, I could have endless sound effects. And I could have… Endless music, Neil’s manager told him they wanted. A full orchestral composition, something that is a cross between The soundtrack of this movie and that movie, Although Neil, was a talented bloke Up until then, he needed no great musical knowledge, But now having complete freedom. Neil did not know where to start I’ll, never forget it I’ll, never forget the position I was sat in I’ll.
Never forget the look of the keys. I literally sat and stared open mouth The keys and thought “ I’m done, That’s is The last idea is gone.” In stead of feeling more creativity, Having now the luxury to compose anything, he wanted Resulted in an overkill of choices Today, decades later Neil regularly, Still is aware of how constraints can actually be fruitful. It’s an interesting point. I think..
. The subject of this conversation about restrictions. And creativity, and things like that, I think… You know necessity – is the mother Of invention and all that stuff, I think when-when you… When you [ are ]. Faced With a lot of challenges, when you really have To… Squeeze something to get… Get some joy out. Of it, when it’s harder, you work harder at it When it’s easy, when it’s all on a plate.
You get lazy And I am including myself in this. Does this work S… S…? I could… Now. This is my dad composer and musician. Alan Laurillard: Okay Constraints in the creative process: Have really been handy for me and I think… And I I actually believe in it. It makes you… Focus on what’s left over And you can go much deeper and you are not worried about the… About uh…, all the information, all the possibilities But constraint, [ ments,.
.. ]. It doesn’t limit your creative process at All I think…, and I am thinking about it now – It makes your creative process… More depth, more focused And your final product b… Might be better. That’s you kn…. In any case, that’s my story. Yah… Using constraints, possibly works so well. Because human creativity seems to have its origin In precisely that solving practical problems, You know you can t.
.., you can put all All the stuff on the table – or you can just put a couple of things – On the table, when you are going to cook, You can make real good food with Just a couple of ingredients also, you know…, You have created a game for yourself. So you got to work within those parameters. It’s really… Um,…, uh… Gives you freedom Makes it easier. This is also what the French writers Raymond Queneau and Fran瀀ois Le Lionnais searched for when They founded in 1960, a group called Oulipo which practised And studied potential literature techniques centred around Deliberate constraints, For example, the novel La Disparition Translated into English, with the title, A Void by Georges Perec, a notable member of Oulipo A book written entirely without the letter’ e’ The relationship with the audience is one Worth looking at, If the artist wants to he can consider the Outsider as part of the configuration of the artistic Expression and play with it Not letting the expectations of the audience.
Control what you do, but deciding some of those things ahead of time. And allowing them to be constraints that inspire you Making lasagna is not a random creation. It is subject to presets. Your freedom is limited. If you deviate too much, it is not longer. Lasagna, We are looking here at form which -is- a Constraint, albeit a conventional one, It is a bit more of an assignment, An agreement between the maker and the audience Here.
My friend Ole Juul joins the discussion. He is…. He is… Not so easy to classify A man with many interests. Danish by birth, A sonnet is a constraint. Some people can speak fluently. A lot of sonnets I don’t know Edna Saint Vincent Millay: she is brilliant Uh, whether you like her or not. Uh, uh and and Shakespeare certainly was Uh uh uh uh, uh uh um…. In that form, You you take a form a-a-a-and and uh uh Uh Uhhh, you take deliberate constraints, A-a-a-an-an-and uh.
What does that give it? It gives it tonality I-I think it does other things. The constraints are the language Because without the language y [ ou ]…, it’s… It difficult to communicate. To somebody I… Really believe in that kind of thing, Although I do see the beauty of conformity I personally am unsure of the value of caring at all. About what the observer finds of your work But -if-, you somehow decide to deliver a specific Type of art your form is set, and now you can only ponder Over the parameters within the boundaries of your selected, art, Form, That is not to say you cannot temporarily Shift? On the contrary, as I put it forward here, As technique number two shapeshifting Think of an architect stuck without inspiration, Committed to design a building for a client can use this technique to first sit down to Design a piece of jewellery which he then later transforms Into a building Such a shift is substantial, But also possible.
Is a relatively smaller shift, An advertising copywriter being paid to Write a sales letter persuading housewives to Buy a laundry machine could decide to first write. A letter to his own wife, in which he tries to Interest her into buying one We want to disturb conventionalism. There are Typical ways to start a reggae song typical shapes and patterns on totem, poles, Typical topics to cover in stand-up comedy Form, And that is all fine if you are comfortable With doctrine and never get bored with the tolerance That is left over, But making something conform.
Expectation can Remove suspense – And that is what this documentary is about – How to fight artistic stagnation and bring back excitement To start producing again So shape shifting By assigning a different form. Even just for the moment, you trick yourself into a world with different laws. And thereby free yourself from common assumptions Here I am in dialogue with Emmy nominated Screen writer novelist song writer and vocalist Pauline Le Bel, who describes having used Such a form metamorphosis, I had to write something.
I was writing… A-a book And I had to write about something that was Really really a painful experience and hard to write. About So I wrote it as a poem first, And it was kind of um…. I-it suggested what had happened, And you certainly got the feeling of Um of sadness and distress by reading it. So when I put that in the book, And then the editor had a look at it and she said “ I’d really like you, To expand on this and do it in prose.
”, But I could not have done it in prose. If I had not done it as a… As a poem first And then I could work from that Because it allowed me to… Um… To feel it and to move through it Kedrick James poet, musician, multi-media, Artist, professor at the University of British Columbia, In the faculty of Language & Literacy teaches this method to his students. I use a term for that which I think of as ‘Genre bending’, Okay, Which is you know, a joke, really A play on gender bending, But um.
.. Genre bending, would speak to exactly the same Uh… Practice of stepping outside of the form In which you are most familiar or which you have made a routine practice, Of in order to reinvigorate that form and find Something new, But if I were to uh, write a sonnet How can I use genre bending for that Uh? You could use genre bending I think in a whole lot of ways, So you may decide to generate your sonnet Out of uh other texts, You might decide to combine two of these different Uh.
.. Provocations or creative provocations, You might decide…. Ah I have a good friend named Wreford Miller. Who is also a poet who wrote a whole series of sonnets in which he would take two different Texts often counterposed against each other, so… A-a-a romantic text and you know maybe ( I’ll exaggerate, this isn’t a real example ), but Like a Harlequin romance and a [ n ] engineering textbook, And then he would create them using those Rhyme schemes, so you know Shakespearean or Petrarchan Or what have you.
.., Um…, so that the A-line, the A rhyming line? Would be from say the Harlequin romance and the B rhyming Line would come from the engineering text And he would very carefully go through And weave those… Sew them together And they flowed as if it were one… Voice, But the language keeps shifting gears on you And…. So that’s you know just…. Just one example: Of if you were going to write a sonnet, How could you.
.. Uh… Use genre bending Or form hopping to do so That…, that would be one example of… That Being done, Each tiny part freed from desire unbranched Being one itself, a complete flower Self is untouched, so finely divided in seeing Hearing touching smelling eating walking, sleeping breathing speaking Small scaly white flowers, opening and closing on the poorer Soils Others offer all “ ray” and the yellow, “ disk” In the fire of deepending on the ideas of the individual Arching blooms about June kindled here in This life, the weed concept, arises from the wide Achillea Conquered by those present everywhere, pungent Brahman, if crushed This was the first half of the poem called ‘Yarrow’ by Wreford Miller, with sentences taken from ‘trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in British Columbia’ And’the Bhagavad Gita,.
‘ Wreford Miller, took splinters of text He found and reused them to make something new. We stumble here upon a third methodology for Escaping a creative headlock theft Incorporate someone else’s work, either temporarily Midway the creative process or permanently and either blatantly or after a graceful transformation Doing it blatantly, that is to say, without Doing much modification will easily receive criticism, But there are also examples wherein the original Artist expresses appreciation of the minimal twist The tube he assumed to be empty.
Still appeared to squirt toothpaste, Bass, player and composer Tony Overwater With his idea on the contrast between acceptable and unacceptable artistic borrowing, I think the selecting of the idea of somebody Else and… And putting it into a new context, is Never really theft Uh. I think it’s theft, When you sort of copy a result, When you… Copy… Somebody’s success, When you want to create a certain success for yourself, By using somebody else, his uh.
.. Achievements – I mean music is language. Uh and language is constructed And th [ e ]…. These constructions are…. Is the grammar that we use to musical grammar And we cannot prevents to use certain sentences? Uh…, or to use certain structures that… That we all Use every day or that is being used, Um…, if you…, and if you name that you were Inspired by them,… I mean there is compositions by Sch怀nberg That are based on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach And uh.
…, that’s an honour For both of them. You know… T-to use and to reuse [ Singing ] Before lord god made the sea and The land he held all the stars in the palm of his hand,… Pauline Le Bel [, Singing ]…, and they ran through his fingers. Like grains of sand And one little star fell alone, So one of the songs that I love singing… Have sung for many years is called Lost In The Stars: It’s by Kurt Weill, A part of his um musical, called Beloved.
.., The Beloved Country. So I love this song, It’s just so beautiful And so what I did… – And this was the first time I have done this This was a couple of years ago…. I took the… Cause. I love the harmonic structure ― it Is so exquisite…, So I took that harmonic structure and just Started playing with it Just started playing with it, And then I came up… With a song… About Kissing Ha, so the melody is completely different.
You’d never know that this was related in Any way And it’s about a completely different topic And uh… Yah. So that’s my biggest theft And the thing is th-the ha [, rmonics ], the chord Structure was even pretty d: [ ifficult ]… (, and I am playing It on the piano ). It was pretty difficult… To play, So I… It wasn’t exactly a copy. Just because… I knew when I recorded it, I was going to have to play it, so I had to make it.
.. Dumb it down a bit, But it’s still like… And people just say: “, Oh I love it. I love it.” And it does have a really really beautiful…. I mean the chords. Are exquisite… Every time I play it… Just I get. You know,… The hair… On… And it’s because of Kurt Weill. Thank you very much One of my… One of the most wonderful composers. So this is the original sung by Todd Duncan Who was in the original cast of the musical, And here is what Pauline made of it? With her song A Kiss By Any Other Name, Could it be a sign of the times There is so much there already, Rather than creating things rare and unusual You simply add things to a gigantic pipeline full of information.
