Welcome to this week's edition of Code Club. For this week, we're going to transition to a little bit of a different format. Just because my life and my work is not always as predictable as I'd like, I'm going to try to record videos, post material on the website, and then go through the material with you in about 20 minutes, and then encourage you to pause the video, engage with the material some more, as well as work through the exercises, and then come back for me to give you a breakdown on how I would do the exercises. So it's the Code Club, but without people calling in via Zoom. So we'll see how this goes for a few weeks, and then we'll reassess. Again, I'm trying to put out content there for people to strengthen their R skills and their data analysis skills, and trying to find the best format to do all of that. So I hope you're doing well where you are. I've had a great couple of weeks teaching for the University of Michigan, my R class, which I'll also be teaching next week. And so it's a busy time, even though we're kind of hunkered down right now in quarantine. So today's Code Club, we're going to dig into the function theme. So in previous Code Clubs, I've always used the theme underscore classic function at the end of all my ggplot code chunks to give it a special look. I personally like that kind of simplistic look. I'm not a big fan of the background. My understanding is that I forget who it was, but someone said that, you know, if you're thinking about the defaults for a style, that the defaults sometimes are intentionally bad. That they're just not attractive as a way to get you to change those default settings. Okay, so if you're like me, kind of digging into that theme function is a little bit scary whenever I've opened up that help page. There's just tons of different arguments to give. And again, it's just kind of scary. So I have a fun activity for us today to play around with. And so we'll work with that. All right. So I am going to go ahead and using the code from the first Code Club a few weeks back. I'm going to build off of that to have us make some modifications to the appearance of the plot. We're not going to change any of the data. We're not going to change how the data are presented and how they're depicted, so to speak. We're going to change things like the font size, the line length, the colors, aesthetics, right? Kind of the appearance, the theming of how a plot looks. You know, if you looked at a plot made in Microsoft Excel, you could say that plot was made in Microsoft Excel because of the theme that it has, right? If you looked at a figure published in, say, like the journal Nature, you'd say, oh, that's a figure from the journal Nature because it has a certain look, right? And so perhaps you want to develop your own look or look for your research group, or perhaps you're working for a company and your company has a certain aesthetic, a certain branding, a certain style that you want to bring to your figures. Another thing to think about, a pet peeve of mine, which I'm very guilty of, is if I'm giving a research talk, I will often copy and paste a figure that I published in the paper into my slide deck, okay? That's not the best approach. Perhaps we want bigger axis labels. Perhaps we want thicker lines, right? And so these are the types of things that we can modify with the theme function without, again, changing the upstream analysis. So let's dig in and I will go ahead and copy that code over and I'll meet you over in RStudio. So I've gone ahead and copied the code over from the website, from the Code Club page for today, over into my Scripts tab, up here in the top left corner of RStudio. I've made a few subtle changes from what was on the website, mainly so I can have a larger font without worrying about how lines were wrapping across the screen. So if I run all of this, if I highlight it and click run, it will run the code. And one of the things we notice is that it's executed with no error message, but there wasn't a figure that was generated over here on the right. And so that's because I made one subtle change to the RScript. And so that is in this code chunk for building the plot, the ggplot, I've assigned this to the variable named p. This is not a very descriptive name. But it's kind of a shorthand tag for a plot or for a figure. So down at this prompt now, if I type p, it will pop up the figure over on the right side. Something else you'll notice is that in the previous Code Clubs, I've always used Theme Classic. Theme Classic is kind of my go-to figure, a theme for ggplot. But the default theme looks a bit like this. And as I said earlier, I don't really like the look of this. I'm not a big fan of grid lines. I'm not a big fan of the gray background. It just doesn't work for me. You might love it. I'm not judging. It also is the default. So if you showed somebody this figure, they'd say, oh, you made that with ggplot. And I don't want that to be so obvious when I'm doing it. So again, that's what we're doing today. And so the nice thing about having that p variable is that I can add additional ggplot layers to it without having to re-copy all this code over and over again as I manipulate little bits of the theme. So as I said, the default theme is Theme Gray. And so we can see that that plot, that figure is the same. And the nice thing about our studio, one of the nice things is that in this plot window, there's a left and right arrow that allows us to see the previous plot and the current plot. So we can see p and p plus theme gray are the same. Okay. We could also do p plus theme classic. This is my go to, like I said, we could do p plus theme BW for black, white. And this gives us fairly similar to theme gray, but instead it's got a white background with gray grid lines. We could do p plus theme dark. Background. I'm not a big fan. P plus theme light. And this looks vaguely familiar to the theme BW. So there's a variety of these themes that are baked into a ggplot. Another is theme void. And this is a theme where there's nothing, right? There's no theming applied. So if we do theme classic, question mark theme classic to open up the help page, we can see all the variety of different themes that are built into ggplot. Now these are fairly basic. I don't want to say they're basic, but they're, they're baked in, right? And so they're, I think probably what Hadley Wickham came up with as a variety of different themes and different looks that somebody might like. Now, one of the motivations for talking about themes is that you might have a particular theme that you're really interested in. Style wise, because you like the way it looks. Perhaps you work for a company and your company has a certain style, certain fonts they use, certain colors they use, or just general design, design aesthetics. So you could create a theme that goes with that, right? So if I looked at a, a figure that was generated by the New York times or Wall Street Journal or 538.com, those figures all kind of have a general theme about them, right? That are consistent within that publication. Similarly within the scientific world, if I showed you a figure from the journal nature, you'd say, oh, that's a figure from the journal nature, right? Again, that's one of the motivations of themes. So some people have had fun with these theme functions and they've put together a gallery of these themes that, and a, in an R package that you can use to install the themes. So here's a webpage that I've linked in the notes for today's code club that goes to the website. All your figure are belong to us. And it's got a gallery for various themes that are in the GG themes, our package. And as you can see, there's a theme for the Wall Street Journal, Tufti, the kind of a pioneer and really very influential individual in the world of data visualization, a status software package, a variety of different themes. 538 as I talked about, that you can make a plot kind of look like Microsoft Excel generated it, theme from the Economist and so forth. Okay. And if you look around in here, you will find that there's a lot of different packages listed in here that also contain different themes, right? So there's a cow plot package that comes with a variety of different themes. One of the funnier, if you will, packages is XKCD, and it comes with functions and theming to make your plot look like it was from an XKCD comic strip. Anyway, we're going to stick with GG themes as kind of an illustration of what you can do with these other packages that provide themes. So to get stuff from GG themes to work within your instance of R in RStudio, you would need to install dot packages, GG themes. It's got an S at the end. I always forget that. Or you could come up to the packages tab here in RStudio and install it from there. I already have it installed. So all I need to do it would be library, GG themes. And so now what I can do is I can run these themes. So I could say P plus theme Excel. And so now I get a plot that has kind of that boring gray background with the black grid lines that we know so well from plots generated in probably more of like an old school version of Microsoft Excel. These data were generated by 538. So let's see about that. So theme 538 with the parentheses. And this now gives it a look that's very characteristic of 538. Economist. It gives it this kind of light blue background with white grid lines that's characteristic of things published by the magazine, the Economist. So again, these are other packages. GG themes is another package that provides themes that you can use with GG plot to make some attractive and perhaps whimsical figures to kind of mix things up a bit from what you might typically get with the defaults. And the styling makes it look like perhaps you've gone through a lot of extra steps to get a certain type of styling when you and I both know that you grabbed that from the Economist's GG plot theme, all right? So this is great. Again, we're not really getting into the nitty gritty of arguments of kind of how to change the theme. We're taking other people's themes and adding them to our own plot. So before we dig into the theme function, which will allow us to do much more precise modifications of the way our plots look, there's a lot we can do without having to go into the theme function. So if we return to theme classic say, this is the figure that we get. And there's a variety of arguments that if you recall from our help tab that you perhaps noticed. So the base size is what is the base font size that we want to be using? So it's an 11 point font. The base family is the type of font we want to use. The base line size is the thickness of the lines that we're going to draw for say like our axes. And the base rec size, which is the thickness of the lines for any rectangles that are drawn in our figures. So say it's like a bar chart, or if we have a border around our legend. So one of the things about GG plot is that based on these base sizes, everything else gets scaled to that, right? So the number on the X axis is a fraction of the size of the label on the X axis, which is a fraction of the size of say like the base font. So we can change the base size of theme classic. So say base size. So you want it to be a little bit bigger. So base size equals 20. Now we get a larger font, right? And so this might be nice again, for something like making a figure that you're going to present as part of a presentation. We could also do P theme classic base