First-of-Everything Concert

I've been blessed. 2014 has taken me to some interesting places so far, Germany, Italy, London, Sydney and now Taiwan, but never had I thought I

This was how Taiwanese singer, Wubai started his own concert: "Tonight, is not actually a concert, it's actually just a really huge party! You guys can all do whatever you want to do because we'll also be doing whatever we want to do too. So right now we're going to sing our last song first!"

Wubai is well known in Taiwan for his rock ballads that are performed both in Mandarin and the Taiwanese dialect. Being an avid learner of both the languages myself, I was very happy to have had the chance to work on part of his concert design that I just went to tonight. It was my first concert too!

The night of Wubai vibes started off with a taxi ride to Taipei Arena. Upon hearing my intended destination, the driver asked what gig was on tonight. I told him that it was Wubai's concert and asked him whether he liked Wubai too. He suddenly broke out in a very heavily accented Taiwanese accented Mandarin and exclaimed his fanatics for Wubai. If I had some more extra tickets, I would have loved to give him some! His favourite song is: "愛你一萬年", one of the classics.

But another reason why I'm excited is because I helped to do part of the concert graphics as part of my internship. It was an interesting exercise with considerations of lighting, contrast and visibility involved. My task was to make a set of graphics which would emulate the Taiwanese street scape.  It turns out that our office PA once dated the drummer for quite a few years and so she was a great source of primary research to designing the "essence" of Wubai. After a few iterations, we finally got it right. In making something "abstract", especially an "extract" of it, it definitely helps to first do some study sketches too.

My first ever concert design also happens to be the first ever concert I've attended! And the anticipated audience number is actually ten thousand, not five thousand (Taipei Arena seating capacity: 15,082). At first I felt like puking because I wasn't sure whether my boss was joking when he said that my job would be on the line if anything went wrong (lol, working overseas is not always glamorous but is is definitely ALWAYS CHALLENGING). But towards the end I just had to let it be and enjoy the moment since things seemed to be going alright, also half way through the concert my boss gave me a happy-looking wave from where he was sitting. Now that the concert craziness is over, back to doing more residential and commercial projects on Monday. Dear Concert, thank you for being such an interesting little design tangent!

(International Work Tip: Everything visual you do which requires options, always number it, that way people can just refer to the number. This is because some adjectives are very culture-dependent. E.g. Colours "blue" and "green" sometimes get interchanged with the word "aqua", so by numbering things, we save time by minimising the margin of error.)