We have parallels of clutter and overload Between our information environment from horizon To horizon available stuff, you can — read — experience; –, look at –, listen to And our physical environment like when you live In an overcrowded city Here again Kedrick James, I think, that’s to a degree Why remix-culture became so significant [ It ] was the idea that you are already barraged And to create something original or new.
.. (, maybe not new ), but to create something original seemed almost impossible. You’re…, It’s always already been done And uh…. So people started looking at ways. That you could work with what was out there gathered up Reprocess it and make it something: new Reuse, You know in a sense that whole idea of Reduce reuse And recycle applies really well to the information environment. As it does to the uh.
.. Natural environment, uh…, [, mut,…, ] physical environment, You can buffoon all you want when reusing And here again it is the creative you in charge. Of deciding how to reuse someone else’s work, Don’t copy but modify You attach, get fertilised detach and cultivate Design. A hat in addition to an existing Dress Then omit this dress. And create fashion that matches the hat Hum a solo on top of an existing music piece.
Omit this music piece Play that solo, but now on bass and in Reverse And then write your full composition on Top of that, How typical principles of an art form really Are is much easier to see when you are an outsider? Does all tango music seem the same to you All graffiti, All types of licorice On the flip side, as visitors in a world of Cultural esoterica: we are blind to details that the insiders Value The people who listen to tango a lot Can quickly say for themselves which tango music piece, they value The musical form (.
What makes tango tango, ) -Shelters-, the internal creativity and many artists do not usually touch such Essential criteria They do not redefine what tango really should. Be, And this refers back to my segment about form The creativity is applied on common attributes. And that is how you make tango that has enough authenticity to get respect from the insiders. Everybody happy Everybody happy, But if are you going through an artistic Depression then, let’s not only play with common attributes, Go beyond expression within the normal realm.
Discover your blind spots Take note of the things you have not questioned. And notice how much room there is for ideas of an unusual sort, Expand into different dimensions by being Playful with atypical attributes, Change the rules of the game And thကt is our fourth way to ignite creativity. What is cola you ask Pepsi and Coke. Well. Cola is a delicious soft drink. And it has an identity, a brand Coca Cola’s brand for a long time was stronger.
Than that of Pepsi, Then back in 1970, Pepsi made a smart move. That falls into this category of prescriptions for creativity, They changed an attribute outside of where the normal competition Took place Here is what they did: A big part of the identity. Of Coke was its distinctive trademark. The hourglass-shaped Bottle And for many years at the cost of millions, Of dollars, Pepsi fruitlessly studied new designs of their Own But then – and here comes the clever move – They introduced for the first time 2 litre bottles, Which it had discovered consumers found more convenient.
Coke had apparently not seen this consumer Interest, possibly because it was blinded by its own Success concluding that it was on the right path. There was no good way for Coke to sell 2 litre. Bottles and maintain their unique design because it would make the bottle too tall. For shelves in supermarkets And so Pepsi beat Coke by nullifying Coke’s Advantage and changing the rules of the game. How do we apply this in art? You change something that you usually don’t.
Okay, I can think of something here. This is improvising piano player, And composer Lisa Cay Miller, who talks with me about modifying her piano To change the actual sound It involves, for example, placing objects Inside the piano touching the strings so that they dampen Or vibrate when certain keys are played, And so I’ve done quite a bit of work, researching With um some of my colleagues, Rachel Iwassa (, pianist In town ) and also a friend of mind in Rio, his name Is Claudio Dauelsberg and uh learning how to Do these things in the piano without damaging the piano at all, The piano is normally this certain sound And when you.
.. Place… These objects in the piano And things aren’t, as you expect them, when you play them, They come out differently And it’s quite surprising, uh and…. It can Be quite…, um…, quite… A surprise to hear… The-The sounds that-that. You can make with the piano Especially some of the… The things I also work with Denman Maroney in New York, City, He showed me a few things that are really Wonderful, where you can actually make the piano sound, A little bit like a motorcycle or like chainsaw And you are not actually hurting it.
Because of all this research to do it carefully, Uh…, But the things where you prepare the notes. Where they don’t sound like how you are expecting or… In the course of playing things, shift Slightly and the note that used to be a sweet note, Is no longer a sweet note and um…. I think that that sort of tension that that Creates um is really wonderful as a performer And then when you are playing something And it doesn’t sound,.
.. The-it’s almost seems sort of mystical Where these sounds come back at you, that seem to almost have very little to do. With what your hands are doing, [… ], [,… ], and you can have this relationship with The sound that is really fresh, My father’s music group, The Noodband, consisted Of a double trio, Two drummers, two bass players and two saxophone Players Just that setting alone something plenty Bands do nothing interesting with made everything Else that followed in opposition to the expected overall Sound First of all, it was a practical choice.
There was a… Two good bass players around And there w [ ere ] some good drummers friends. Good players And one other good saxophone, [ player and Also ], I played saxophone And the kind of music which I kind of envisioned. Even before I started writing um…, And I wanted to do something different – also It’s nice…, So…, But I k [,… ] I and that… With that case, I really envisioned the music before I started, making it, And I can do that with hey two bass.
.. I can w [… ]. I can work One low one high. These characters are good characters for this Music, These two drummers – I just tell him… And That was the hardest part telling drummers what To do So, one drummer does one thing: And the other drummer has to do something complimen-mentary That was tough Cause. The drummers are difficult. Now the sax players just play What they’re supposed to play now that was easy In one particular piece.
My dad did something Else that is usually left alone in modern Western Music So-so wha-what…. I did one piece: It was supposed to s…, sound kind of it is…, it was called Vietnam. The piece And we tunes ourselves a quarter of a tone: [ a ] part, So pulling the mouthpiece out So that the notes are quarter tone, difference, Yah, they’re, off…, they’re off perfect pitch Off-pitch yah, Oh, but right, b, [ ut ] for.
.. For somebody with Ears like mine, uh,…, uh-I…. I am not even going to to notice that Yah. You are going to notice. Because it is going to sound really out of tune the two saxophones, But if you…, Oh from each other From each other yah yah, yah, yah, Okay. So then, if ya…, if ya have like twelve Notes in one saxophone scale and the next sapho… Saxophone begins a quarter tone [ lower ], so you got Twenty-Four notes, It’s not all that easy as it sounds.
But that was the plan. In any case, Perhaps you can detect what he is talking. About in this recording performed live in Berlin, In 1982, The vocals are by Greetje Bijma Technique. Number five Alternate Craftsmanship. When I was 19, I started a small advertising. Agency and fell in love with copywriting. I noticed that writing on an old typewriter Produced an essentially different text than when writing on a computer.
My typewriter was ancient and did not have A backspace key, So you better know what to write before you. Start typing And if you regret the first words of a sentence: You are then, faced with the challenge to somehow continue anyway. If you do not want to get messy with correction fluid, And so this is what I mean with alternate Craftsmanship Find an irregular way to accomplish the same Thing Disturb conditioned automatisms by using a Different instrument – Medium procedure – Or working environment to evoke new fertility and avoid paved cowpaths With Pauline Le Bel.
I talk about various ways: To use the human voice Uh, is there… A different way of singing, For example, with a corset or with… After inhaling helium Uh…, You would sing very high. He he he Yah…. Well, I had to sing in a corset. It was this awful show I had to do. It was terrible You just… Yah, it’s pretty hard to sing with a corset. Because you… You’re not getting the massage of your internal organs that you really need.
To sing well, I don’t know how they did it in the old days… How about hanging upside-down? Ah, no, I don’t really like hanging upside-down, But it would certainly change your voice. It would I mean yes…, Maybe not for the better C [ ause ]…. Should I try it now Sure? Okay, Let me just see what I could do… As long as it’s…, Oh I’ll, just hang over this in here Ya. Well, actually, it makes my voice deeper Doesn’t it Ha ha ha ha ha.
Okay. Now I know how to do… I’m at… This afternoon I am going to record A friend’s song Because uh he’s recorded it before In English, but he’s written it… It w [ as ] translated In [ to ] French ― cause, he is approaching Radio, Canada With this… Plaything, he’s-uh-‘s got So um. Oh, this will be very good for actually Singing uh singing that song Cause I-I think I wan na have gravitas. When I am singing that song so eh, that’s a good Thing to try Thank you very much, Tristan Ha ha ha.
So we are adjusting the variables of fabrication. Composition or just generally how to go about doing what you do A different procedure: Doing at the very end, what you normally do in the beginning: A different working environment, And I am not talking here about getting inspiration from working in unusual surroundings. (, because we shall look at that too ), but here I just mean changing the lighting In your workshop wearing ear, plugs or sitting In another chair Using different instruments and material Like attempting calligraphy by imprinting, your boots into show, In my own example of writing text on an old Typewriter this mark made by the production process, obviously Remains also, if the words are then later transferred To a different medium Here is Kedrick James about such permanently.
Enclosed distinct, aroma of a text Um the materiality of a text We need to under [ stand ]…. It is almost that idea that Walter, Benjamin Has when he uh talks about um…, the idea of The materiality of the text having an aura and That…, You know he is making a comparison. Um About works of art, where there is a unique example of it, Or a mass-produced example of it and its original state… Sort of absorbs A lot of the energy around it, I think that the material processes involved In any production, um imbue the final product with intent And then [ in ] tent continues to resonate uh Long after that thing has, you know, left its original creator.
Or what have you…, Um that and… And-and th-the material circumstances? Of its creation are… Deeply significant There-there is a big part of the spirit. Or, as you mentioned, the kind of soul of… The work that comes through its manufacture, The actual a-a working things, um…, shaping them So operation elements impregnate, The work and will continue to reside there comfortably and noticeably Look at a piece of furniture made with hand.
Tools where the woodworker had to carefully select The wood sharpen his chisel strike his mallet, This chair or table, will come alive. Develop personality in the process and radiate it for good ― the conditions. Of the craftsmanship with which you can goof around And the emotive force the artist put into it, the intent Intent Can we make art without it? Yes, we can, and it even has a name aleatoricism And this is number six in my list of creativity.