family. And so the default, at least on my kind of vanilla installation of R is sans serif. So all the fonts here are, are sans serif fonts, but we could also say serif. And now we get something that looks kind of like Times New Roman with the serifs on the font. Alternatively, we could do mono, which will give you a mono space where each character of text takes the same width. Okay. And this is kind of like a typewriter or code look to our figure. We can also do base. Line size. So perhaps we want, we want larger font, but we also want thicker lines to go with that. So perhaps we say our baseline size is two. And so now we see that our X and Y axes are a little bit stronger, right? And we can of course then combine these, right? So I could then say base size is 20. My baseline size is two. And so now my numbers and my edges on my plotting panel are, are also larger. Okay. So again, these are some of the settings that we can set for all of these functions to modify the font, the font size, the line thickness. We could also change the rectangle sizes. We don't have any rectangular objects in this pot, but you could do that as well. Okay. So when I do this, I notice little things like the way the lines join down here in the bottom left corner. Looks kind of crummy. Maybe I'd want that to be a little bit more rounded. Perhaps, perhaps I want these numbers to be a little bit smaller than I see for everything else. Perhaps I want the title to be bolded, not a plain font. So that's now where we get into the theme function. Okay. And so when you're learning about a new function, I really advocate that the best thing you can do to get going is to do question mark, name of the function. So we'll look at theme. And again, the, the, this help page is a bit overwhelming. And so if you look at the usage section, there's all this text that's just like a wall of text. And it's kind of, I don't know, it's impenetrable, right? So what I would encourage you to do instead is look at this argument section. And so it's got things laid out line by line of the different types of arguments, and then aside from these first four arguments of line, wrecked text and title. So line being kind of like the parent or the base line. Attributes, the wrecked for the rectangular base attributes and text for the text attributes. And then kind of the base title attributes, everything that follows is alphabetical. And my way of thinking about this is that, that the theme is a hierarchical structure, right? So we have, in this case, an axis. So we have an axis. Every axis has a title. It also has text on the axis. And there are also ticks on the axis. So the text would be like the number. If we go back to our plot would be like this 75. Whereas the title is this contests one. And the tick is that little black piece there. So again, what you can see is that there's some hierarchy here, right? So we talked about the axis title. Well, the title on the Y axis, well, the Y axis that's on the left versus the right, and it inherits, it's kind of like CSS. So cascading style sheets, if you're familiar with web programming. That the axis title or axis title Y kind of over specifies or trumps, so to speak, the axis title. And so we can do that and think about that for all of these different things. And so we can see we can change the axis ticks, the lines, the labels, the titles. We can manipulate various aspects of the legend, the key within the legend, the text, the background, the position, the direction, the justification, the box around the legend, the themes we've been looking at don't have a box around them in the legend. And then the panel. The panel is the actual plotting window. So this, which is kind of surrounded by the X and Y axis is the panel. If we keep scrolling down, we also see the plot. So the plot is the full window. So if I wanted the full background window to be gray, I could change plot background, and then the whole plotting window would be gray. And so then we can change these very attributes of the title or caption or what have you. We can also change the margin around the plot. And the strip is for when you might have faceted plots. And so that's kind of a bird's eye view of the different attributes, the different arguments that we can give to the theme function. So I do not have these things memorized, but this hierarchical structure kind of helps me to remember well, legend is the first word. But then I'm not really sure where I want to go from there, right? So I frequently will call up this help page to help me figure out what attributes I want to modify when I'm making my theme. So something that you might also notice as we've kind of scrolled through this is that there are a variety of different helper functions that are being used with these different arguments to the theme function. So I'm going to kind of comment them here. So one is element blank. And this basically blanks out that attribute. We have element line. And what you'll notice is these are all functions is a function that allows you to modify how lines look. We have element text. Modify text. We have element wrecked for rectangle. We also have, so we can, we can do question mark elements. Blank and it will pull up the help page for all of these various attributes. Something else that we can use is the margin. We can use the margin function. To set the margins around a plot. And we can also use a helper function called rel, which specifies a size relative to the parent object size. So if we said that the title was rel 0.5, let's say 2. So say title, plot.title equals element text size equals rel 2, then that's going to be twice the size of the base size. So if the base size is say 11 points and we say rel 2, then it's 22. If we change the base size to 5, then it automatically gets changed to say 10 because that's 2 times 5. And so again, there's a lot of arguments here again for these helper functions. And again, do not be ashamed to use the help page to figure these out. Some things that are really helpful to know about include things like the fill color, the color of the line or of the text, size, the line type that you're using, the line end. So where we had the x and y axis come together and there was a little gap, well, we could say we wanted to be a round line end or a butt-ended or a square-ended. You can specify a type of arrow and how the arrows look if you're drawing arrows. You can change the font face. There are other R packages that allow you to bring in special R, bring in special font families. We won't talk about those. You can change the justification. So is that horizontal or vertical justified? The angle to pivot your text? Line hides all this stuff, right? You can change all this. And so again, what we can do is we can play around with this with these different settings and with these different arguments to the theme function to get a better understanding of how to manipulate our figures. Okay. So let's think about our P figure. And let's see if we can change some things up to make it look particularly horrible. Andrew Steen, who's a professor, I believe at the University of Tennessee, when he teaches R, I'm pretty sure that he has an exercise where he has his students use the theme function to make the most hideous looking figures possible. He then posts some of them to Twitter and they're always pretty funny. And I think that's a really cool instructional approach. So my hat's off to him. I'm fairly inspired by that. So let's say P theme. So the default theme is black, white. So I'm not going to add that. So I'm going to add theme. And then maybe I'll say. Plot.title. And I want this to be bold. I'll do element underscore text. I'll say size equals rel to make it twice the size. I will then do face equals. Bold. I'll do color equals red. So like a lot of things in R, and especially with things from the tidy verse, I find that it really helps to incrementally build things up. And so you can see our title now is a nice bold, large red font. Okay. And then perhaps we want to change our panel dot background to be element rectangle. And we want our fill to be hot pink. Looks like I forgot a comma. So we need commas after each of these arguments. And so our background now is hot pink. Well, that's awesome. Maybe we want our, let's say, I'll do access label. Access title. And one of the nice things about our studio is that it's very helpful in popping up these arguments that we can use. And again, giving us kind of an example of the usage. So access title, I'm going to say element. Text. Let's say size equals 1.2. So it's 20% larger than the base, or let's make a little bit smaller point eight. And I'm going to do font. Let's make those mono spaced. It's supposed to be family, right? And so now it's minus skill. Can you see it down there? Okay. Let's make that size one. Wow. It's so small. Oh, because it was one point font, right? And I think before I did point eight instead of rel point eight. So we could just say rel 0.8. Great. And hopefully you get the idea here, right? That we, that we could keep on with this. Let's do grid. Or no, panel dot grid. Major equals element line. Let's make the color black. Again, you got to have those commas after each argument. And so again, you can see that we're changing things up a bit here. Something else I wanted to point out was this kind of to emphasize this hierarchical nature. So if I do access dot title dot acts, I can then do element. I'll do element blank. Right. So we don't want to put in the title on the X axis. And so the element blank gets rid of that. But what we see is that even though I've set the title for both X and Y, then X supersedes what I had for the layer up. Okay. So hopefully this gives you a sense of how we can play with the theme function using these different aesthetic, this different attributes within a figure, and how we can use the helper functions like element text, element wrecked, element line, element blank to then set values for these different components of a plot with GG plot. For these activities, what I would encourage you to do is where you're writing your code to take the theme that you want and generate the plot with that theme. So say theme classic. So P plus theme classic. It gives us our plot over here. We can then have P plus theme. And as we go through the activity, you're going to plug in different values for theme, right? So if you run both of these lines, then in our studio over in this pot window, you can use the left, right arrows to toggle back and forth between the different states of our figure. This is kind of like going to the eye doctor where they say, does this look better? Right? And so you toggle back and forth until you don't see a difference. So as I said, I'm going to have you go through that with the assignment. So the first is to try to generate theme classic using the theme function. I want you to also generate the theme dark function using theme settings. And then because this data is coming to us from 538, I want you to use theme 538 and try to recreate that theme. Okay. So that one I'm going to tell you is a little bit harder than all the others, but I know you can do it. I keep picking away at it and hopefully you learn something as you go. I do have the answers in here, but it would really tell you like, don't look at the answers until you absolutely have to. And so take your time. This would be a great time to pause the video, engage these assignments or perhaps go back and play with various