Ugh. Just Got Back From The Computer Repair Place, And My 15-month-old Laptop Is Dead With No Hope Of

Ugh. Just got back from the computer repair place, and my 15-month-old laptop is dead with no hope of resurrection. I hate Dell. I hate Windows 8. I hate how technology these days is built for consumption and not production. Right now I kind of hate everything.

Except you, dear followers. You might be the only good thing left in the world.

Also, I did back up all of my writing files.  :)

To steal a music term, the hook of a song is that thing that, well, hooks you in and makes you wanna remember the song.  So how does that pertain to design you ask?  Well early on in the DA:I project I decided to treat the appeal of the characters I designed not through the eye of the beholder, compiling massive reference sheet of beautiful people and picking features I found appealing. Instead I decided to look through the lens of the narrative, and find their hook.  I just found beauty too subjective, too mushy too, too, well lets just say I didn’t find it adequate.  Luckily for me a lot of the talented people at Bioware believe in narrative so it wasn’t a hard sell to change the thinking and discussion away from “do I like what that looks like” to “does that visually say what we want”.

In the above example of Cassandra. Her hook is her power and authority.  So then the trick was merely to use visual language to tell that story.  I no longer had to justify what I thought was attractive.  Her face became all about her aggression.  Through the angle of her facial structure to the angle of her ears. It all became about giving her a strong aggressive forward visual flow.

— Casper Konefal (x)

Character of the Day: Knight with a Blue Scarf by Greg-Opalinski

If Thedas had candy-grams, I’d like them to be something like this.

And so, this is my silly token of affection to Tumblr friends and followers alike.