Kick starters Yes, aleatoric, meaning uh dice And a roll of the die uh, which of course, Get its… Glorious, uh birth in Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Chance,… [ sic ] Kedrick memorises the title of this work: Slightly incorrectly, That should be Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard, which translates to A Throw of the Dice, will Never Abolish Chance a work by the French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé Um, in which he creates a poem, rolling dice And using the dice to select the lines and The words and.
.. To me it’s-it’s, a beautiful…, It’s a beautiful uh concept and I-I-I…. You know I can’t put the exact date on it. But I think it’s about…, It’s the 1860’s. He publishes that – And I mean just… – opens a whole world to…. How…, not only literature, can be constructed, but How it can look, Mallarmé was brilliant. At being able to do that particular… Thing of just radicalising our engagement, With language and what it could possibly be, Mallarmé went quite far.
But did remain selective and responsible with where to incorporate random elements, And you must to not produce unidentifiable. Meaningless garbage You may feel introducing something randomly Generated removes authorship, But it is questionable how Much authorship you have in general as we easily and without always being aware. Of it use ideas picked up elsewhere, Unconscious theft, As also discussed earlier And alright, let’s say you become less the Creator, the one giving life – perhaps it is okay, To shift to the role of the selector With the right software, you could quickly Generate a hundred ideas, a thousand and then you Need to look at them all absorb them and select Only a few interesting ones Serendipity And then there is Always the option to still change what you find You are starting with something.
.. Anything Somewhat usable to then apply creativity while you overthrow And reconstruct The source of your input does not need to Be human or computer generated randomness per Se, It can be just data from an unrelated source When you have water damage or other urban Or domestic decay somewhere take a photo. There are beautiful, shapes there, Walk through a forest and see How tree stumps look like castles Or how about choreographing a dance based On natural, primitive movements already known to the human Body such as those seen in footage of riots, Improvising, piano player and composer Lisa Cay Miller wrote her doctoral thesis about the emergence Of language in her infant son and recorded musical compositions To go with it, So there were seven movements And the first one was called.
I Cry. And it was all about crying (, I don’t have them all. Memorised ) Uh uh-one was Scribble Talk, which was the Uh inflective kind of speech that children have When they don’t have… They’re [ going ] mne ne me ne ne, So it… The-the inflection has meaning But there is no words yet And then there was… He for… Um when He was about…, eight months to a year and a half or something He spoke in sound effects.
So he had about forty different Sounds and they were consistent, Um…, so I wrote a…. That’s one of the movements. And it was called Da Tuk [, The Truck ] because… He had… Um…. Well, that was one of his first Words, But he had Ghop-Ghop-Ghop-Ghop was duck and sss-sss-sss was sweep Um… Krrr-krrr was bike, eeeh was bird And there… It was wonderful. We tried to teach him… Um sign language, Because that’s a thing that you do now.
You teach your kid sign language And he never grabbed onto that, But he gra…. He had these sound effects. That he spoke with, and that was really really fun… Period when he… He was doing this And some of the other movements move onto A more abstract representation of grammar, So there is a whole album for me. That’s…! That was inspired by… My son’s… Emergence of Language And my doctoral thesis was about that.
It will be clear that such a pursuit is also About mimicry, But central is to at least for the time being, Take away decisions of the artist as she goes: hunting For secret, hidden creative currency in unexpected places, That are not the realm of her own art form, as would be the case with technique. Number Three theft: We move on to the next method, to ignite creativity, Immersion Inviting artistic crosscurrent by exposing Oneself to a different infusion or placing oneself in a different Environment as this could fuel your own novel ideas, It is not about grabbing and incorporating Something you discover in the wild, but about using it to set astir the soul.
I ask article game music producer, Neil Biggin, If he had the task to make music for a horror, article game, Would it help to first go sit in a dark cellar or walk around on a spooky graveyard? In my opinion, it absolutely works. I have very specific environments that I, like To write music in And if my environment changes My music changes, No doubt [ a ] bout that There came a time I had to do a game.
Called Loaded for… The PlayStation And they said we… We’d – need it to be Dark aggressive moody, Well I’d, never really written dark, aggressive Moody, So they were all written at night In the winter, with the blinds shut And just a little orange or red light on in The room Really a dark, closed environment, Uh, writing, dark music in the dark; I couldn’t do that in a field full of flowers. It wouldn’t.
.. Wouldn’t happen. I think a lot of musicians are influenced. By their environment, but I really really am And… As a…, I’m a photographer as well. And uh-uh, if I am wanting to shoot scary shots, I have on scary music. There is a horror blog I find online that does really experimental, horror, music And I listen to that And the work is really really influence by… The soundtrack So even though there is no sound On the photographs you can tell by looking at the Photographs that.
.. That-that there is a…. There was a mood there at the time. Similarly, I… Always found it difficult. To… To create the more… Disney, cartoony type things Because I am serious person I-I’m a… Funny person too, but I…. I am not a kid and I am not into kiddie things. And I don’t like…, I don’t listen to cartoons. I don’t read cartoons So for me to create in that kind of vacuum. A jolly happy uh,.
.., childlike piece,… Very, very difficult, But I’m…, I imagine, and if I want and sat in a kindergarten, For a week among all those… Sights and sounds and smells And then set my gear up in a kindergarten, then that would have an influence and away We go So I… I’d…. I definitely believe in that To soak up the right, creative arousal for His work as an artist and for a regular, fresh Puff of air in his personal and professional life as a Professor Kedrick James decided to buy a ranch in the Canadian wilderness, So I am constantly setting up this ranch And to go and commune with a whole lot.
Of animals cause it’s full of wildlife And the wildlife is exceptionally uh…., I don’t know… Present, You know when I say I’m… Having trouble Relating to the… Current state of affairs uh, partly because I’m developing disciplines That… Take me as far out as I can get… I-I think that’s sort of what I am referring. To Like different… Approaches to being able To uh… Be enraptured with.
.., you know the Whole of creation so to speak And that that’s… My drive Like without that I don’t know how I can continue to… Create my weird, obscure artwork. It needs that sense of real otherness In order to keep driving it in order to keep the sense that… You got… This time on earth. You should make really really good use of It Um but…. The… Sense for me now is that… Those practices showed me what’s.
.. Possible And…. You investigate what that leaves open. To you, Um…, the… Whole physical uh,…, environment,…, Takes on a very personal,…, a-uh-eh-a…, a… Aspect: It becomes engaging Clouds, become muscular And everything is interacting with you: And-and, that’s very close to the experience. I have when I’m actually… Doing that kind of retreat. And experiencing my time with all the animals that.
.. It’s a very… Communicative space, The aim is to absorb something foreign Deny yourself: the oxygen you have grown used. To because today you will dive in a pool of liquid Curiosities drown suck new concepts into your lungs And crawl ashore, with unassumed stamina as an artistic beast, whose existence has not Been proven, There are worlds you do not know of And until you go there there are parts of You you do not know of In my interviews about immersion At this point, the topic of discussion regularly ballooned into using drugs And other forms of manipulating the mind getting into a different zone.
Which is the last approach? We shall look at unusual mental states For Kedrick. This is a topic of some importance Coming of age in the late seventies, He is of the opinion that the art world or society itself, Has gradually forgotten about the value of changing The very apparatus with which it functions the human mind There seemed to be a brief glimmer. When that was a subject worthy of investigation I-I-I, I think we’re now.
.. Just way too Far up the creek without a paddle to…, you know give much credence to people Wanting to explore altered states um of mind, Though… I-uh-uh. You know. I think that How, then do you have new thoughts if we’ve… Already discussed the sense that With the barrage of what is already there, everything is already there. Well, how do you have new thoughts? Well, I think sometimes it’s by completely Altering.
.. The perception (, that is, the reception and the processing ) of those thoughts, Because you won’t come up with new ones. If you’re using the same… Perceptions and the same processing techniques and tools, That…, you know, are being kind of foisted on you. If you’re, using the automatic version of it as opposed to going and exploring it, And trying to work it out for yourself Um, you are not going to quickly or easily.
.. Uh find the new… Or the radically the…. You know life changing techniques, Artificially adjusting perception, thought Processes affect and drive is for some an art form in Itself, An inventive pursuit to design devices or Practices to overcome wonderlessness Induce bizarre states and possibly open up otherwise obscure mental Faculties, All the beautiful… Work of the Sixties and seventies psychologists before they buried all their work.
So people like Masters and Houston um Charles Tart people, like that Building their witch’s cradles and things Finding ways to alter perception that were Non-Pharmaceutical or non drug related, Um I-I-I think it’s important to Experience those states… To go out there. I mean I-I…. You know found myself through A phase of my life where I was running an art Gallery with the opportunity to build a lot of those and experimented with things like You know um the Burroughs Gysin Dreamachine uh stuff Created some of my own mirror rooms and Um.
.., where you could spin… On a disc Among a whole series of mirrors that had flashing light so that… You’d experience this movement out of your body, Um…, An-an-and…. I think those…. You know uh-uh-uh States of mind when you make them really dynamic, You start to be able to see through the really formidable walls of perception that we build And you can actually start to know… There is that Y’know, you can’t teach.
.. The shamanic journey. I-Uh-Uh… People try to I-uh… Don’t-not, really Sure how that goes for them, but…, um,… Y-you, can’t teach those journeys Those journeys happen or they don’t So at the same time, while we must be committed,… To… Allowing…, not scientific,… Or non s, […, ] What’s the word… Allowing rapturous states To inform us more generally, So we got to stop being afraid of all that.
Stuff And thereby the list of eight means to stimulate Creativity in times of feeling like a punctured beach, Ball is complete. What would be technique? Number nine or ten Pauline Le Bel wanted to include rituals Bass player. Tony Overwater saw value in mental Digestion, a conclusive resting and contemplation phase, Possibly making kitsch, would loosen up tension. Of playfulness design, something that entirely lacks authenticity, But offers instantaneous gratification Prick that bubble of your own standards.