arguments to the theme function. And, and once you're set, come back and I'll show you how I went through it. So I hope you found these exercises engaging and fun to help you kind of develop your skills with modifying these themes. The first one I'm going to go through it was to make our theme look like theme classic. And so again, this is what we had popped up here. And so one of the first things I notice is that the background in theme classic is, is white. So I'm going to add. Panel. That background. Equals. Element wrecked. Phil equals white. And I'm also going to add panel. Grid. Equals. Element. Blank. And again, if I, if I run. Those lines. I can then see. Similarity or differences. And so it looks pretty good. Something that I'm noticing first, are these access labels are different. So let's go ahead and change that. So we'll do access. Access. A line. Element line. And we'll say color equals black. So that looks good. Something I noticed if I look down there. That was in the original was that it's got that gap. And so I forget what the, what the argument was for element line. Where do I have that? Here we go. So that was line and. And we'll say round. It's kind of thing that just annoys me. So if I look, if I look closely at that. I see that it's, it's, it's got a nice, nice budding there. And so if I just to test this, if I were to say size equals two, we see that it's got a round curvature down there at the end. And also kind of this nice soft round edge at the end, which it's not going to be a perfect reproduction of theme classic, but I think it looks better. Right. All right. So let's see what, what these all look like. See where wrap. So that looks pretty right. One difference I'm noticing is over here for the legend that the red dot on the key is gray in my version, but it's white in the other. So I'm going to do legend dot key dot. And we'll say element wrecked. Phil equals white, which I think looks pretty good. I'm going to double check that. So this is mine. This is theirs. That looks pretty good. Great. So we did it. So if yours looks like, so if your plot looks like this, you did it right. Okay. So what I'm going to suggest, if there's probably many ways to do this, that would get you the same output. Okay. And what's, what's key always when learning the program is you get the same output. We can go back and figure out, you know, what was the best way to do this? But if you got, if you got this plot to work and it looks like theme classic, good job. Well done. Okay. So the second was regenerating theme classic. I'm theme dark. And so theme dark has this very dark background. And I'm noticing that it's got dark background here and also dark background for the legend key. The ax, the grid lines are also different. They're darker gray and also perhaps a different thickness than what we had with, with, with the default theme. Well, this looks like it's a thicker line on the major where the numbers are and a thinner on the minor. Okay. So let's start with changing the background. So we can do panel dot background, panel element wreck. And what we're going to see is that a lot of these things are the same, right? A lot of the arguments we might give are the same, but it's going to be slightly different values that we're passing into the arguments for these element function. So I'm going to say gray. So they've got gray from I think one to 99 or maybe 95. No, 99. And the lower grays are darker than the larger grays. So we're going to try gray 60. We'll see what that looks like. I'm just to remind ourselves what it looks like. I think that's too light. So I'm going to try 50. I think that looks about right. It's hard to see because we've got the white lines breaking things up. So I'm going to go ahead and add panel dot grid. Element line. Color equals, I'm going to say gray 40. Just for comparison, we'll put up the gray. The theme dark here. So those colors look pretty good. I'm noticing that my lines are a little bit thicker than theirs. So I will do panel. Size equals. Well, I'm not sure. Let's try what role one and see what that gets us. So I think that was the same. So let's do 0.75. So it's still a little bit thicker. So let's do 0.5. I think that looks right. That looks good. So one thing I'm noticing as I toggle back and forth is that my access ticks. Are the same thickness. So I want to do access. Tick ticks. Element. Line. The size equals Ralph 0.5. And again, if we compare that theme dark, we can toggle back and forth. And that looks the same. I think we got it. So the other difference is over here with the legend background. So we'll then do legend.key. Element, wrecked. Background. Oh, I meant key dot background. I'm going to make it the same gray as our panel background. So gray 50. Legend key background is not a development. Okay. So what do I do? Maybe it's just. Legend key. There we go. So color. This is the old trick. So when you've got a rectangular object, you want to use fill to fill the color. The color is the color of the outline. There we go. So it looks good. But I'm noticing that there's this, the white line. So there's a white border around our keys. So maybe I'll do color equals. Gray 50. And that looks pretty good. So let me, let me run theme dark again. And if I toggle back and forth, I noticed that the, the legend keys are just a little bit smaller in theme dark. And what I think is happening is this color. Isn't cut gray 50. I think it's actually NA. So I think there is no, there is no border. And so to do that, they can do color equals NA. And so again, if we run these lines, this is mine. This is theirs. We got it. We're good. Very good. Okay. So for activity three, we had theme. Five 38.   And then we had theme. Five 38. And this is what it looks like. Okay. And P is where we're starting. Okay. So what do we notice is different? Well, the font for the title is bold and it's a bit larger. All the fonts seem a little bit larger. Even like the labels on the axis. There's no title for the X axis or the, for the X axis or for the Y axis. I don't know that's like the best date of is, but whatever our goal is into critique, it's to reproduce. It's got a gray background for the whole pot. There is no line for the Y axis. And it's got, instead of having the legend on the right side, they have it across the bottom. Okay. So there's a few things we're going to change up here. All right. So we'll do a theme like we've been doing. And so the first thing I want to change is let's do theme. Let's do a theme. Let's do a theme. Let's do a theme. Let's do a theme. Plot dot background. And equals element wrecked because it's a rectangular object that we're changing element that we're changing. And then we'll do fill equals gray. Let's say 80. Let's say 90. And how's that compared to that? Okay. So we'll also notice that we want our panel. Background to be the same. And so what I'll do is I'll do plot. Sorry. Panel background. I'm going to set elements. Blank. And so we get. The same background color. As we had with theme 538. Okay. So that color looks pretty dead on. Okay. So we can also get rid of the access titles. So we can say access dot title. Equals elements blank. And we compare that. So that's gone again. We want our grid lines to be this darker color. So we'll do. Panel dot grid. Is element line. Let's do color equals. 80. Let's give that a shot with all this. So I think the gray is pretty right. Something I'm noticing is that it has tick marks. And so we can get rid of those tick marks easily enough. As we saw earlier, I think. So access. Tick. Ticks. Equals elements blank. Looking at that. So it looks good. So something I'm noticing is that. We have the major grid lines, but we also have these minor grid lines. The minor grid lines are the grid lines between. And so what we can do then is access. I'm sorry. Panel grid. That minor. Equals elements. Blank. So that looks pretty good. So we'll go ahead and then think about how do we put our legend on the bottom? And I'm not really remembering how to do that. So I'm going to go ahead and do theme. Look at the help page of the theme. Function. And if I scroll down, I think there was a section for legend.  And I see legend position. So the position of the legends, none left, right, bottom, top, or two element numeric vector. So we want it on the bottom. So let's, let's try it. See what that looks like. So I'll do legend. Equals. I'm sorry. Legend. Position. Equals. Bottom and quotes. That's right. Excellent. So again, we've got a white background on ours. So let's go ahead and add. Legend. Background. Ground. Element. Blank. What did I do wrong? Legend. Background. Most of how to typo. And if we compare that to theme 538. That's right. Excellent. So again, we've got a white background on ours. So let's go ahead and add. Legend. Background. Background. And if we compare that to theme 538. Oh, we're getting there. So our keys have a white border on them. Which I think we saw from before when we were modifying to make that theme dark. So we can do legend.key. Element. Blank. Great. And that went away. Excellent. So what do we have left? What do we notice is different? Well, the font size is different. And I think there's a margin. So let's go ahead and take on the font size first. So I'm going to go ahead and the help page showed us that there's a text option that allows us to scale all the text elements. So maybe I'll try that. So we'll do text equals element text size equals 12. So sometimes I don't know what the right value is, but we play around. Maybe I'll do 15. And again, if we compare that to our 538. That seems a bit bigger. Yeah. Let's try 12. So it looks like my numbers on the y axis are right. But it's kind of hard because we don't quite have the same positioning of everything. So maybe I'll make the plot.title. And we'll do element text face equals bold. That looks pretty good. It seems like the title maybe needs to be a bit bigger. So let's do size equals 20. I think that looks pretty good. And then we need to add a margin because it seems like there's a layer all the way around that we don't have in our version. So we can do margin or I think it's plot.margin. It takes the margin function then. And it's the top, right, bottom, left, and then a unit. So the mnemonic that people remember is trouble, trbl, trouble. And the unit pt for points. You can also use lines. So I'm going to use lines. To add a one line margin. All the way around my window. Let's see. I think we've got it. So I think our font is a little too big. Let's try 18. I'm going to call that good. I think we've got it. I think we've got it pretty close. There's a little bit of movement I see in the font. But I think, I think we're good. I think we've got it good enough for our purposes. So again, I hope this activity, the set of activities helped you to understand how to better manipulate the way a plot looks. I think it's useful to take a plot like some, say something from 538 and try to make yours look like it. And as a way to kind of hone and develop your skills for working on your game function. And again, as you develop this for your own personal brand or for your research group, you might think about a theme that works for you and that reflects your sense of style and your sensibilities. Okay. Until next time, keep coding and be sure if you, if you enjoyed this code club, please like and subscribe the video and join us next week. As I'll post another session for code club. Take care, be healthy and be safe.


