ECLAT is an acronym that stands for:

Emfred Catalog Archival Tag
|      |   |   |        |
E      C   L   A        T

It comes from the French loanword “éclat”, which refers to the quality of something being brilliant or elaborate¹².

(Note that, given its French origin, this word is pronounced “ay-clah”, not “ee-clat”; same for the acronym).

ECLAT came out of the confluence of 2 different problems:

• 1.) If you’ve spent some time poking around this website (which you probably have if you ended up on this page), then you’ll have noticed that I’ve posted a variety of content ranging across different mediums and levels of quality. Some areas of the site, like the recent Sketchbook pages, contain pieces which have been worked over for many hours and present (hopefully) captivating creative experiences. Other areas of the site, like many entries in the Blog, contain work that is old enough, or rushed enough, to not offer what I feel is a good reflection of my current³ abilities and standards of quality.

• 2.) My website currently³ contains a lack of high quality writing, which is something I care about just as much as high quality music (which I believe the site does contain).

So, I started thinking of a system that could solve both of these problems once: addressing 2. by defining a set of general creative standards for future pieces of writing that I intend to be significant, which I could push myself to achieve throughout the process of their creation; and addressing 1. by giving me a umbrella term under which I could collect pieces of writing which meet those standards – in other words, a stamp of approval.

See the ECLAT Criteria page for the list of standards, and the ECLAT Collection page for the collection of pieces.