Just for the day, I left out some obvious ones, such as Collaboration and training yourself, But I do want to play one last – clip Wherein my friend Ole Juul describes the benefits of getting to a point. Where you can work friction-free, You need to get… A lot of things. To-To be Automatic It is r… Really difficult to write a novel. With a dictionary in one hand, and a grammar book, In the other hand, and trying to figure out how to make a sentence every time you’re making A sentence If.
.. I-I-I-It, really… A certain basic level of skill, makes things Flow really in a way that is more likely, to-to be…. To have that warmth of… That fullness of b-oh… And the coherence o-of-o-of coming from someone’s heart…, coming from someone’s heart Lidless, This heart turns inside out And just now the artist feels good A melody is born and the world dances along. You have been listening to The Nots.
A total of eighteen hours of interviews have Been recorded and all are available online, Professor poet and musician Kedrick James [,… ], and I think that…, these different Artistic practices and disciplines are ways of getting… Through All the mediations so that there is direct connection with the Creative proces Video game music producer, Neil Biggin, When I was… When I felt… Comfortably enough In the position that I could just write, my own music and [ thought ]’to hell with everybody else,’.
I think I wrote My best stuff, A round table discussion with both Neil and Kedrick, as well as Giorgio Magnanensi creative director Of Vancouver New Music [… ] and-and – for me, that’s joy,…, Liberating…, liberating possible way of being. The thing is that there is this Counter… Argument that I would voice Pianist Lisa Cay Miller. We just heard a… Police car uh…. If they would ask you to design a new.
.. Sure That could be fun Or make it like. Weng-ကကကH-Eng-ကကကH Like I don’t know He-he he he he Writer and vocalist Pauline Le Bel, [… ] and I f…. I felt immediately asleep And I slept deeply for fifteen minutes. I woke up. I knew exactly what that scene. Needed Bass player Tony Overwater In India, there is uh what they call the Delhi Belly So sometimes some of us would have it. And you would have a.
.. Okay, let’s have a drum solo. And then… The others guys would run to the toilet. Ha ha get back on stage My friend Ole Juul. Could you get that I’m in the middle of an interview? But uh…, why? Not? Oh dear I’m, sorry Hallo hallo, It’s not Jennifer, It’s a recording of Jennifer Jennifer you’re, a machine. You should listen to me. He he he See. Somebody was being really creative there. There is also a dialogue with art, collector Trout, Johnson, So I went to her studio.
She said. Oh, this is a piece I am working. On right now I looked at where I left my cup of coffee This morning and I liked the pattern it left-left in the Napkin – And I was like Oh Now, I know that I don’t like it And my father Alan Laurillard, When you tie your shoes in the morning. Do you sometimes try to do it in a totally… Different way? I have done that, But I always go back to Like I did when I learned it when I was.
.., five Ha ha ha ha or four ha ha, That’s a faster way, but I haven’t… Perfected it yet Ha ha ha ha ha All these original recordings. And a transcript of the full documentary can be found at the website thenots.Com, And it is The Nots not’knots’ T.H.E.N.O.T.S-dot-com Episode 1 released in 2015
Today, we’re going to dive into the tools that browsers give us to quite literally design in them will be using chrome, dev tools, a material design as our baseline to see where we can adjust and play. Let’s dive in like design tools, developer tools, help designers and developers build test and debug in the browser.
Luckily, there are a ton of great tools and plugins that make this process of prototyping iterating so much fun. There are tools from everything from color selection to finessing animation, to ensuring a nice user experience on a variety of devices and even testing load at various network speeds. Dev tools help us not only to see under the hood but to also make changes and decisions and see what those decisions look like in the browser, the medium in which we’re delivering the final product.
That’s why the series is so important as designers. We have to work in this medium and use it to our advantage to really have the most control and power over our designs and what’s the first tool that we need inspect element. This is the primary entry of dev tools. Inspect element is often how I open up dev tools just by left-clicking, an element and finding that inspect item in the drop down, inspect element lets you select an elements and get information inside of it.
This information includes the Cascade of styles, styles on various States, computed values, classes, shape and size and more you can even change the text content in order, the Dom of the element within the elements panel. You do so like this, so here I’m going to left-click on this heading and hit inspect, and now I’m opening up this information here – and this is the elements panel you can see. The sizing here is 350 pixels by 32 pixels and Heights.
We have the class name here of headlines, 6 and all of the class styles inside of that. You can see here that this Moz OSX font smoothing, is not being applied in favor of the WebKit font smoothing. So it shows you which styles are being applied and which ones are being applied. We also can see here this h1, so we’re getting styles from the h1 as well as the clasp on top of it, and it shows you which styles are being overridden.
For example, this font size of 2 M is being overridden in favor of a font size of 1.25 bream with the class MVC typography headline 6. There’s also a variety of element classes that I can play with here, and I think that this is a really great way to prototype. So inside of this, if I started typing MVC typography, we get an autocomplete evolve, the different type of graphic options, so you can just sort of scroll through and start to see what these would look like within here.
So you can see that headline. One highlight two aren’t actually making a difference and that’s because I still have MVC headline six selected, so you want to uncheck that and now we can see what the headline two looks like. So if you truly want to play with a baseline for the styling here, remove all the classes and then start to search the classes that are relevant to this element. So here we can see all the typographic styles and decide which ones make sense.
This also lets you separate your logic from your styling. Your logic is the date of the text content here. So this is a header one in this form fields element, but you can apply a class on top of it to style it. However, you want say we want to style this headline, one like a headline: five or headline six. We can do that and we can test that inside of this elements panel, I’m going to select the button now so here I’m just going to hit inspect on the button and it’s going to go right to that element, and we can see that this button has A few classes as well so right now we’re using the MVC buttons raised style.
But here I could select this outline style as well and put that in there. You can play with density inside of buttons, and these are all classes that I’ve just sort of playing with earlier applying them, seeing what they looked like testing this in the browser. So it’s a really powerful tool and there’s a ton that you can do by changing. Some of these Styles around you can reorder things in the Dom as well.
I’m going to just grow back into my UI here so say we want this headline. Maybe after the paragraph we could do that we’ll probably want to change that to be not an h1. In that case, you know make sure that your Dom still makes sense, but you could reorder things you could reorder the buns. You could reorder this remember this device text there and really just start to play with your UI in the browser.
So here you could even change the text of what this says: I’m finding this label here and now I can change this to always Pat disco, and now I’m checking I’m always going to Pat disco. This is a place where you can test our front language if you’re unsure how a piece of text will fit into an element on your screen, then you can test that and you can test this at various sizes. Let’s look at the color palette now.
In this example, we have a custom properties based theme playground for material design if you click to inspect the page and we’re opening up that panel and inside the HTML. You can see this route here with all the custom properties and their color values. So here we can start to play with what our colors look like. So if I want to change the primary theme color, I could click on that square and I have this whole array of color here that I can start to pick and choose and play with and see what that looks like in my UI.
Maybe I want like a bright paint color here. You can also change the color type, so here’s the hex code, if I click on these arrows here it changes from hex to RGB a to hsla and speaking of alpha. You can also use this alpha toggle to toggle the Alpha, which is the amount from transparent to full color and how much will show through to elma behind it. So we have all of these capabilities and another fun one.
Is this color palette, so in this color palette we get a base palette of colors, but we can also start to pick color from the page. So you see these page colors here were the initial page colors. These color variable is that the dev tools have found from the page as most proud colors on that page. So, if you’re working within a design – and you have a pallet that you’re working with you – can easily find the colors from that pallet inside of this dev tool here, there’s also the CSS variables that are being pulled out here that we can get the color values From and we can just start to really play with color in this way so say I want this to be a bright pink.
That sounds good. Maybe we want to change the color on that primary here. We can also change this color value. We can change the we can change the secondary color value, so we can change this to maybe a purple value and you can start to see how this cascades throughout the entire application. So now, if I scroll through, you can see that all the secondary values, like the check boxes, the switches.
This is all live code and we can see that this is in the browser, transitioned and transformed all these elements to be pulling in those colors in the drawer. Here we see a background on the active elements and that is also pulling from the primary color but being all but faded behind, so you can still see a contrast with the text on top of it. So by applying these color changed in the browser, you can really see what that looks like in various elements and in various states of those elements.
So let’s go back to the top up here and select this button. What we can also do in dev tools is figure out if something is accessible or not, which is a really great shortcut to have so here on the button, we have a color value on a background, color value. If I click on this color value, you can see that we have a contrast. Ratio of 8.5 point 1, that’s great. If we made that color value a little bit more closer to the background color that contrast ratio starts to get lower and you can see that that’s no longer accessible.
So we get a lot of help here when you have a color and background color within an element to help us make decisions on contrast and on colors that are accessible for our users. If we click this open, we can see where that’s accessible. So we can see that’s accessible for double a for a larger text and not necessarily for Triple A which means that we will have to have that white value for it to be triple a contrast, accessible and for this to work for our users.
Make sure that you’re keeping accessibility in mind at all times and you can use the color palette inside of dev tools to help you to do that, especially when it comes to color selection and readability on various elements. Let’s talk about the animations palette in episode 1, where we talk about motion on the web, we recreated this wringing button. So let’s inspect this element in dev tools and explore what that looks like behind the scenes.
So here I’m going to hit inspect on this button. I want to make sure that I have the button selected here and then in the bottom. Here we have this animations palette. Now, if you don’t have this, you can find it in this drop-down menu, this little kebab menu and you can hit more tools in the drop-down and then animations is the first item in that secondary drop-down. So that’s what’s going to bring up this animations palette for us so now, inside of here we see that we have multiple animations happening.
If I click open on those animations, we can find that on the button we have this grow animation, where it’s growing over time and on the icon. Inside of that button, we have this ring and I can actually toggle back and forth between here like this. Is a keyframe, I can go forwards and backwards. I can pause. I can play I’m going to pull this up a little bit here. So what I can also do is I can adjust the time stamps.
These are percentage based animations. So if I wanted to make this grow really long, this will break up the effect of ringing as it grows, but just to show you, I now have it sort of off-kilter. It’s ringing its ringing still sort of not changing its size, so you can start to really break things down here. I have it ringing very tightly in this section here. I could break that up too. You can move these around, so I can move it back and forth.
