Thursday 29th February 2024
One more iteration of the Guided Drawing Meditation Pad ready for the midpoint assessment:
GCD.Studio
https://gcd.studio/pages/guided-drawing-meditations
MAGCD Elva Category: Projection 1
Monday 26th February 2024.
For today’s tutorial I have showed two production iterations + all 21 guided meditations.
Guided Drawing Meditations Pad experiments:
1 x Full colour with sheets printed in violet, indigo, turquoise, green, yellow, orange and red
1 x Black & white version
☞ Tutor Feedback :
• Ai narration doesn’t bother but ask your audience. You can use it until you get the meditation narration polished and then narrate yourself.
• If you want audience to add their dates, you can add a space such __ / __ / __ for them to write the date on it.
• There’s an issue with the visual hierarchy of the pad. Try making QR smaller, make grid larger and add a cut line for people to tear off outcome drawing.
• Try making some more iterations with coloured paper, coloured lines and variety of cover experiments.
★ FOCUS GROUP :
After the tutorial I printed all 21 sheets on regular paper for tests and asked all classmates who wanted to participate to try the meditations to gather more feedback.
10 students participated, most / all of them don’t draw nor they meditate — their feedback is listed below:
General Feedback:
• The activity is very relaxing.
• Some of the prompts resembled them a colouring book.
• Try get feedback on this activity from people who are not into arts or graphic design.
• Variety of grids more fluid and organic, less rigid.
• 3D grids are liked because it let’s imagination flow.
Audio track feedback:
• Slower, leaving a larger gap to breath at the start.
• Give a notice when reaching 5min and have a longer track for those who wish to continue.
• Most students felt 5min was too short but at the same time very approachable and less intimidating than longer time. Ideally, give an option to extend the activity over 5min.
• Ai narration doesn’t bother – it’s ok.
Sunday 25th February 2024
All 21guided drawing meditations of the pad have been produced to test out.
LINK: https://elva.myblog.arts.ac.uk/meditations/
Categories
MAGCD 3 | 1 • 07 Audience Trial
Thursday 22nd February – CSM 3PM
Gathered with a few classmates to test out the first three Guided Drawing Meditations.
☞ Thoughts + Feedback:
• Natural voice better than Ai – Participants would have preferred if I had narrated the guided meditations
• Talking first and then music to start meditation
• They preferred more organic and random than modular and strict grids
• Modular grid: Less opacity and larger space between dots
Concept
• Experience is nicer colouring in with pencils or markers
• No all design works for everybody – each person had a different preference
• The activity reminded them of conditional design manifesto
Potential
• This could become a calendar desk pad to make one activity a day, one prompt a day with a inspiring quote
• Emphasise this calms you – if you are stressed designer this could be good
Categories
MAGCD 03 | 06 • Test 2 AI Voice
This voice over version is a brief generic description of how to use the booklet.
Music: Crystal Bowl Royalty Free Music | Royalty Free Meditation Music | Singing Bowls from Youtube
This booklet version has a variety of experimental grids.
Categories
MAGCD 3 | 1 • 05 ► Test
Paper Manipulation Experiments inspired me to experiment creating grids.
Guided meditation test with grid:
Narration: Elva
Free Copyright Music: Equilibrium by Sanchii from Uppbeat.
Transcript of narration:
“We all have an inner world to explore,
The intention of this colouring in guided meditation is for you to explore embodying your meditation practice one breath and colour pencil at the time.
Sit comfortably, close your eyes and take 3 deep breaths, breathe in through your nose filling your belly and your lungs and exhale through your mouth.
Using a range of colouring pens or pencils, colour in each rhombus with a different colour, ideally no rhombus with the same colour should be next to each other.
As you colour the shapes, breathe in and breathe out, focus on your breath and the colour each shape.”
_
Guided meditation style inspiration taken from Moment Space App. I found the 3D motions and branding created for the app to be very similar to the mindful paper exercises I am testing for this project.
☞ FEEDBACK & TUTORIAL NOTES:
• Less “woo-woo” – red herring.
• Look at “Present & Correct” graph/grid paper.
• Ask feedback to your audience.
To this tutorial I brought in this table and prompts created from it.
“Get out of your head” 49 graphic design meditations – which I realised 7 of them for the tutorial.
☞ Feedback & Tutorial Notes:
• Consider adding an element of voice over guiding the audience through the meditations
• The Musical Note is confusing
• Realise all 49 of them to see what works and what not.
⭐︎ Peer review feedback:
A student from MAGCD tested the above prompts at the library after class and gave the following feedback:
“I think the exercise helped me in two ways. First, by thinking about repetation and rhythm I started to notice how my thoughts became clearer. For example, when I was drawing the icosaedro, it started as a very frustrating process which eventually turned into something more enjoyable as I mastered the shape. Second, the exercise helped me to take my mind off the things that were frustrating me and the confusion that my creative project was causing. By concentrating on a single, unrelated thing, I felt freer to narrow down my thoughts.” – Evy Prentice
E. Prentice, 2024
Categories
MAGCD 3 | 1 • 03 ✐ Class practice
Categories
MAGCD 3 | 1 • 01 ✏︎ ? Projection