I want to ask you to think back to one of your best projects ever. This is a project that was just like a perfect project. Everything with the client just went great. Everything was smooth. You guys were in perfect sync. It felt like you were working more with the client instead of for the client.  They also didn't give you a difficult time about your prices or payments. This is what my version of an ideal client is. Now what if all your projects could be with ideal clients and these type of projects? Odds are if you're watching this video, those might be far in between. And it was for me. That was my story. It was hard to find one of these ideal clients, a client that was a good fit for me that I truly enjoyed until I did some work. And that's what I want to show in this video. The work that I did to get to a point where I'm getting a consistent funnel of high quality leads and clients that I'm now working and being able to pick and choose the clients that I work for. But it wasn't always like that. I had to put in some work first. In this video, there's a few exercises I want to show you the same exact exercises that I did. There will also be download links so you can download the worksheets at the end of the call. Let's go back to finding ideal clients real quick before we jump into the work. The problem is the problem for most of us web designers and developers and creatives is when we first start off our first year, we're just learning and we're usually taking jobs for a very low pay and we're just getting all the work we can to get experience and build a portfolio. And if we get really good, then we start to get a lot of referrals and recommendations coming in. And we could actually build a business off of referrals and recommendations and have a sustainable income. I was able to do that. I was able to build a really nice freelancing business and even start a company, an actual agency just off of referrals and recommendations, but there's a huge problem with that. And the problem is when we're only getting referrals and recommendations in, we're just taking the work that comes our way. It's a comfortable place to be in as far as finding work and finding clients, but it also puts us in a position where we have to take jobs that are not a good fit. And think back, think back to those difficult projects, the projects that were not fun and you're just happy to be finished with those projects. When you're finished, you're like, I'm never going to do one of those again. That comes because we have to at times. This is very common for us that are still new, still in the one, two, three year mark. Another problem with this model right here of just working with referrals and recommendations is they dry up. We can go through a long dry spell and I'm speaking from experience. And the scary thing is what happens on a long dry spell, as soon as a lead comes in, we're just jumping on it, we'll undercut, we'll do it for far less than we would do it for. We would see red flags that says run from this project is going to be a nightmare and we still take it. It could be a scary place to be in, a feast and famine type of place where we have to take that work in order to pay bills. This happened to me. I actually had a dry spell for four months at a point where I'm running agency, a company, I have overhead, I have staff that I have to make payroll for and it got very scary. And at this point, this is when I decided I need to do something different. I need to put in some different kind of work to find good clients and scale my business. And that's when I started building marketing plans for myself. Now I know marketing plans, they're, they're not fun. I mean, for me, for some people that they're, they're, they're exciting. I just like to design and create websites. When it came to marketing, it was something that I wasn't comfortable with. And I didn't really know too much about, but take a look at it from this point of view real quick. All right, let's say you get a client and this client, you're talking to them and they say, Hey, we got an excellent product. We got this excellent service. We think we're going to be very successful. We want to build a website and we think that we're going to really grow and do great. And you start to ask some questions like, okay, that's great. How are you going to reach your audience? How are you going to get more customers? What kind of marketing strategy do you have? And if that client were to say, we don't know yet, we haven't done any of this yet. We're still thinking about it. I mean, what would that, what would that say? What would you think? Me personally, I would think, oh, they're not ready. This business that they're trying to build is not going to succeed that this might not be good. I don't want to work on a project with someone that's not ready to do it. And at the same time, I'm myself doing the same thing. I'm relying off of referrals, recommendations and not doing marketing. So if you are feeling like this is a little bit scary, this is going to be very easy for you because this is going to help you find the right avenues to go ahead and market. There's all kinds of different ways to market and to find new clients. The trick is, or the key is to find the right way that works for you because the way that works for me is not going to be the same that works for you and vice versa. We all have our own strengths. We all have our own assets. We also have our own weaknesses and different personalities. The key here is to find what is going to work best for you. We're going to have a few worksheets and a few exercises that we're going to go through and after this video, you'll be able to take these exercises, work on them yourself and you got to put in work. If you want this, if you want to build a business and even if you're just going to freelance, you have to put in some work into building your business and attracting clients and finding new clients and that takes some marketing. There are two different types of marketing that we're going to look at. Really quick, we're just going to briefly touch on them. That's going to be outbound and inbound marketing. Outbound marketing, a couple of examples would be cold calling, email marketing, network events and LinkedIn doing like LinkedIn outreach type marketing. The inbound marketing, you are basically building something of value that attracts clients to you.  A couple of examples would be SEO, content like blogs and YouTube videos. Just what I'm doing right now, building your portfolio on social media like Instagram, Dribble, Behance. There's freelancing platforms like Upwork and Elementor Experts and then Google and Facebook ads. Working on both of them is actually a good idea, but you need to find out what works best for you and let's go ahead and take a look at that right now. First up, we need to identify who your ideal client is. In the very beginning of this video, I told you who my ideal client is. And I could go more deeper into that, but we need to find out who your ideal client is. Where are they? What problems do they have? How can you help solve their problems? This is the first exercise right here. And this is the exercise I run with my clients when we're in discovery and strategy sessions. This exercise helps us identify who their customers are. So running an exercise like this on yourself is going to help you identify who your ideal client is. There's a lot of questions in here. A lot of silly questions like, let's give them a name. Where do they shop? All kinds of questions that they might sound silly, but they have a purpose because once you've gone through this and you've made it really you put more thought into your ideal client, you're going to understand who they are and where they are. After you finish doing one of these, repeat, do this at least three times. Create three client personas for yourself. Before we get into any of the other types of marketing, we need to understand who your client is. You should be able to answer these questions. Who are you serving? What are their problems and challenges that need to be solved? And where are they spending their time and giving their attention to? Building the client personas will help you answer those questions. Here we go to exercise number two right here. We need to list 10 ways to find your clients. This one was a game changer for me. This was very huge for me because I was stuck on a couple ways of trying to find clients when there are so many different ways. So on this list right here, I want you to take time. Take time and list down 10 different marketing ways that you can find clients. Earlier I listed some in both inbound and outbound. There's anything from SEO, from Google ads, Facebook, social media, LinkedIn, email marketing, there's all types of ways. List down the ways that are possible for you. If something is impossible for you to do, then don't put it on this list. Only put something that you can't actually do. You might not like it, but if you can do it, put it on the list. Now we need to find out where your target client's attention is at. Inside this exercise right here, for both inbound and outbound, write down an item inside your list. We're going to keep going back to that list. Write down the item in there and put in there where your client's attention is at. For example, let's say we're going to do inbound. You have Facebook ads as one of your ways of marketing.  