I can have this start to grow before I have the ring happening, I’m ruining this animation, but the idea is to show you that you can have animations that are separate from each other and then also test what this looks like together. So now I have it ringing off kilter from the size changes, but here, if you have a lot of animations that are complexed and you have to orchestrate them together, you can take a look at what that is what that looks like you can take a look At what the animations are happening inside of this element, so we have a box shadow change to as its growing and changing color there and then start to play with this start to finesse in the browser – and this is a really great opportunity for prototyping, because if Things are off, it’s a lot easier to see it visually.
That is, to try to read the code and figure out what’s a little bit off when those time stamps are different too. If you want to slow this down to get a little bit more of a finesse and detail here, you can also change the speed at which you’re animating. So here I’ve set 25 %, and I have this very slowly now, starting to grow and shake here. Starting to ring very slowly so this is another opportunity for you to adjust speeds and see where things are in a very precise way.
10 % is another speed option for very complex animations. Again, you can start to really get in there in the details and intricacies of these animations. Let’s talk about the device panel. Now I use this tool all the time and we’re going to showcase it. I’ve opened up the material dot, IO websites and I’m just going to hit inspect from any part of the page to open up dev tools, and here is that device toggle toolbar.
So I could also hit command shift M on my Mac computer, but anywhere that you’re using Chrome. You could always, let’s click into the browser, screen and open up dev tools, so I’ve clicked this open here. I have a few options. I have a responsive option, so I could see what this looks like at various screen sizes by dragging it over. You also have a drop-down here with some default devices like the Galaxy s5, the pixel to excel, to see what this looks like at various screen sizes.
We have the iPad pro here and you’re also able to adjust this from horizontal to vertical. So you can see what that looks like when you flip that device. That’s a little bit more dramatic on a phone here. So if you flip that you get a completely different layouts, you can also again use this responsive mode. You can even edit what the devices are that you want to showcase. So here in the dev tools, I’m going to pull this out and going to hit edit, and I have a bunch of devices here – you can add a custom device.
You can add devices that aren’t currently in your drop-down by default. So if you want to test, for example, on the iPhone 4 or if you want to test on the Nexus 7, I will now have these inside the drop-down. When I next open it so there they are iPhone 4 and the Nexus 7 somewhere in this drop-down right here. So you can see that that focal looks completely different than that iPhone 4 and that’s important for you to know.
As a designer. We also have various breakpoints here that allow for you to just quickly change between common sizes, mobile medium, large tablet, sizes, laptop sizes, and you get a percentage based visualization here, that’s scaled down to fit inside of this browser screen. So if you want, you can make this 100 % view you can make it a even larger view. If you want to sort of zoom into that, you can make it 50 % sort of fit in this area, and then you can see really large screens, 4k screens you’ve.
Even and if you don’t have a 4k screen, you can still test on those devices. Your design does change, based on the DPI of your screen and kind of is determinate of whether you have a Retina screen or non-retina screen, and that can also come into play when you’re deciding what images to send to your users. So if you want to test those, I have an example here with disco right how this high-res image and now inside of my dev tools, I can actually test to see that I’m sending a lower res image with the lower resolution browsers in my CSS.
I have a media query where I’m sending a different image based on the density of the screen. So here, if I have a high density, Retina screen, I’m sending a high resolution in and if I don’t it’s going to fall back to this low resolution image. So I can actually test this with a medium dpi screen inside of my dev tools, and this becomes really useful if you’re sending a lot of large images. And you want to think about performance for your users and for their devices.
And if all of those aren’t enough for you, there are some tools that you can use to extend these capabilities and make designing of the browser even easier. One of those tools is called this bug created by Adam Argyle. We’re going to fly over to him to have him explain why it’s so useful for designers right now. Hmm this page, I like the layout – I think, there’s a lot going for it, but it’s lacking some color.
Don’t you think? Well, let’s have fun and and try it out. Let’s make some color in here with this bug. All I have to do is launch it. In fact, I’m going to scoot it down off of here so that it’s not conflicting with the header and I’m going to start with the header. It’s just asking for a nice, bold color, don’t you think? What do you think of, like a purple, ooh, pink, a hot pink, I’m always down with hot pink all right? I’m actually settled that that’s great okay, you can see our guides tool is trying to help us make some alignment checks here, as we as we hover on other elements, you can get distance between them all right, but I’m also interested in changing this image up here And I’m going to drag in a new one.
Will I have an SVG icon here? It looks like this. Oh thanks for that that didn’t work out very well, but if I drop it up here, look at that. I replaced it. That’s kind of nice all right. So what about all of this these cards? I feel like they’re a little tight. I want to check. I want to check out their spacing here. So if I select I’m trying to select the card element in here and I’m having a little bit of a trouble because there’s so many elements in here look, I can actually select the elements inside of here.
That’s crazy town, but in order to get to these grid items, I’m going to select the parent and use keyboard navigation to help me get there. Someone hit Enter, which is going to select the first item as a child, so I selected the grid container. I hit enter and I selected the first one I hit command shift E, which is going to expand my selection. It’s going to find all the other elements to match.
I found them there. I still have the margin tool. So if I hit shift down twice, I’m going to add 20 pixels to the bottom, and that’s going to give me a little bit of spacing between my rows super neat. I can actually continue using this multi selection of I hit enter. I’m going to find that that each of these cards had a rapper element I hit enter again and I’m going to get the imaged container. That’s in the upper part.
If I hit tab I’ll find the next element in the layer tree – and I want to change the alignment of these, so I’m going to grab my flex box a line tool, I’m going to hit left and right and find a nice alignment and I’m going to Pick the center and I’m going to hit enter again and we’ll find that there’s a span inside of that container, and I want to change the text size of this. I grabbed the text tool I’m going to hit up on the the keyboard a few times here.
I’m going to hit command down to change the font weight and, of course it needs some hot pink. So I’m going to go over here to my color picker and grab that hot, pink from up top close out and see what I did and look at that. We brought some color to that page, really pretty quick and we’re able to just sort of express ourselves in a nice fast manner. That was fun. I hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of taste of what vis bug can do for you super cool.
Thank you. Adam, I really love using dev tools. I use them every day for designing directly in the browser for prototyping for making decisions, and I find that these tools are just getting better and better and better, and that’s really exciting. For me, as somebody who likes to design and build the browser, what are your favorite to have tools? Are there any that we missed in the show, and that we didn’t mention tools that you use every day? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Please leave a comment below and thanks for reading the show we’ll see you next time save I just go.
Two buddy honestly, I have an account with both and I’m constantly comparing trying to decide which one I like better. What I want to show you today. I want to compare apples to apples a lot of other articles that I’ve looked at when they’re, comparing maybe they’re, comparing a real free version against the free version. I highly recommend not getting the free version.
You do get so many more benefits getting that pro level. That bottom level, but from here I’m looking at myself, trying to decide which one am I going to upgrade and what are the features, but what I’ve learned as I was searching, this isn’t what I’m not. This is not what the articles about you trying to upgrade. I’m going to show you the features on the pro account and I’m going to show you what I’m doing to look at each one of the features one at a time, because each of them are Chrome extensions and what has been happening is all the features are On my page, at one time when I go in to upload a article, there’s two buddy features and there’s vid IQ features, and I actually like them all.
But I started thinking what, if I compared them one at a time without the other one there and am I missing something. So that’s kind of my goal for you. If you’re like, I am you’re caught in between the two of them and you’re like which one should I use, let me show you what I’m doing to help me with that decision and also I’ll give you a tip at the end that I’m going to use As well so, let’s dig in and let’s look at the features of each one and the price because, like I said, I’m comparing apples to apples, I want you to see that that you know both of them are the bottom level Pro account or plan alright.
Now this one is vid IQ and vid IQ. You know it has all the features here. How many right here you’re looking at this one see where it says 750 a month. A lot of people want to look at the free, but we’re looking at the one that you’re paying for at the bottom. Okay and as you’d see there’s only one user, which is good with me. One blog, that’s fine, competitor tracking, which I do like about vid IQ.
There’s a couple neat things even on the higher plans. But after that there’s a lot of description, keyword, search analysis, top tweets articles, things like that. I’m actually going to take you into my account. There’s a lot of analytics in there, but what I noticed when I was in there now remember this is where my brains go with the pro vs Pro. I noticed that there’s a lot of analytics well, a lot of these analytics are already in YouTube.
I found there wasn’t really for me. Somebody else might know it a little deeper, but there really wasn’t anything in the analytics that popped that I wasn’t getting from YouTube. So this is where the research is going. So, let’s jump over to YouTube to buddy. It starts at 9:00, but this is something neat the two buddy does have you. Can you can mark this where it says I have less than a thousand subscribers read what happens 450 a month.
I love that too. Buddy does that that they help the small blogs out one of the things that’s really hard when you’re new on this online business and trying to set up all these software tools is in the beginning, you’re thinking this is going to be free. Well, it’s not if nothing is free, the right, no free lunch right even with this, but you’re still trying to decide which tools do I need to buy, and I bought a couple tools that I absolutely didn’t need in the beginning, but I didn’t get scammed, but I got convinced that I needed them and I bought them so you’re going to go through that everybody does.
So what I want you to do is really start with the pro account start with something low and make sure you’re using it before you upgrade. But anyway, I love that about to buddy at 450 a month that that’s a piece of cake, alright and if you want to pay yearly – and you have more than a thousand subscribers at 720, okay, so that gives you an idea there with price. I wouldn’t want to slide down just so.
You can kind of look at features. You can go, google vid, IQ pricing or buddy pricing and then you can sit down and compare features, ok, so tons of features. Now I’m not going to go into all those features, because I have both of them and I’m going to show you what my blog looks like. I brought up a article right here and it has both of the features showing and you’ll see how busy it is. Ok, we’ll slide down there’s over here to the right, there’s checklists.
I can go in there’s even more information. My vid IQ score see where it says 72. I love looking at that score. Both of them see how these certain keywords that I have some of them are in blue and some of them are in green. The green, I think, is to buddy the blue or vid IQ, but both of them do the keyword, analysis, which is great so no difference there and it’s kind of neat to see that both of them have the same scores so keep going down.
