Happy Places- Crit

I showed my work today in the crit alongside some sketches I did, looking into using stop motion animation, either with hand drawn, painted or digitally rendered illustrations. I thought however it might be easier if I used walk through videos like I did with my test video, as this will be more of an accurate representation of a reality, this was confirmed during the crit. Not only would it be incredibly time consuming and less about the actual design, I feel it would be too personal to me and how I would view my own happy place as I have quite an abstract sketching style I feel. 

Therefore I now know I need to focus on the actual design as I have enough research, I need to produce the content (visual and audio meditation/ sound clips) and get on with the design of the app. 

The response to my reasoning (creating a more accessible meditation technique to younger audiences) was responded to well which I was pleased about, my ideas for having a typically psychedelic aesthetic was received well as this will indeed widen the audience range especially to younger audiences. 

They agreed with the use of lava lamp backgrounds as this is a soothing backdrop in keeping with a more modern vibe, as opposed to the almost clinical layouts similar to that of sports apps I experienced when using especially the Meditation Timer App, the one in previous blogs that has a brown colour scheme which isn't particularly a colour you'd associate with something relaxing, and the layout is structured, the home screen featuring a timer as well which I feel adds time limits/ pressures, when I'm meditating I don't want to be conscious of the length of meditation as I see time as one of my anxiety stressors. I therefore won't include any notions of time limitations, nor clinical layouts, hence why I plan to have the names of the happy places filled with imagery from the destinations. 

During the crit I spoke about how my homepage would be animated, my tutor thought it may look good having the text and the acid smiley rotating, so I'm currently playing around with making a gif of this as opposed to having them change to yellow, I'll keep the text white, in keeping with use of the white space on the options page.