I can tell you right now their attention is not in web design, graphic design. Their attention is in their own hobbies, their own interest. Their interest isn't the same as yours. I've seen many people, many designers create web design ads, targeting people who are interested in web design and not getting any results. When you understand who your target client is, who your ideal client is, and you understand, and this goes back to those silly questions. This is why we look at those silly questions and we put them in the client persona. We're getting a better understanding where your client is at, what are their interests, and that's where you're going to go ahead and place your ads. You would do that for each one of the items. So in both inbound and outbound, write down each item and where their attention is at. This will take a little bit of time. Like I said, this is going to be some work. And step number four, this is the big one right here. This is something so simple. Yeah, it is such a game changer right here. You may have seen a chart like this used for something else. In this exercise, what we want to use it for, we want to take every single one of those items in your list. So you have a list of 10 items up to market. Let's place them where they need to go. If an item is not going to bring you much results, very little results, it's going to go in the low impact down on the bottom. If you see an item in there that you see this can potentially have a much better rate of success, I could get a whole lot more clients in through this way. Then you have the right and the left, the very difficult and not difficult. If a task is going to be extremely difficult, let's say, let's say for example, one of your ideas of marketing would be Instagram, building your portfolio on Instagram. And right now you have 60 followers and you don't really have a portfolio and a large library of designs where you can just start posting and building. That's going to be very difficult for you to build that. You have put that on the very difficult side. And then if something is not that difficult, let's say Facebook ads, we're going to go back to Facebook ads. I'm not saying Facebook ads is the number one place to go. We're just using it as an example. Let's say Facebook ads for you is not that difficult. You have some experience running ads. You know how it kind of works. That would go in the no difficult, not difficult side. You would place all 10 items on this chart. Anything that is on the top, right. Those are the ones you want to keep. Anything down on the very difficult and low impact area, even if you're working on it right now, stop, stop. That's wasting your time and you're not going to get anywhere with that. You're not going to get the results and it's going to take too much of your time. You have 10 items and a few of those items are going to be placed on the top right. Those are the ones you want to stick with. Once you've identified which items are going to be high impact and not that difficult for you, choose three of those and stick with three, maybe even two, but no more than three. If you try to do more than three, you're stretching yourself too thin, it's too much. When you start with three items on here, you're going to see one or two of them are going to work and one of them probably will not work. If one of them after a month or two months is not working out, cut it out and focus just on the two, maybe even one. The goal of this is to find that one or two avenues of marketing that works best for you. You're going to need to put in work on this. It takes work, this is part of it. If you're spending all your time on client projects, you're not working on your own business. You have to delegate time for your business and separate for a client work. This is how we bring in new clients and find our ideal clients. It takes about a good three to four months. You got to give yourself time and be consistent and stay with the strategies that you've identified that are going to be the high impact and going to be the easiest for you. Those are going to be the ones that are going to work best for you. Put in time, identify which ones work. If one of them is not working after two months, cut it out.  One more exercise, this is a bonus one. This one could also help you out. This is to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Call this one the SWOT analysis. What SWOT stands for is going to be your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In here, you want to list what are you good at? What are you strong at? Communication might be your strength or it might be your weakness. You need to identify that. Opportunities, these are the opportunities where you could actually help your clients. Let's say you identify one of your clients to be a startup. That might be your ideal niche. You might choose to work with startup businesses. An opportunity could be a startup, they need more than just a website. They need marketing plans like this. They need social media, strong social media presence. So you have your opportunities in there. These are more services and more value that you could give to your ideal client. And then your threats. Threats are gonna be the things that are gonna get in the way. What are the threats? What are the things that are gonna get in the way of your ideal client finding you and choosing you and wanting to work with you? Identify those. So that way you got a counter measure against that. That way you could identify the threat and have a solution for the threat. These exercises you could work on your own, you could work by yourself and you could also collaborate with others. In our Building Businesses with Elementor Facebook group we have a mentorship program. You could work these exercises with a mentor or mentee or just another member in the group that wants to learn. I hope this video helps out. This has been a game changer for me. This transformed my business. It took me from a feast and famine position where I was taking any project I could and basically getting lucky if I landed a good client and good project. And I had to go through a lot that were not fun and not ideal or a good fit for me. After working this, these same exact exercises it changed everything for me. It takes work, it takes consistency. If you want this, you could do this. This is it right here. It's a formula that actually works. There's a download link inside the description. All the exercises in here are free for download. And if you like this and you find it helps, subscribe, it helps the channel. You know all that good YouTube stuff. You know, subscribe, like. Also drop a comment. If you have a question, leave it inside the comments. I will get back to everybody. Everyone that asks a question, I feel this is a very important topic. This is something that comes up most for web designers and developers and other creatives, how to find clients. If you need help with this, because I was there before and I know what it's like not being able to find them. And I found a solution. If there's any way I can help others to also grow your business, especially during these difficult times, reach out, drop it inside the comments. I will get back to you. That's it. Thank you.


I'm not going to take any chances with Galare, I'm going to give her the army and then I'm going to send him to here. He doesn't know Bloodlust, he doesn't know Summon Boat. Eventually Galare, this other fella, he is going to teach everyone everything. Oh man, talk about cutting it fine. So, it's actually a couple of ways I can do it, I can come to here and engage. Where's the best place to shake hands? I'm just trying to think the next few turns through because I really want to be using this fella to do this thing. Okay, it's probably wasteful because now I'm not going to be next to him. How can I move that far? A road's that good. I mean, finding out what this quest is is so low value, I don't need to do that, but totally not getting punished for it. The game's been very kind to me, like in terms of luck so far, in terms of my errors of judgement and stuff. So it's really important, when you've got a hero who is absolutely constrained to the absolute maximum of movement, do not accidentally tell her to do something that you don't want to do. So, in terms of when you're meeting a new hero, use the other guy to do the meeting. From looking at what it makes when you combine it together, it really doesn't, um, the collar of contrary. He said, with confidence, I don't like having just, you know, you've got to do this and then keep them apart just in case something bad happens. We run into an enemy hero that has magic arrow and a silver pegasus. You know what I mean? Like you almost want to kind of do that to just really make sure that he can't be deleted from the game, which is what happens if you get sniped by another hero. So you guys, if you've been watching Heroes 3, professional clever people play it, they'll do this just to make sure that they can't be ambushed essentially. I think all this logic holds up.  I just clicked out of that actually without even thinking. Preparing for this fight, the marksman are going to sadly hurt. And what we want to do is, is it shift? Yep. I'm trying to work out the best way to do it. It might be something like this. When the marksman attack you in melee, they're going to cause the same amount of damage regardless of how big your stack is. It's the question of how much you deal back in retaliation. But the catch is, my retaliation attacks don't matter as much as my alpha-striking attacks. And what would be far more of a disaster is if the marksman are all spread out into seven groups and I don't have enough sprites to cover them all to stop them shooting. So I think what I'm supposed to do is this. I'm supposed to spread that out so that, yeah, good luck us. Ord by the forces. Ord by the power of my forces begin to scatter. Do you wish to pursue and engage them? I'm actually half-minded to say yes to this. So even though I lose experience, life's, you know, sometimes you're going to take the easy option, I reckon. So she can come down to get this. We'll see once and for all what it actually does. He wants to be educated. Okay, this is the end of the week. We know that each altar costs $1,800 to service. So tomorrow we'll have $7,200. Half of that goes on water elementals. The other... How many of these do I get? The 30 a week? What happens if I do something like, can I click a button here and it'll tell me 30 per week. There it is. 30 per week at a cost of $30. So that's $900. Oh, hang on, how much is an ice elemental when she's at home? $375. Yeah, so there were $330, right? So that's an extra $45. So there's another $500 there in converting from water to ice, and then the air elementals cost $250. So that's $1250. So by my count we will have exactly enough money to buy everything tomorrow. But not if we build something. Right, so, and this is the trap that it's easy to fall into if you don't bother doing the maths is that you build, say, the altar of fire. And then tomorrow comes day one. You can't buy all your stuff and you've got to leave a hero waiting around, da da da. Because it's right to do that, but I don't care about fire elemental very much. And I certainly don't want to be building more troops than I can afford to purchase. Entitly or intitly fashionable. It's okay to be out of sync a little bit and it's inevitable actually. One key thing is the mage guild actually tomorrow I'm going to want to be able to teach Alomar all the spells in the mage guild level two and then have him gallop up to teach both of these, or certainly to teach Lebelia. Lebelia? Lebeda. So there isn't that to think about. OK, but in any case, I'm not building anything today. They were my ips. That was my stuff. What did we just learn?  