When you upload your article, I love how see down here at the very bottom. I love how vid IQ will have the top 3 keyword searches. So I always like getting those. What else do I like? Okay, look up here in the right top right corner, see how here it’s telling me. I can open this up the analytics and it’s telling me exactly how many articles are being readed in the last 60 minutes in the last 48 hours.
Now being a new blog. That’s exciting to me because there was a time when I’ve run about 300 to 400, sometimes 500 in 48 hours and you’re thinking. Well, that’s not very much. It is if you’re, new and you’re small and it’s fun to read those numbers get bigger, and this is your total time read time 4000 hours. Yes, I just applied to be monetized and you can read those numbers increase. If that’s important to you, I guess once you get huge, that might not be important, but these are things I like, but somebody as I was reading another article or blog, they said take one of the extensions off and then see what’s there and then compare so.
Let’s do that now, I’m going to take one of the extensions off and I’m going to show you how up in the top right hand, corner there’s three little dots, open it up and go under more tools and then over here it says extensions. You can turn off and turn on your extension. So let’s turn off vid IQ, okay and we’re going to look at two buddies. So now that word, that’s off I’m going to refresh my page and then we’re going to go back and look and see what it looks like without buddy.
Is there anything that we’re missing? Okay, as you can see, I came back in and I had to refresh the page, so there was a lag for me anyway, but now there’s only green next to all those keywords. The one thing that’s really neat about this. This is one of my older articles and I brought it up on purpose, because I want to show you how you can use these tools when you’re uploading, but it’s good to go back like this one here it has been up for about seven months.
It’s got like eight thousand views, it’s my number one ranking article and I can go back in and maybe get rid of some of those tags that are not ranking and maybe do some research on the side and then change them up. If that makes sense – and now I have two buddy okay, this is what I’m using so notice. The analytics that I had up in here in the corner is gone. That was one of the things that made me decide.
I want to keep at the very least the pro account with vid IQ again, I don’t know which one I’m going to upgrade, but I definitely don’t want to lose those analytics. I look at them, I like them, so I can go here to to buddy to help me come up with more keywords by just selecting this icon and I can select here where it says, keyword Explorer and it’s a free tool or it comes with two buddy And in this tool I can put in the word HootSuite, I could even say HootSuite versus buffer.
That’s the name of my title of my article. Let’s see what happens, what comes up and what its going to do? It’s going to give me some longtail keywords over here to the right HootSuite versus, but for 2019 HootSuite versus buffer versus later. Maybe I could take off the vs. Buffer see what happens, but these are all keywords that I could try to put in and take out. Some of the ones that don’t have anything – and it’s all right here within this program – okay, who’s, sweet tutorial, HootSuite review, HootSuite social media marketing, so I could add those actually I could click them hit copy to clipboard and go right in and add them in.
So that’s how easy it is to continue to use these tools, so that’s to buddy and I’m going to go up on the side. Another thing that I like the two buddy has is this little checklist: there’s 13 best practices and one here I’ve got 11 out of 13. I think I I don’t post directly from here to Facebook or Twitter, I kind of do it a different way, so it doesn’t pick it up, but those are two things that are on there all right.
So if you looked at this with two buddy, I would almost think if I didn’t know what else to buddy did behind the scenes it looks like vid IQ would be better, but let’s put vid IQ on and take two buddy off now. Remember, you’ve got that keyword, search tool, that’s right at your fingertips, all right, I’m going to pause, which won’t be long for you and I will pull up a vid IQ. I got to change it and refresh everything all right.
Welcome back. I know that was like two seconds for you, but um that IQ is on now and notice. I’ve got my analytics up here at the top, which I like and then right here in the center I’ve got some analytics. There’s an action score 72 out of 100. The higher that score is the better and different things tags with volume see my tag. Volume is low. Again, that’s telling me you need to go in and change some of your tags up.
I left it here on purpose. Just so you can see and then again all the tags that are ranking have numbers next sim, the higher the number the better and then I’ve got these higher ranking tags at the bottom. So my my advice to you, if you’re in the same dilemma like which one should I use, use one at a time and ask yourself, is that something I want or don’t want now I’m getting ready to decide which one I’m only going to upgrade one and Here’s my tip to you go into only one of those two accounts and go to that higher.
Let me go back up to the pricing, maybe get the legend account for one month with two buddy use. It see how I like it and then back it down to the pro both of them. Allow you to do that and then the next month get the vid IQ top account and I think it’s called a plan and it’s the boost plan right here. Okay at $ 39 a month, yes, this one’s cheaper. Sometimes I don’t look at price as much as the value of the product, which one am I really going to use, and I see good things in BO.
I know vid IQ is really good about comparing you can go if you get the boost, you can go into your competitors page and it’ll. Give you a spreadsheet that you can export of all their articles and their keywords and which ones have ranked, and things like that you could go in and export it and then get lower your account and then use that data to drive your content to decide. What kind of content that you’re going to have you don’t want to look at your competitors, stuff and recopy it per se, but you want to say see what are they doing? What’s ranking what are people searching for and then you can say? Okay, I can do the same topic, but do it better, maybe add more information to it so that my audience can get even more out of it, because you’ve got to remember: there’s billions of people out there and there’s someone out there for everyone.
If that makes sense, so hopefully this helped you just you know to kind of get a feel of what you need to do, to look at vid IQ and to buddy. I’m not going to sit here and say either. One is 100 percent better than the other. I’m finding some features in each one that I like. So if it’s going to help me with my business, then I’m going to use them. I just now need to decide which one am I going to up my account with.
So if anybody uses these, they and they’ve made a decision. They’ve done. Some research feel free to add that in the comments, not only will you be helping me, but the other people that are reading it as well. That’s what this is all about, helping each other before you leave, don’t forget to subscribe. I am posting articles three times a week, Monday Wednesdays and Fridays at 3:30. So don’t forget to hit the notification button as well and I’m thank you for reading and I’ll see.
So I’m here to help you with most of those avenues, if not all of them. If any of that interests you please feel free to subscribe down below and ring that notification bell now without any further delay, let’s get into the book.
So this book is one of two variations, so this one is crushing it. The original one was called crushing. They essentially have the same information in them and you should really get to know them, because guess what this book is going to help you either get started or take your whole new social media game to the next level, because I’m going to tell you something, this Is one of the more recent books that I read and it really did help me pretty much take my blog from nothing from like the little guy that you see.
You know in the very first article to you know kind of like what we have now a little more confident, hopefully my environments, a little bit nicer. My lighting is a little bit nicer. I decided to use some natural light today and there’s less Sun in this article, so you’re welcome so crushing it is a book about being on social media. It doesn’t matter what social media, so they talk about podcasting, they talk about Instagram, they say about YouTube.
They talk about Facebook, there’s all different types of examples and, to be honest, this book is written by Gary Vaynerchuk for the examples in this book, and there are many of people who are succeeding. Just like you and me average joe’s that just found a passion and they ran for it. There isn’t too many of Gary’s words in this book, but I’m going to tell you something the examples that he uses all the youtubers, all the social media experts that he uses.
There’s tons of examples and they’re going to help you get to where you need to be because guess what they all tell their origin stories, which a lot of times we don’t always hear that type of stuff. We don’t always get to hear what how people came about, how they started, because a lot of these people ended up being either homeless or living on their brothers, couch or mother’s couch or living in their mother’s basement and guess what they are now making sick figures.
A year, and I’m talking about like high six figures, not like a hundred and two thousand I’m talking about like high six figures, doing exactly what they love doing. So this book is one of the things they’re going to want to pick up and crush it. If you have not already, I actually have not picked up crush it. Yet I’m going to do that actually very soon, because this book was great and I want to read the original and to make sure that I didn’t miss anything.
I may even read this book. Another time because I’m here to gain a ton of knowledge – and I definitely want to pick up every single piece of knowledge that Gary has to offer, as you might be able to see from this article so far, I’m very stoked about this book. I love this book, so the reason why I’m talking about it today is because not just about the book, but just about its message in general, he is saying in every sense every word of this book he’s saying that anyone – and I mean anyone, can start this Journey anyone could be on YouTube and start a podcast with their knowledge and obviously you’ll, know everything.
So you have to take your steps, your proper steps to learn more each day and get better at what you do so then you can obviously share that with your audience, because again I started about six months ago and I’m going to tell you something. I am NOT you know, I don’t know everything, I’m learning as I go, I’m doing more things. I’m contacting more people I’m connecting with them. This is what this book pretty much tells you I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to talk about the book again, but they’re. The essential point of this book is just to experiment. Do not wait, do not let anyone tell you all. You can’t do this, or this isn’t good enough. If it’s not good enough put it out, get some feedback seeing where specifically where you can improve, because if you don’t get that kind of stuff and you just let it sit, let’s say if you’re making a YouTube article and you just let it sit in your Unlisted or your private articles, no one’s going to see it, nobody can critique it.
You do not know everything other people that have been doing this for a longer period of time. It can help you out trust me. I’ve been there now. The main difference between this is that I want you to understand that anyone can start not. Everybody is going to succeed and that’s the thing that really needs to get understood here. Not everybody can go from point A to be successfully. So that’s where the journey comes.
In and the journey is not easy getting started is the easy part doing the stuff is the easy part going through the journey to actually get yourself to your end goal? That is the problem and on the cover he says great entrepreneurs how they build their businesses and their influence. You can very easy right. No, the actual process is the hard part getting started, making your first article. That should be the easiest part.
I know it doesn’t sound like it is, but making the first step is the easiest part making continuously good steps, successful habits, successful steps, that’s the hard part and most people will not get through the first month and that’s why we all have to understand that you Are in a knowledge game, you have to learn every single day, there’s no such thing as an end goal really because you’re in the infinite game, the end goal to me is again death and after death.
How are you going to be remembered? So I hope you gained some knowledge from this article and I am going to link this book and crush it in the description down below, because I really want you guys to pick up this book and the first one read the first one. First, like I was an idiot and I don’t even know he made a first one, and I want you guys to read it understand, comment now and then comment your update after you read both these books.
I want to thank you guys so much for reading and I want to thank Gary for being such a great influencer because he influences everybody under the Sun that actually reades him and understands him. So if you found use in this article, I’m going to have three more articles that you guys can read and a subscription button, because you know what they’re all going to be here right about now.
