I have to take back my criticisms a couple weeks ago on these fine music folks.

Marvelous Flickr photoset of tonight by zimbablade

I first saw the Decemberists by recommendation with a group of friends. I did not know any of their songs but still managed to have a great time, because their frontman, Colin Meloy, is an expert in interacting with the crowd. Besides talking a lot (really a lot) between songs, he has lots of stage antics that sets the band apart from the rest. For example, he would divide the crowd in half, and conduct them to sing along in an extended chorus, or invite people from the floor to replace the guitarists for a fake jam, and so on. I enjoyed the show a lot, and soon the songs were catchy enough they ended up in my record collection.

They did none of that tonight.

At least before encore. Instead of going for their usual stunts, they went for the extraordinary: The gutsy band dared to play their new album in its entirety. Their new album, "The Hazards of Love", does not sound exactly outstanding on record and received mixed reviews, but that is because we will not understand it until we see it performed live in its entirety: It is really meant to be a rock opera.

A non-stop, intense ride of music telling a tragic love story with precise and pristine musical sensibility, the show is a blend of genres from the last whole century: folk, bluegrass, metal and rock all melt into one album. And unlike most records, the album is arranged to be playable live, thus the lack of strange sound samples or hooks. Despite the fact, they still manage to create great aural textures with a combination of many instruments, from chime to mandolin, a harpischord as well as a grand bass viola.

Colin Meloy does not exactly have the best voice (he sometimes cannot hit certain pitches), but that’s ok, he has great energy and emotion. Meanwhile, the female vocals were also highlight tonight. I love the commanding voice of Sarah Worden from My Brightest Diamond especially. I might check out their albums in the mean time.

Here is one of the highlights, “The Rake’s Song” (plus free download), a twisted wicked tale of a mass murderer who killed all of his sons and daughters, featuring 4 sets of drums playing simultaneously! Amazing! Enjoy!

The song and music video, conceived by my talented activist great friend Miss Lauren Larken, criticizes the veil between a person being truly personal and a technical support acting personal for your services, while suggests that a corporate love is perhaps possible as well as we break our preconceptions and let our imagination go wild.

The kids staged a few improv dances inside and outside Apple Stores around Manhattan a couple weeks ago. I was in the dance, too, making fun of the Apple products that I love and hate, while handing out heart-shaped balloons that resemble their oh-so-glorious logo.

The video was released on Valentines’ Day, and a few performances followed.

On the back side of the project, I also designed the animation for the opening and the karaoke session. Everything was done in Adobe AfterEffects and Illustrator, the same tool I used for the over-the-top Trillian Astra preview movie. (Watch it over and over again while it’s still up!)

Faking the space with some simple polar distortion. Well, not so good.

Simple 3D layers and motion paths were used, plus a few custom space-y background effects inspired by tutorials of Andrew Kramer. His tutorials are intuitive and helpful, and I would recommend everyone to watch them if you are interested in animation effects more advanced than Flash.

“Subtle arrogance” through font weight: Notice how there is hardly a U, there is only i.

Imitating Apple is always educational, as you learn how to restrain yourself from using way to many effects while giving the products a nice professional finish. Just having a few pixels or centimeters off will ruin your composition, while picking the wrong highlights and shadows will end up looking like a fake. However, make sure you don’t end up ripping off the whole design!

This is not about Halloween. It is about a strange world with a bizarre copyright system and record industry: Your own work can be used to compete with your own work.

Here’s news: It’s Radiohead versus Radiohead! While Radiohead had previously announced to release their new album “In Rainbows” on their own on December 3rd, their previous record company decided to release all the previous Radiohead album, which they own the rights of, as a box-set just 7 days later, as an aggressive response to the fact that Radiohead decided not to continue the contract with them.

Can an ordinary person tell the difference? Can even a fan tell the difference? In fact, can a fan even be zealous enough to follow through the band’s principles, i.e. not support their previous record company by not buying the box-set, instead of succumbing to their own desires?

Of course, it’s not like Radiohead will lose money in this case. It’s still their work. The difference is, in the former case they earn 100% of what they created, while in the latter they earn perhaps less than 10%.

A record company is supposed to be simply a company that helps an artist to advertise, reproduce and distribute his work. Back in the days, it was necessary because it would be impossible for an artist to raise money to get their own record reproduction equipment, and to get a crew to advertise and distribute their records. And of course, after decades of lack of negotiation skills, artists lose their grounds to entrepreneurs, and nowadays artists only earn less than 10% of what they created, and get locked into long “six album deals”. Six albums is most band’s or singer’s lifetime, if they are lucky enough to release two.

I can foresee this happening to anybody, including myself, because I hardly own any rights to my current works either. Say, if my company were bought, I would own nothing more, despite 100% of the artwork and user interface design comes from my hand.

…and that was how I described it back then in 2001. The windows are sculpted in a specific shape so that they would line up and create series of choreographed waves going up and down, like rows of mountains… hence the name, “Cordillera”.

