Category Archives: Infographic

Daily Instagramming + Chord du Jour Update!

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According to the archive of articles listed to the right-hand side of this webpage, I haven't blogged here regularly since early 2010.  At that time, I tried my hand at a repetitive, fill-in-the-blank-speech-bubbles webcomic series.  By mid-2011, I've written a new blog post about once a month.  This monthly blog schedule continues to this day.

Since the start of the new year, I have increased my Instagram snapshot posts to at least once a day!  According to the old adage, these Instagrams are essentially thousand-word essays, with the subject matter ranging from my dog Kate to the adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to non-fortunes from fortune cookies to the status of the Moon (see above photo).  Those are important topics, of course.

If my Instagram habit continues for the next few months, perhaps I should forward the URL "DeRamos.org" to my Instagram profile.  Then again, maybe not.

In other news, I am about nine weeks away from completing (a first-draft version) of the Chord du Jour "coffee table book."  This "book" contains 90 pages of keyboard (piano) and fretboard (guitar) infographics.  I've limited myself to four colors for each image -- usually black, white, and two other colors.  Each two-page "spread" has a matching color scheme.

Recently, I have been posting new images on Chord du Jour's Facebook page for two workweeks (10 images for 10 days), followed by a review on the Chord du Jour blog for one workweek (the same 10 images over 5 days).  I believe I'll continue this pattern until the book is finished.  Then I'll start on another Chord du Jour quasi-educational project.

I'll probably preview the new project on a work-daily basis as well, on the blog and on Facebook.  Hopefully the "coffee table book" images will be polished enough to actually be a physical coffee table book, or even a tablet-worthy publication, but I am getting ahead of myself.

I just have to create a new infographic page, one day at a time.

A "Chord" a Day…

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Guitar, standard tuning.
Sometime last summer, DeRamos Music finally got around to resurrecting our old Chord du Jour blog -- but this time, on Facebook.  At the beginning of October, we started an experiment in graphic design and music education:  We limited each design to four colors and tried to make each image a self-contained bit of music knowledge.  In other words, if a beginner musician was stuck on a deserted island with one guitar-related Chord du Jour poster and a guitar, then that person would have enough information to write and play for days or weeks or months or even an entire lonely career!  Obviously that's a lofty and overly idealistic goal, but I think some of our four-chord designs cover a lot of popular music songwriting, which says a lot about the state of popular music songwriting.

We're currently on our fifth week of these designs, which could one day fill a coffee table book, or at least fill up a redesigned Chord du Jour website.  Our goal is to have 18 weeks of these images, at five designs per week, or an entire school semester of music "lessons."  Here's a sampling of what four colors, four chords, and perhaps the truth can do:

Four guitar chords.


Four piano (keyboard) chords.

Two scales on the fretboard.

Two basic drum patterns.

Please check out our progress on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/chorddujour

Venn Diagram: Narcissism

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I don't quite remember what I was trying to get at when I first wrote this in my notebook, on December 17th of last year.  Basically, I think I'm (sarcastically? facetiously?) accusing everyone with any sense of self (an "ego") of being a narcissist.  Those who are aware of their narcissism are dubbed meta-narcissists.  Perhaps a meta-narcissist who is kind to others does so because he/she feels superior to others (or so the silly logic goes).

Also, you can wear this Venn diagram:


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