Hire a professional to manage your website! Find out how much it costs in the video below.
I also use the wiki and some of the resource ability of getting students, access to syllabi and powerpoints and articles, and so when i’m using the vlog, mainly what I do is. I require students to write one entry and comment on two entries each week and I essentially encourage them to write about issues that you know, questions that they have experiences that they’ve had that.
They think really illustrate the ideas they can link to articles and youtube articles and things that they think are really good examples. You know, if they disagree with me, I tell them. This is the place to really write about that and have conversations, and so I really just sort of use it as a student space as long as they make the entries and comments. I don’t really great on content that much so I really consider it an adjunct to their class discussions because we have 45 students and it’s an introductory class, so we really need to cover.
You know a wide span of material. That’s our job is to introduce them to material to see if they like it and they can follow more. So I don’t have as much time to discuss in classes I would like, and so the blog, I think, really works well as a space for students to do more discussion and they comment like I agree. I disagree. I have these ideas and, and i’ve seen a real increase in there in the depth of their comments and the understanding over time.
Once I added the blogging, I really think that it does benefit them. I guess the. What surprised me most is the accept which students really take ownership of the space like. If you tell them, you can use this for whatever you want, they actually use it. I mean I would require them to use blogs, but I don’t require them to do things like post polls and ask other students. What do you think in host discussions, and I think that Sakai has that nice flexible interface, where students can make it what they want? It to be, to a certain extent, it seems more friendly and open than other course sites that I’ve used in the past.
Where I just understood, I think it has a small resemblance to facebook, which makes them more comfortable in just in terms of how it’s setup. And so you know they can do all sorts of things with it and post media in there. And I think that’s what surprised me the most such a students using it creatively, as opposed to it being like a discussion board where or something very rigid where they have to just do this.
Do this do this? So that’s been really a surprise, pleasant. Surprise. You
The position works closely with a chief financial officer, CFO or treasurer. A director of development is chiefly responsible for bringing in revenue streams to a non-profit grants. Donations, special events and a CFO is responsible for the fiscal management of the organization.
A CFO is rarely assigned to write grand narratives but may oversee the budget section of a grant application or a fiscal report for a grant. Some larger organizations, especially those that have large government grants, have a grants manager as well as a grant writer / Director of Development. A grants manager assists the CFO with grand reports, and/or grant related accounting. A Development Director is usually remunerated for his or her work and in best practices for nonprofit organizations, development directors earn salaries.
Commissions are still considered unethical by professional organizations such as the grant, Professionals, Association, GPA and the Association for fundraising professionals F. But the practice of commission based remuneration is growing, particularly in the current economy. The role of a development director is to develop and implement a strategic plan to raise vital funds for their organization in a cost-effective and time efficient manner.
The development directors primary responsibility, however, is to oversee fundraising rather than to actually raise money. This person may write grants research, foundations and corporations and oversee or implement other fundraising strategies, but she or he works mostly behind the scenes, establishing a structure for effective fundraising. The development director may also be responsible for additional financial responsibilities, including developing business plans or strategic plans, in collaboration with the board for the future of the organization.
The development director is usually accountable to the executive director chief operating officer or CFO. The board often offers suggestions and ideas about how to increase the fundraising, including contacts and the development director chooses how to implement these ideas to maximize inflow, while keeping outflow at a minimum and keeping donors happy a strong board often has a development. / fundraising committee makes personal donations to the nonprofit and assists with annual campaigns.
The Development Director has an outreach role in the organization and often fulfills, a public affairs role in addition to office based work, development, directors, motivate and satisfy donors, board members staff and even the press. Many directors of development assist with communications such a nonprofits annual report, development and communications, section of website, newsletters and donor databases.
The structure of a development department varies greatly. A director of development may or may not have staff reporting to him /her, depending on the size of the organization. Some large nonprofits have a development team, including a grant writer donor database, specialist grants, manager, special events, coordinator communications staff and planning giving staff. In some cases, an executive director serves as the lead grant writer of an organization, some nonprofits hire development staff on a part-time or consultant basis.
Instead of full-time averaged directors of nonprofit. Development in the United States make around 58 thousand dollars per year in the world of directors of nonprofit development. Overall cash allowance can occasionally include more than $ 6,000 from bonuses and, in some exceptional cases, $ 10,000 from profit-sharing, causing incomes to vary widely between $ 36,000 and 92 thousand dollars. Earnings for this group are mostly affected by the particular firm followed by the particular city and tenure, although about one in five lack health benefits of any kind, a fair number to enjoy medical insurance and a majority get dental coverage too.
As the title suggests, the development director is concerned with the growth of the organization. This includes staff, membership, budget company assets and all other company resources to help make the best use of them and maximize the organization’s profitability and profile.
Starting a business is not easy! Think about who will be working on your digital image. Hiring a good webmaster will help!
What’s up welcome back for another busted episode, thanks for tuning in, if you’re already a subscriber thank you for coming back super appreciated. So lately I asked you guys what other topics within the boss Dave series. Do you want to see me make a article on just because I’ve had this series for like a year and a half and I’ve covered so much with you know, working on social media working from home tips on organization, budgeting, improving your credit and I want to Know like what you guys really want more help with and what is a good topic of interest.
So I can serve you the best and most of you always say, you’re, looking for more ways to make money at home, whether that be a full-time job or a part time job at home, or just maybe a side hustle if you’re working a corporate job right Now or something nine-to-five, and you only have like two or three hours at the end of the day, when you come home, you know for a little side, hustle or you just you know, maybe you’re a stay-at-home mom and you have multiple kids or you go to College – or you know we all just want to make more money.
Okay, we all want to feel secure and confident in our finances and that we can support our family and you guys know I’ve said so many times in the boss, babe series just being able to work from home and pursue my passion. While knowing that I can support Christian without any additional help, has just been the biggest blessing in my life and there sorry about that. There are really no words to describe how grateful I feel to have this job and, to you know, have learned the resources and the tips and tricks’ over time to run a successful social media business.
So you guys already know it’s my passion to share all of this back with you. If you’re new to my blog go ahead and subscribe and I’ll link the whole box, babe playlist down below you, can kind of choose what article is right for you and your life, and hopefully I can be a resource for you, but you guys know. I do have specific articles on how to make a living on social media if you want to be a youtuber or you want to utilize, Instagram or Twitter for to actually monetize those platforms check out those articles because those are going to be separate.
But today I’m going to talk about the top side, hustles the highest, paying side hustles for 2019. I did this article a few months ago for 2018 and it was a huge hit and you guys loved it. So I actually did some updated research. So everything I mentioned today, I will link down below, if you guys want to sign up, for you can use those links as a resource alright. So the first thing I want to talk about is actually the highest-paying.
It ranges from 80 to 140 dollars an hour which is crazy. I know you guys are liquor. Where can I sign up? Obviously I have links for all this down below for you, but the company is called respondent. Basically, what that is is when any type of company is about to launch a new product. They actually want to send out, like beta testers of the product, to a bunch of different consumers and actually get their feedback and get their review to see if they can tweak the product, make it a little bit better.
Get your opinion on the price, the sizing, the weight, just your overall review on how a product worked for you, so you basically sign up online on this company called respondent as a beta tester, like beta user, some of the stuff is, you have to meet up In person at an office with them, but I know this article is obviously site, hustles and stuff you can do from home. So you just want to look for the job titles that say remotes, which means that you can do it from home.
As long as you have Wi-Fi internet access and you’re over 18 years, old you’ll actually sign up on the website, and then you can choose the companies that fit with your personality and with your tastes, whether it be like electronic stuff or Beauty stuff. You can actually choose the products you think would fit well with your lifestyle. Then the company sends you a beta tester of the product. You review it.
You have two rights, I know there’s a requirement. I mean, obviously, if they’re paying you this much it’s a job. You know it’s not like super easy, I’m not sure if it’s a full page or two pages, but there’s a requirement for how many words your review needs to be, and they want you to review like every aspect of the product like I said just so, they Can make it better before they launch it out to the public? This is super common with like tons of companies but yeah acting my research.
This company has actually gained a lot of popularity within the past year. There are a hundred percent verified certified like legit as long as you’re over 18. I believe they will run a background check on you just to make sure. Obviously you have no criminal history or anything like that, so I will have that website below as well. If you guys want to sign up so next up, I want to talk about Ebates.
This could be a side hustle or it could literally be like a part-time or a full-time job. If you actually get enough referrals, if you know enough people, this is the absolute best website that, where they’ll actually pay you cash back for doing your regular online shopping that you do anyways again. So if you guys are looking for a job specifically from home – and you don’t want to leave the house say you want to order your clothing, your groceries literally anything online – they have, I believe, over to like 2,500 stores, so you basically do all of your online Shopping like you normally would and they’ll pay you cash back, whether that be 2 %, 5 %, 10 %.
The cashback is different per store um. I wanted to mention that in today’s article I know you guys have already heard me talk about eBay, it’s a ton, but I want to mention it today because I’m putting it up this article on a Saturday, so tomorrow they’re actually having a huge promotion with eleven Percent cashback, so I will have a link down below where you guys can sign up. You’ll actually get a welcome bonus and then, tomorrow, whatever shopping, you were planning on doing online.
I would go ahead and do it tomorrow, use eBay, so you’ll get the eleven percent cashback, which is crazy. Most of their stores, usually only have like two to six percent, I would say, is like normal, so this is something again just for like moms to say you have multiple, kids and you’re, always looking to save money and you’re going to order groceries or, like I Said kids, clothing, maybe some Christmas gifts online.
They have incredible deals with Sephora Ulta. You can literally order all of your Christmas and holiday gifts online and get cash back. It costs you absolutely nothing to sign up with Ebates, there’s no yearly fee. It’s incredible! You can get paid through a check or through PayPal um. I believe I’ve been using it now for like three years every single holiday season. My cash back is insane because I just do all of my online shopping online and then with Ebates.