Swordsman, by the way, is annoying, although I don't know if anyone is going to be able to benefit from that. Just out of interest. Let's just check again. Oh, yeah, he was he was he wasn't that he was. Yeah, there's no one who's a castle. Yeah, so the swordsman growth doesn't doesn't do anything. What we've learned is there's a blue hero who is strong enough. And there must be a portal down here or something or an underground.  That's fairly telling. But I'm annoyed that we missed out on that little case of goods there. Having said that, I'm really glad that we've got all the stuff that's in this area. Let's find out what this thing actually is. Reading the countryside of the hideous dragon who made a sport of eating at nights, you are honored with a dragon winged tabard. What does the dragon winged tabard do? You may ask. It's good. What about the shoulders, which means it's going to go here? Increases knowledge and power by two. It's very, very good. Very, very good indeed. I think I want Galata to have this, actually, because I feel like he's the guy who's going to be casting ice bolt. Stuff like that. This girl is going to be doing town portal and hopefully getting to expert with Earth magic. She's going to have more access to artifacts, like, for example, this is, I think, the shield of the yawning dead. So she's staying down here and doing this work, and he's the explorer who might be going a long time between winds. I think I want him to have this, and I will. Anyway, before I figure out what they're doing, let's do this free elementals. I could do this, actually. Now, having said that, Alomar doesn't have much moves left anyway. He can get back to there, but that still might be really worth doing, because that'll mean he can get that much further tomorrow. She's going to take on lots of basilisks. What is she doing with the army? That's the question, right? What is she going to do with her army? Is she going to go for crusaders and basilisks? Or is she going to go over here and try to bully? I see. The thing is, I'm saying that that hero wasn't strong enough to hit the marksman, but he might have just not bothered. The AI is funny sometimes. Do I want to go up against tons of marksmen? For a shield of the yawning dead, I think it's plus two to defense. I definitely want to have a presence down here, a military presence, now that blue is showing its face. Alomar, do that. Mysticism actually is better than it looks. Instead of generating one a day, you generate two. If he's our explorer, then this could be good. Get that any time. I'll take the mysticism. It's OK. So, yeah, he'll be riding past a different well. So we don't need to worry about that. He's got to come to here first, and then she's going to go talk to him and wish him the best. What about the shoulders? Look at that. The dragon's taboo. Well, how much does he need? Let's have a look. How much does he need?  Lots of familiars, and he needs some wood and some gold to get a ship. I don't think the way summon boat works. It can create a boat out of nothing. It's got to be. Jesus, he doesn't know summon boat. How does he not know summon boat? I thought summon boat was getting taught. Do you know summon boat? You do not. I'd rather not deal with the drama. So she knows summon boat and she has a scroll of summon boat. So give that to me. I'm sure she already knows it. Yeah, so she knows it without the scroll. OK, yeah, I think it's worth bothering to do this because it says already learned, but if you do this. It is not learned yet. So I think it's still I think I still want to learn it because I don't want to faff around. Talking, though, about what Galan needs, you can't just send a man out on a boat with nothing at all in terms of troops, but he has an opportunity to pop back in here. He can pick up maybe the air elementals. Could be his thing. The heroes are kind of all glued together. It doesn't really matter too much at this stage because Labelia wants to attack the Labitha wants to attack these. I could be insane trying to take on lots of basilisks. By the way, that might be absolutely involved, because I don't know. I think this is all right, though. I think the air elementals are going to get turned into lighting elementals and they're going to go with Galar onto the boat. And that means this fellow on day one does this does this, buys these, does this. All right, let's have a look. What did we get? Oh, yeah. Icebalt's really, really solid, too, for someone who is going to be a water expert, which Galari is. Galar, Galar. What? How did I have to pronounce his name? I could buy all the air elementals or as I don't think I can afford them all. Yeah, I think I might just leave them there and let Galar come and get them on his way through. See, the other thing I can do with Galar is I can send him here and here before he hops in the boat. What are you worried about, man? Jeez, relax. Blue doesn't show its face. Interesting. What did I say? I said I wanted to let you have the air elementals. All right, let's let's go with that plan. What magic button do I push to blue them all back together again? Alt have the air elementals with my blessing. Let me give me her back, though. You won't need these. So I mustn't lose the opportunity to speak with Alamar. He is wise and noble and sage. I must urgently speak with you. I have discovered new wisdoms. I've studied magic extensively and I wish for you to know blind, fortune, icebalt and weakness. I mean, weakness is a great water spell as well. In exchange, I must learn from you the secrets of summon and boot. While we're here, shall we exchange creatures? And I think the answer is no. We aren't swapping into creatures. I just wanted to teach you the ways and means. So I think this is a great opportunity to spend some money on Galar. His combat ability is questionable. He's going to visit the well as well. A bit of a tax girl is the one you want. For a fee of a thousand gold, he can teach you a choice of new attack or defense skills. A battle scarred instructor will take the attack. Thank you, Alamar, complete your journey. Are we ready to take on the basilisks? Maybe that was foolish of me knowing that I was going into this fight to give up that knowledge and power. I could have kept the cloak on, taken the knowledge and power, drunk from the well. That may have been a mistake. Now, my knowledge and power is too less. And yeah, I'm going to be doing these like blind, which is really mana hungry. That was a mistake. So now, Labitha learns all of the stuff, which is great. Take the soldiers. Go and fight lots of basilisks.  What do you reckon? A horde of halflings. This will this this nulls plays like plus four to attack. I can't. Oh, man, I should have galloped up in before. There's a soul for my hero. Could have taken a horde of halflings. Halflings aren't good either. I don't think that we spread into seven little packets either. Take this. Yeah. Look at them. Woeful, woeful. So they're barely better than I am. But they can shoot and stuff. So I can't get to them in one turn. So I will be wanting to either blind or some protect my girls. What does this do? Increased defense strength. Is that good? It's better to just kill 40. So I can kill 10 of them. Blind seems expensive. I don't have to go back and visit the well. Speed five against speed six. So these guys are going to ice elementals. These ladies, sorry. Going to deal about 100. It goes down about 50 damage.  Or you can blind. Both of them are the best way. One of those two. I think this is overkill and maybe we'll be a little bit wasteful. But I think it's worth it to 20 of them. Oh man, I'm no good at maths. So I lost four. It's not too bad. Cape of Conjuring ensures that they're not learning to see any time soon. I think we don't shoot because if you shoot, they wake up and blind. This is killing. Nothing more satisfying than killing these halflings. A glorious victory once again. Lebita. Oh, interesting. So she's already an Earth mage. Yeah, I think I'm going to say no to the M. Normally I would auto click air magic, but this is plus four.  Knowing your superior skill with this weapon. Yeah, right. You confidently remove the spectacular flail from the fallen creature. My left mouse button's not working. OK, let's have a look here. How good is this thing? Is it plus two or plus four? That's good. Very good. Got lots of knoll marauders here. But we've got horde of pixies. This almost feels too easy. I'm going to get my cup up and come up. Loins of Legion, do we know if that's tier three? That would help a lot if it was, because ice elementals are kind of a thing for us. I don't know, really. May as well send Alomar over here. That feels worthwhile. While Lebita's busy up there. Hopefully he doesn't get killed. All right, biggest fight of the game coming up. Lebita, what have you got? Movement five is fantastic. Even if you get a morale, you can't get to me. OK, so here's the thing, right? We're going to wait with both, obviously. Because they only have movement five, it means even if morale flashes for them, they can't get to me this turn. Which just means by waiting, we have absolute maximum option value or optionality around our decision making. So the first move there from the first guy was atrocious. He's not going to get to us for another whole turn, which is really, really bad for them. I think I've worked this out right. I might be wrong. OK, because you can almost see strategically, like this guy hasn't come into the center. If he had, this wouldn't work, I don't think. So what I want to do here is I can also blind as well, which is just going to be fantastic when we have time in formation to do that. But this is why sprites are so good. Oh, man, they are so good. The only thing that can really hurt is this guy gets a morale. This guy, one, two, three, four, five, yeah. OK, I can strike before he even has the chance. I should have blessed. That was a mistake. Yeah, I should have blessed. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, yeah.  Well, did I? Because I would have blessed her. Maybe I ended up saving myself some. Someone, I don't know. Mama. 29 level four creatures dead to 100 level one creatures. OK, yes, the ice elementals helped a bit too, but. Sprites are special. Sprites are really special. Let's just get these loins. She's got to go into the policy anyway. Searching a ruin. You're amazed to find a piece of the statue of Legion. You carefully dust it off before placing it in your backpack. Loins, let's hope it's tier three. Four extra water elementals. So that's an item for Alomar or even someone like Alomar Junior, a runner hero who's going to sit in the town. In fact, I'm always obliged to hire someone to sit there now. Great. I'll let you turn there. Probably won't see anyone. OK. Should we take attack or defense? You enter the arena in face of pack of vicious lines. You randomly defeat them into the wild chees of the crowd and impressed by your skill. The age trainer of Gladiators agrees to train you, me, in a skill of your choice. She got the Nong Flail. So anyway, I'll do the more standard play if you like and take that. Someone else will come in to get this Sulfur in a moment. Probably Alomar, I imagine, on his way back. I think I'm just getting these gnolls now. I'm getting this Sulfur now. These armies are all very easy for us. Yeah, I do wish to pursue and engage them because it's free exp, but it's 26 of them. Well, this doesn't feel like I'm one expert. It feels like am I just ahead of schedule? I think I'm just ahead of schedule because of the sprites not taking any casualties at all. Do I even need to bolt that? Too good. Okay, spells dealing more damage. I know ice bolt. I might be inclined to use it. It goes 5, 10, 15, I think, to expert sorcery. It's not that much, really, is it? 5%. Whereas if I could get expert slow online, it's just better.  That's just really, really great. Alomar, I think, happy for you to go do this. He's learnt much in his time ferrying troops around. Probably have mentioned this before. Spell powers grew up very good. Knowledge would have been better. Eagle Eye, sadly, is in the vanilla version of the game. Beyond useless. I can't ever remember a time playing the game where Eagle Eye has maybe in the campaign or something it does every now and then trigger, but yeah, woeful. Probably the worst of all of the secondary skills. I don't really want to invest in him up here. Maybe I'll decide that after I've moved Galar. We've said wishing well, I think that's correct. This has already been visited. Oh, we wanted to go here too, though. We've done that. Okay, right, right, right. We've done that, we've done that. Okay, we do this. I haven't learnt intelligence with him yet. Do I want to do that? That's my fourth skill. Intelligence is solid. It's the wrong way around with the well. Which is annoying. 25%, so we go to 75. There'd be 75 spell points missing if I don't bother going back and forward. Um, I want the intelligence. Could I be bothered doing this? Has he got mysticism? Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna bother, actually. I think I will invest in this, though. Might as well do that now, yeah. A tingle of magic fills the air of this school of mystical arts. An acolyte offers to sign you up for the next class for a thousand gold. You will have your choice of increasing your knowledge or learning to better focus your powers. Um, this is the Water Maid. She's gonna be doing Ice Bolt. It means I can cast multiple blinds, you know, recover better if I'm sailing around with my mysticism. I think I know her knowledge. Um, now, does he need to visit? Can I build a third level? Not for a long time. I did six gems as a long way off. Can we do it? And should we? I think we should. I think we can. And we will. I'd love to get the shackles of war, actually. Pack of man to cause. If I had some way, if I could be guaranteed that they showed up in two packets and I could blind one packet and then kind of lightning elemental somehow. Ice Bolt, the other one to death. Yeah, but it's a bit fanciful, I think. Not visited this week, but we'll visit it later. So we're out of movement points anyway. Um, we're not getting any gems anytime soon. There's no way that she's gonna give me gems. Maybe the campfire could give gems? Can it? Don't think so. If this gives me six gems tomorrow, I'm gonna regret this, but um, pretty sure it doesn't. Now I have Mercury up my sleeve because I've got this here. And I think I've got another one down here. So Mercury is my currency. I can make plenty of that over the game. Of course the game. Oh, I very rarely make a trade of this such terrible odds, but I think it's worth it. Oh, I missed that there, I should need two Mercury as well. So there's an opportunity to mess up there. So very cheap to upgrade, it feels. I can actually buy the whole lot today, may as well. No melee penalty, but they're vulnerable to lightning. You would think actually they were resistant to lightning. I think the stats are the same though. Two to eight and 25. Nine goes to 10, but that's just because of his stats. Yeah, okay. So they're just air elementals, but they can shoot. And no melee penalty. So maybe I've got ripped off there, I don't know. Do I want to do anything with the harp? He's run around here and explore. I can't really get in here and unlock anything. I can't walk past them. I'm gonna make a hero out of this guy. Yeah, all right. Yes, that's okay. Man, these pixies are going down. It feels sad, but I feel mean. They're even on my team, they're my people.  But when I'm good, I'm good. Don't be gems. It is, look at that. Okay, well it's not gems, but it could have been. So I probably made a mistake. In fact, there's no probably about it. I definitely made a mistake. So I could have unlocked that as well. I could have run over here. Save myself 10 mercury. Oh man, that's quite, that's a boo-boo. To forget that campfires give these resources, but it's these little things that can change the outcome of the game. I'm half-minded to go for experience here. I might just see what else I'm gonna do first. Follow through with my plan and attack. Come on up around here.  What else do you want to do before you set off? When we went for the city hall. Yeah, well we rush capital. We use this money here to rush the capital.  Yeah, it's definitely, don't feel like anyone here is guilty. Well, this is just, I'm sorry that these fights aren't more engaging. They're not very, probably very fun to watch. Yeah. Right, wait, wait. These poor schmoes. Look at them. Well, these guys die, probably. I've got a whole lot of turn if they don't. Too easy. Yeah, she's actually out of moves. So it's weird. I didn't feel like we had a lot of moves in there. It's day four, so he can go for it now. Whenever I've cast weakness, I've been pretty happy with it. Just trying to figure out if I want to, I'm gonna do this first. Do I want to bother this and come this way? Oh, sure, why not? They don't want to actually fight me. Well, I'm gonna do about 150 odd damage, which is gonna kill tons of them. How did you not scatter and flee? Don't you know who I am? Come across an obelisk made from a type of stone you've never seen before. Staring at it intently, the smooth surface suddenly changes to an inscription. The inscription is a piece of a lost ancient map. Quickly, copy down the piece. And the inscription vanishes as abruptly as it disappeared, as it had appeared. Let's have a look. Okay, it's this very top corner thing, and it's in the southeast of the world. I can always look at the video. I think it's in the eastern, southeastern corner of the world. Don't know what that means, underground, I'm not sure. Head back over here. Build nothing in the turn. Alamar, what's it gonna be? I think I'm gonna take defense for these wizards. He does this. Whatever this is, you can teach it to her. Haste. This is free plus one defense. The Marletto Tower. The soldier's living in the tower. Teach me a few unique defensive tricks. So she's got a much more respectable stat line. Yeah, five, four. I feel like giving Alamar some experience. He hasn't got a little movement left though. Let's just do this. Thank god, no gems. Alright, so there's no punish. So I'm gonna do this tomorrow. Which means I'll do this today. A pack of storm elementals. A pack of storm elementals will be fast and they will be shooting at me. They're probably immune to blind. Is it a better answer to do this and plant a stone skin on turn one? Similar to the marks one, I'm just gonna say no. I don't really want to lose soldiers. There is a vampire, lots of vampire lords guarding a pandora's box up there. That's a big deal. Yeah, okay, let's do this. Just give him all the things. Completely swap places and give him a bit of experience. I still like these guys spread out. Doesn't matter. I should quite like infernal troglodytes. I think they're decent.  No spell point loss. 33 and 36. I don't think we could do much about that. Really. Vampire lords, are we doing this? Scary. Vampire lords are scary. Oh hey, while we're here, take these off me. Yeah, you keep the lines. I guess I don't have to decide about this until tomorrow. Alright, down here. Okay, let's just get this fight done. Shouldn't need any spell points here. I don't like the fast combat animations. I think it damages immersion. Might lose one here. And or it might maybe want to cast a spell. 12 damage. That's half. So I'm down to 18 and a half, guys. I think I'm going to live. Oh man, I thought he'd move faster than that. Sorry. I can just shoot these guys.  I'm not dying, I'm not dying. Making a habit of this. Yeah, we'll buy the boat. Do this before we get on board? Yeah. I don't even know if I am going to... Well, I bought the boat without even knowing. Yeah, let's just wait. These guys are still going to miss out the next turns and that's very good. So we are underground in the eastern reaches of the world. It's a teleport here. I think it's a two-way. So we're happy enough to just land on here if he gets caught on the wares. Oh well. He should be up and at flea with such a big stack. Getting the water. Still saving for the capital. It's fine, I don't need more... I don't need tons more troops at the moment. So...


