This final project was completely open to us regarding what we wanted to create and how. When deciding what direction to take it I started with something that I felt emotionally connected to in the present moment, and for me that is the Headspace meditation app.

I use Headspace everyday and I love their lively instagram presence. The Headspace works hard to maintain a strong and unique style that heavily features illustrations and animations of abstracted characters made out of solid shapes and bold color. I think their look is incredibly successful with one caveat. I have always felt a bit of a disconnect from the app’s visual representation due to is almost sterile digital appearance and lack of texture. Meditation is already such an abstract concept that I feel a textural look that still maintains Headspace’s established bright colors and graphic shapes would nicely bridge the gap between visual look and meditative experience.

To maintain a consistency to the content that Headspace so meticulously cultivates I started on their Instagram account and chose posts that I liked the captions of, but felt I could easily put my mark on the image. From there I created several sketches that can be seen below.

After choosing two of my sketches to bring to final painting I focused on how I would keep what was good about the brand’s visual look and improve what was lacking. I kept the bright colors by using gouache and the graphic shapes by cutting characters and prop elements out of watercolor paper that resulted in a multidimensional image of clean cut elements. The relief that the paper layers created added an element of texture that I didn’t anticipate and showed up pleasantly upon scanning the images. I further added texture simply by choosing to paint in gouache and centrally displaying painterly brushwork. When mocked up using Headspace’s own existing text in the Instagram format the the illustrations look playful and approachable as Headspace already does, but the images feel more grounded in this world since they are tangible objects.

You can find images and descriptions of all of my projects this semester on my portfolio page here.