You know I get the cash back and then they do have a referral program as well, where you do get twenty five dollars per person that you refer and then when they make their first purchase, you get that referral bonus. So if you have a lot of friends and family, you send them your referral, link back and add up super super quick, so they’re also sponsoring a hundred dollar giveaway in this article, so I’ll have a link down below in the description for you guys to enter There and then don’t forget tomorrow to log online and go through Ebates to get eleven percent cashback on hundreds of stores.
That promotion is only tomorrow and then they’ll also have other awesome promos for like Black Friday for December. As long as you’re signed up you’ll be good to go, it’ll alert you and remind you to shop through Ebates whenever you just log on to your web browser per normal. But I know tomorrow is like the highest cashback day that they’ve had in a really really long time. So if you want to get anyone, Christmas gifts or anything, I would jot them all down tonight and just be ready to go tomorrow.
Alright, so another incredible resource and website which I’ve actually used for my business, I did hire a virtual assistant on there. It’s called upwork.Com so again, if you guys want to make money from home, and you want to sign up on there – I believe there may be some of these websites. I’m mentioning, are free to sign up on with up work. There may be a one-time $ 20 fee, which I think is nothing and that’s totally fine.
If you’re going to go on to make hundreds even thousands of dollars, you know having like a very small setup fee. I don’t think as much. If you want something else. That’s completely free, obviously check that other resources down below, but if you want to sign up for up work, it’s incredible, you can become a virtual assistant. People will go on there and they’ll pay you per hour. You’ll actually negotiate with the person.
Who is hiring you? How much and like what is a fair price for that job? A lot of people on there will hire someone to do graphic work like graphic design work. If you have a podcast or an e-book, and you want someone, who’s really artsy, and they just fully understand. Like Adobe and Photoshop to do all of your graphic design for you, you can hire someone on up work. Basically, if you go in there and you sign up you input what tasks you have graphic design virtual assistant experience, whether you want to build a website for someone, you know all about the HTML coding and you can just completely build their page.
People will literally pay. So much money for all these things, especially entrepreneurs who are trying to build their business. They want to hire someone really professional again to make sure they come out with a professional, ebook or website or again any type of VA work that they need. So I am hired someone off of up work. I can rely. I can vouch for the person who I hired was responsible and mature.
Obviously, everybody’s different, you can, you know, pay the extra money to have a background check on that person if you would like, but I don’t think it’s that serious if it’s just like VA where you see getting all up in my article girl but yeah, I’ve had Tons of friends use up work, calm and it’s a 100 % legit and I will have a link down below if you want to sign up for that. Alright. So next up I know I’ve talked about uber and lyft in some of my previous articles, but the popularity of those companies is only increasing as well as the revenue and how much they pay you guys.
So in doing my research for this updated article, I still didn’t want to include these, because I truly think it’s an incredible position and it’s a great opportunity for you guys. I know this article is like stay at home side, hustles, obviously with uber and lyft. You do have to leave the house, but it could be super part-time totally up to you guys. Both companies are like certified and like verified.
If that makes sense to where, in order for you to work there, you obviously do have to have a good driving record. A super clean, safe, reliable car and I believe they do a background check and just you know, make sure that you’re a legit safe human to be driving other people around. But this is something really great if you’re a nurse or you have a job like that. That’s overnight, or you have really weird hours and say you’re only free from like 10:00 p.
M. 2 a.M. Where you really do a side hustle you could go out into like old town and uber. People always need rides home when they’re drunk or you know when they just didn’t, want to drive, but I know I mentioned that in my last article uber and lyft are both actually having bonus periods right now. So if you sign up – and you work a certain number of hours, I believe with uber it’s once – you work your first 200 hours – you get a $ 300 bonus.
So that’s incredible again as long as you’re over 18 and you have a good driving record. You can sign up for either of those. I’ve obviously used both services so many times, and I love that again. Links for those will be down below another delivery service, which is incredible, is going to be over eet’s and also instacart. You guys can easily sign up to be a delivery person through there. It’s actually funny the girl who delivered my groceries, the other day open the door, because I use it’s to cart like everyday, like hi sponsor me, like, I spend all my money on instacart.
I don’t like going to the grocery store, so I always have my groceries delivered and it’s so funny of the girl who delivered, on the other day open the door and she was like. I was like literally in pajamas. She like look me up and down just like. Oh my god, now read your articles. Hey girl, but yeah. Signing up for insta car is super easy. You can actually make, I believe, with instacart up to 30 dollars an hour.
It really depends how fast you are. If you want to hustle all they’re going to do is send you to stater brothers, Albertsons, Costco or Petco. They just include they just included Petco, which is really cool, so they have all four companies. The customer will go online place their order. You’ll get a text notification on your phone, that someone has made an order and you will go get the items from the store and deliver it to that person’s house.
So this is another one where you do have to leave a house, but it’s totally up to you if you’d want to work two hours a week or if you want to work 2030 hours a week and make even more income totally up to you. But it’s super flexible because you’d be really surprised. People actually order things, groceries and like stuff from CVS and just random items and like random hours of the night. So it’s a cool job where it’s very flexible on hours.
I believe the pay on that starts at 16, an hour and, like I said it goes all the way up to 30 an hour alright. So next up is something kind of random and you’d have to definitely be like a giving cash like trusting person. But this is actually again perfect if you’re a mom of multiple kids and you can’t leave the house and you actually want to rent out your vehicle. There’s a lot of people who you know don’t have the funds for a vehicle they need to get to school.
They need to get to work for whatever reason, maybe they don’t want to take the bus, the train, you can actually rent out your Carr as long as you have a reliable car, I’m in order to sign up for this. I don’t know if someone comes out and inspects your car I’ll have the whole website list it down below, but to sign up for this, all you have to do is be over 18 you’ll actually negotiate with the company.
How much money you would like per hour whenever someone comes to your home to pick up the vehicle, you can actually lease out your car, for, I believe, like to to like 12 hours a day, depending what you negotiate with the company and with that specific guest. But as long as you feel comfortable with the person – and they just want like reliable transportation to college or whatever, to work whatever it may be, you know I feel like.
I would totally want to help someone out if they just didn’t, have a car and they wanted, especially if I didn’t really need that car for the day – and it was you know the right price per hour and everything there’s two companies that do this. It’s called Toro and run run around run around. I believe it’s, the other one I’ll have them both linked down below but say that your spouse is at work, he’s got his car and your cars just sitting at home, and you do want to make extra money.
Definitely take advantage of that one next up, you guys already may be super familiar because I feel like this has run the world right now again, because it’s an incredible investment, an awesome way to make extra money, whether it’s a side hustle a few hundred bucks a Month or a ton of people make a full-time income doing this like a ton of people, so of course it’s Airbnb if you have an apartment or a condo or a little side house like a casita like a grandma’s.
What’s a called grandma’s quarters like attached to your house and no one he’s using that room, spruce it up a little bit for a guest bed in there and air B & B that shit out, because you can charge so so much! It’s crazy! How much money you can make with Airbnb if you have any portion of your home that you’re not using, and you want to let a renter come in very temporary renter. Of course, most people come for events or for a vacation for maybe 1 to 3 days.
I think is the average you can make so much money with Airbnb. You can just sign up I’ll, have a link down below or if you have a vacation home or say you rented out an apartment for a year and you’re in a lease. But you want to go travel and you want someone else to you, know come in and rent out those rooms you’ll actually end up making. So much more than your actual rent say you have multiple renters, paying different fees for different nights.
If there’s like a super popular event going on or a concert or something in your city, you can charge more per night because the demand for people looking for rooms is higher. But I personally I’ve heard online insane stories about how much people make with Airbnb, and I have a few friends who just recently started doing it and said it’s an incredible incredible site. Hustle so definitely be sure to check that out as well.
Then last I do just want to mention selling your own stuff, your own artwork or clothing, or whatever products you have around the house. You may not mean or something you created on Etsy and then also on Poshmark. You guys know. I’ve talked about plush mark on my blog tons of times. If you have clothing, you’re no longer wearing it, that is new or it’s in really good condition. You can list that on Poshmark Poshmark takes a very, very small fee and they also pay for the shipping, which is great when someone purchases, something from you, they’ll email, you, a shipping label which is prepaid.
All you have to do is drop off the package at the post office and then Poshmark will pay you your earnings and they can actually transfer it right into your bank account, which is super easy. I know a lot of people already know about Etsy, but Etsy is pretty much where you can sell your own creations. So if you’re a painter or you design things or you make anything handmade, you can sell it on Etsy.
I know one of you corrected me in my last article and told me to make sure that I mentioned Etsy also does take a very small fee and I believe they do set you up with a 1099 as an independent contractor. So any money you make throughout the year they won’t tax you on, but they will send you a tax form at the end of the year, so make sure you’re saving some of that revenue. So you can pay those taxes back later and you know just make sure you good with the IRS, because I actually recently heard of someone going through an audit.
You know, and that was no fun so with any type of like self-employment. Like this, a lot of companies are going to have you sign up as an independent contractor, which is cool for you, because you get more revenue upfront throughout the year, but just make sure that you’re, smart and being just really savvy, financially and saving so that you Can always pay your taxes back properly at the end of the year? You know, so you don’t got any issue with Uncle Sam.
That would be no good, so I feel, like I’ve been chatting forever. I mean it’s me. It’s probably going to be like a 20 minute article again, but I hope you guys enjoyed this. I really really appreciate you tuning in obviously, every single job and resource I mentioned I’ll have listed down below, do not forget about tomorrow with Ebates and the eleven percent cashback promo. It’s going to be crazy.
I’ll have that link below, for you guys to sign up you’ll, get the welcome bonus and then, whatever you purchase tomorrow, that’s included in that promotion. You will get the 11 percent back so yeah be sure to follow me on Instagram when you guys are reading this article, I’m currently in Colorado, so come check out my Instagram story. I’m going to be posting all of my adventures with my son this weekend.
It’s actually his first time on a plane and he’s super super excited and we’re hoping that it’s going to be snowing, so we’re bringing like snow gear – and you know like we went ham on snow clothes. So he’s really excited. I’m going to be vlogging that as well, but be sure you’re subscribed here to my blog. Thank you guys for reading and I’ll see you in my next article
Jimmy's Internet Marketing Business Blog 