I had to design the most versatile, sensible and attractive interface. There was a month’s time to finish the skin, in order to enter the skinning contest. The design underwent a long scrutiny until the final draft. It was not an easy design:

1. All windows need to be resizable, i.e. it has to look in virtually any size – or at least normal sizes – it is unusual in the realm of design.
2. You can have any amount of windows, and that means it has to look good whether there are sixty flowers or one flower in the vase. Both the design of a flower and the vase are equally important and difficult. The Contact List (or “Main Window” as we called it back then) is the only unique and always visible element, while you can have a variety of Message Windows and Status Windows, and so on.
3. The design challenges above still exist today, but to make more difficult, back then I had limited technology to work with. I could not stretch or do fancy calculations (now you can!). I could only tile. I could not overlay things on top of one and another. Text boxes, contact list areas and display areas must have opaque backgrounds. You couldn’t align things at center. Oh, and you couldn’t change any fonts either.

After spending a month of summer vacation working on it, the result was a curvy skin in cerulean blue called “Trillian Professional 1.0“. It was very well-received, and eventually chosen to be the default skin for the then-future version of Trillian “0.64″. It was a great feeling back then to have my work recognized, and also the first time working with strangers over the Internet. I had won a few awards back in high school on designing computer programs for education purposes, but then nothing really happened in college ever since until a few years, so that came as a little surprise. It was pretty exciting back then.

Months of refinement and collaboration led to a total redraw of the skin, soon widely known as “Trillian Cordillera”. Along with the release of a brand new 0.70 version of Trillian that featured file transfer, the software was propelled into stardom within days, gaining momentum and attention from media and enemies alike. Trillian became very popular and eventually its image landed on the cover of PC Magazine and the pages of Wired Magazine and more.

Of course, success was not without price. A few months later, while Trillian was blocked by AOL, Cordillera was also ripped and copied by other skinners in the forum and from other softwares. It took me very long to accept such harsh reality, and realized that it was actually no threat to me since rippers and imitators are always people who are much less talented. But of course, I didn’t know that, and instead, I wasted too much time on defending the skin being ripped off, and eventually became uninterested.

That also was probably the dark ages of the world of Trillian skinning. To push for a professional image, we decided to use Whistler as the default skin for Trillian Pro 1.0, since the other choice “Trillian Cordonata” (a totally different Cordonata than the one you see now) was not good enough. And so we neglected the fluid forms of Cordillera, and were stuck with the corporate rectangle for good four years.

During that period of time, I had designed “Trillian Cordillera 03″ and “Trillian Cordillera 2004″, but neither of them got released, because it required a lot of time and it had limited audience. I also designed for a lot of things that required better skinning technology that I always expected to be included in the next version but they never made it. And so, we were stuck in the middle ages with Whistler.

Trillian Astra project changed everything. With the introduction of Profile+Widgets, Trillian Astra is geared more towards a crowd who likes to express themselves, and as a result, a more expressive skin is required in order to attract such a crowd. The versatile and elegant design of “Trillian Cordonata” made its debut, with a nice balance between the pragmatic Whistler and joyful Cordillera. But the nicer thing is, developing Cordonata results a great by-product: better skinning technologies that we had been looking for since 2001.

So here we are. With much better vector rendering skills and expertise, and with the use of Trillian Astra’s new technologies for alpha-transparent windows, bitmap stretching, PNG layering, skinnable contact list area, color themes and a lot more, let’s welcome the new “Trillian Cordillera Astreme”, a total redraw, rethinking and redesign, a triumphant rebirth of the classic. Though she had now surrendered its crown as the default skin to Cordonata, she remains a shining jewel that we will love. And I hope you’ll like it too.

What’s more, it is not just a screenshot. It is available for download already. Of course, you need to be a tester in order to use it. Enjoy!

Have a very Merry Christmas to everyone!!!

Writing lyrics is easy and hard. It is easy to spit out a bunch of unrelated words like magnetic poetry and call it a day and people will still praise you for being mystic – yes and no – because down there at heart you were trying to get to something when you were writing it. If your brain was empty, wasted and aimless, then the words will sound the same. If your brain is tense, ambivalent and self-critical, then the words will also be critical, but tense as well, like the words are pushed together by some dark matter ready to explode any minute.

“Down Is The New Up” is a working title of LP 7 of the band Radiohead. I am browsing for design idea and came across this. At first glance of the words it sounds like yet another megalomaniac way-too-much-depressant poetry, like you have been down for so long you took it for granted you thought it was just normal progression of life, thus up. But then I saw their new artwork:

…and somehow all in a sudden their songs make a lot more sense.  It almost sounds as if Thom Yorke is doing the urban critic job here in these songs.  It also makes me wonder, do they come up with the drawings first, or the words first, or the music?  Probably something happening symbiotic and simultaneously, wouldn’t it?

Because if you work on all these artistic components in a linear order, it means the one component being worked at last would be the most compromised by the ones at first.

I wondered because normal bands work in a mundane manner: You come up with songs, then record them, practice for tour, and ask the art department to come up with some merchandises with your logo slapped all over the place and some crazy fans will buy them anyway.  (It also relates to a separate issue: Spoiling your fans with too much faceless junk.)

Radiohead is probably my most respected band for their artistry because they are the only one of those bands that care about elements related to the whole performance other than just the music, and they develop them in a symbiotic manner (not forced).  The way they play the songs on the stage, their crooked music videos, the fragile voice and sound, and all the choatic artwork are strongly related – in the way that they all share the same character, and share the simultaneous process.

Yes, I know many 80′s bands care a lot about their hair and pyrotechnics, or a lot of pop singers have a whole dance team to go with them, but they are all unrelated to the music and the whole experience, they are all come up with after the fact like a last minute fix, and I would just call those extensions as gimmicks but not part of the art.