Hey everybody, we are live. This is Protected Trust live and joining me today for I think the third or fourth time Something they just go by so quick. It's great is Steve Cornell the service desk manager here at Protected Trust and today We're discussing one of my favorite topics. I Don't know if it's your favorite, but self-service password reset It's a mouthful, but all it means is that the user is able to reset their own password This hasn't been a feature in previous versions of exchange Right, and you know speaking on behalf of the service desk. I don't know how many password reset email the ratio is to I mean other tickets industry standard For most help desks around most companies is like 20% 20% of all the tickets that you get is password reset related And you know it definitely helps out a lot in our case with having Giving the option for users to reset their own passwords that way, you know, I mean there are a lot of companies out there who have You know outsourced IT where they have to sit on hold for a while and wait for somebody to get on the phone Or they have to you know reach out to somebody else and wait whereas now You know they have the ability to just reset it for themselves within you know less than a minute Comes in handy. So well what I thought we would do today is you know go over the benefits You know aside from the fact that it frees up your help desk from right You know that 20% of tickets that are going in But also give a quick demonstration of how it works in case people I mean I'm sure people have reset their passwords on other accounts before right, but just to show you know the different Different ways that they can Authenticate themselves to reset their password because that's really the biggest concern that we've had when we've been doing host exchange was How do you get someone to say who they are? How do you verify that the person that you're speaking with on the phone or dealing with your email is exactly who? Needs to be the person to request it because I mean you know nowadays Especially in the last live stream that you did with you know a lot of the breaches and the hacks that are going on right now I mean fishing attempts are huge and you know social engineering things like that I mean, you know if you have a really laxed help desk that doesn't really go through a lot of verification In order to change things like this you have people that can just call and say hey I'm so-and-so the CEO of the company and you reset my password and if Your company doesn't have something in place that can safeguard against things like that and you have a really big problem Right, and so that would lead to a lot of angry yes end users But the admins would thank us because we're just following it, you know not only their procedure, but you know standard practice Because any anyone can call and start yelling at you and saying I need access to my account right now I need you to reset my password blah blah blah so not only would we have the admin have to write in right then We would go through all the checks to make sure that it wasn't being spoofed right look at the message Hatter see where it originated from that that is a big rule at least for my guys out there And it's been you know ever since I've been here is that you've never do those types of account changes over the phone I mean there's no way to to verify who it is So in order to avoid any sort of issues with any of our clients We always make it a standard that you know Unfortunately, sometimes people get upset you know that we have to do that but when we explain you know if You know we basically use the phrase you know if you're if you imagine that somebody called in and Wasn't you and we gave them access to your account That would be a lot worse than having to deal with you know waiting a little bit for a password reset But now they don't even have to do that You know they can just reset it themselves with their own verification information So right it takes it takes away the error of being human So I say you let have a lapse in judgment and you feel sorry for the person on the other end of the phone You're like okay. I'll reset your password just this once It all it takes is that one time right account to be compromised. So it takes it away from You know your help desk and it gives it to the computer to analyze right to you know Authenticate right and you know a lot of the you know other than reducing costs for for IT admins You know people that are actually supporting the end users You know it also It drives mobility. I mean it allows people to be able to reset their own passwords when they're away from the office You know you know big places that have in-house IT would normally have to pick up the phone and call their help desk and ask them to Do a password reset, but if they're away from the office now They got a call in you know they're you know using their cell phone to try to call Maybe they're on hold but you know in this case you you can quite literally anywhere with an internet connection reset your own password So exactly So right what I think we'll do right now is just show How it's configured very quickly in the admin center, so this isn't something the end user does this is something that we would do as the Cloud service provider or your own local admins can do this if they have access to the Azure panel So right now we're in Azure and we got there by going to the normal portal dot office comm and clicking on Azure And then we're going to scroll all the way down to password reset and Right now we see that it is not enabled for anything We do have a choice to put it in different groups too, so it's not something that has to be company-wide Right, so if you have like a set of users who refuse to want to adopt this policy Even though everyone should be adopting it that is an option to do But right now I'm just going to set it to all for this test company here and save it And while you're doing that I will say for for everyone watching that you know At protected trust when we on board anybody in the 365 We enable this feature by default and what he's doing right now isn't enforcing it for any users So when you do turn this on What will happen is when somebody goes to log into the portal they're going to see a Request for a couple verification options One of which is an alternative email address So like a non-work related email address that you could use to receive an email to reset your own password or a Phone number so a mobile device can call or text you a code a landline If you have users that don't feel comfortable using you know Their personal cell phones for work. We do come across that right a little bit So and that's on the the very next screen here is those four options that you're able to choose from so right alternative email which we advise against actually because of Kind of what we discussed on the last stream was that once someone's in they can set up forwarding rules And so that just renders the Email method useless because now it forwards that request to a different mailbox And then they're able to type in whatever code it is Yeah, not to mention if in most cases like what you guys discussed before if if you have an account That's compromised the likelihood that somebody used that password on another account somewhere else is really high I mean in most cases somebody tries to use the same password for all their services But if one gets hacked then you know everything else is potentially compromised as well Especially in or in this case the alternative email address, right? So right mobile phone, which is the one that we've been pushing right you know You download the app and it will send you is that the same thing or as will it call you well No, what this will do is it will actually either you call you with a number with a code or it'll text you a code The Azure authenticator app is what we use for MFA for multi-factor authentication. Okay, that's good to know And then right so we had a question in one of our other YouTube streams, which was MFA can I do alternative email address and we had to break the news? No, you know You can do it for self-service password reset, which we're kind of advising against right now, but So MFA no alternative email address, but with self-service password reset you can do it and you just went over our office phone and Security question, which is what I'm gonna do because it's the easiest one because I don't want to give up So I went ahead already and saved that so what we'll do now is Sign in to one of our test accounts Yeah, the screen up. I have a screen out for two all right, so This would be the page that even if your passwords give you your passwords even if your users sign in all the time To the portal instead of going into Outlook to check their email They will receive this prompt once they go to portal correct and that's that should only happen one time, right? Yeah So encourage your users to just go through the process. It takes only a few seconds So from the previous page, I chose office phone. I believe and also security questions And I put I only the parameter I only need to have one of these complete and like you saw on the other screen is you you can Force your users to have all of the options If that's if that's what you want you want them to have the most amount You know of I guess a successful password reset chances that you can give them So if you limit them to only one, you know, and it's a security question They happen to forget the security question then you're taking another phone call, you know Because they can't reset their password now. So if you you know, it's it's recommended that you at least give them two options and You know recommend not recommend but make it mandatory that you fill out both of those options that way if one fails The other one's fine if their phone is dead and they can't get a text message Then the alternative email address one would have you know be the one that you fall back on because you know Chances are you're on the internet you're trying to reset your password. Yeah, really good point really good point So I chose three security questions, which was the minimum by the way You can go all the way up to five if you want. Wow, so what is I just chose easy ones So you probably want to stick with harder ones spaghetti and Then what is my first pets name spaghetti? Oh, that's interesting and What is your childhood nickname spaghetti also spaghetti? Wow So I'm gonna save those all to your mansors are identical. Oh, look at that. How about That's actually a great security feature. Yeah. Yeah, I did not know that you couldn't give the same answer But that's yeah interesting, right? So it's actually a good practice, which is something that we learned from one of our One of our fishing videos was if you are filling out security questions It's actually really good practice to have a different answer than what the question is asking Oh, wow.  That's a good first dog's name and I can't name myself fluffy how about Steady All right, so remember I only chose the Having to have one of these, right? So it's not going to force you to fill out the other one, right? So I'll just click finish and I don't want to save that to my web browser. That's poor and then ask you to sign it Looks good Don't say And I'm in my account like everything's normal. Okay, so right What does it actually look like to reset your password? Well very familiar to the screen that we just filled out It's gonna give me those Same questions again, so click forgot password And I'll have to fill out the captcha Which I think it does for most things make sure they're the first standard test But make sure that you're not a computer or a bot. So right there. There's those questions again And that's all it is I Personally don't like the the question one since it is easy for someone who knows you to do it But I like mobile phone because I always have my phone on me Most people do I mean mobile phones are are always the go-to for that I mean, that's the reason why we push these your authenticator app You know for MFA when we configure that for our tenants for our clients is you know having that second layer You know some people don't really like it because it's an additional thing that they have to do So having to type in something every time you log into you know Oh, or you go to add your mailbox to outlook or something along those lines having to do an additional Step is is always inconvenient, but that's that's kind of the double-edged short to additional security Right, I mean take having that sacrifice to do that every so often is worth You know not losing your identity or having somebody break in you know to any of your accounts So, you know the mobile device makes it really easy You know for the MFA because you can just push an approved button And then on this side, it's really easy because it just text you a code you type in I think it's either a four or six digit code and you're you're you're back right into your work Or a phone call sure if you wanted to absolutely At least that's the only option for Your office phone, right because they can't receive text messages. We're not there yet Technology wise. No, we're not okay. We're not there yet Well anything else for self-service password reset. Well, I mean, you know, we were discussing You know discussing the benefits of it and you know on the IT side You know, we discussed being able to reduce phone calls and cut down on things and you know on an IT perspective You know the less tickets that you get the more money that you save as a company, right? So you have to hire less people right?  Well with self-service password turned off They wouldn't have the ability to do that.  You can make the phone calls I guess an email address is you know, and it can even unlock It can even you can even use that to unlock your account if if there is a lockout policy So that that's something that we didn't really touch on and you know There there are options within Azure when you enable self-service password to do a password policy You can you can go above Microsoft's complexity, which is already pretty complex. Yeah You can you know, you can set certain standards. You can set lockout policies You know every three failures five failures seven failures, you know, whatever you want to do And you can also I believe set a lockout time So if somebody gets locked out They have to wait 30 minutes or or so and then they can attempt to do it again And there's a there's a lot of options in there though But you know, IT admins definitely would be able to mimic Whatever lockout policies they have now with whatever on-prem You know AD that they have whatever they're using when they move to 365, you know We can definitely mimic any of those policies in 365. It's all built in very cool. Yeah. Well, you did it again, Steve That's what I'm here for So if you have any questions about self-service password reset, I Know like like you said, it's something that we do by default So most of our users have probably already gone through this and absolutely they did it so quickly They don't even realize that yeah, they have it. Yeah So yeah, take the time if you're not a client of ours set it up for your organization And have your users spend the what 15 seconds that it takes to write to set it up It's a good time save for your support desk and it adds a whole bunch of security to your Company, absolutely. So for Steve, I'm Steve if you like our Content, please click the like button or the subscribe button and also thank you to our clients who make these live streams possible Thanks, everyone


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