Designing Your Ascending Being v.1

Our friendly shape-shifting flag-bearer!

Push
Push
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read

With the first mountain ready to be climbed we got thinking about who our flag carrying character would be.

We started with a simple illustration created from a wooden manikin… but for many reasons it isn’t the one we’ll be using.

We’re setting out to create an organic shape-shifting gender & race neutral icon. A unique entity that can take the form of whoever our user imagines.

We played around with these combinations for names:

We chose the name ‘YAB’ which is an acronym for ‘Your Ascending Being’.

I felt that ‘Ideal’ isn’t right because our character represents the current you at the start of the journey as well as the ideal you. The name suggests growth.

YAB is the character that can become anyone you like. It represents the user on the journey to their ideal future self.

If you can think of other suitable names or word combinations we’d love to hear them.


Creating art has been something that I believe will differentiate us as a platform. I’m fortunate to have a friend with whom I can bounce ideas and spend hours designing. We don’t get much time together but when we do creative output ensues!! I’d love to be able to work full-time on a project with him.


Sending Vibes

Every particle in our body is in constant vibration. This is the inspiration behind the “vibrational being”.

I love the idea that our thoughts also send out vibrations into the universe — returning to us what we put out. Visualising this concept was an afternoon challenge for Theo and myself.

The obvious center-point for the vibrations was the brain, or the third eye. We started with a few of sketches…

And then begun with some Illustrator iterations.

123 Circles

We started by duplicating circles from a circle with a 6pt size increase. 123 enlarged copies were made. I literally added 6 to the shape size over a hundred times. I tried to automate it using Actions to no avail. We joked that I would now know my 6 times table all the way up to 750!

The body parts were initially constructed from circles and lines so that we could note the proportion differences. We need to be able to position the arms and legs and this allows us to rotate them from the circles.

We then proceeded to cut the circles to sit within the body parts.

Energy Spheres

From Indian tradition come the Chakras — psychic energy points up the spine and above the head. Some people will recognise them, and those that don’t can appreciate that there are other energy points within the body.

We sketched a couple of different ways to represent them, in this first concept we’ve used alternating lines.

The silhouette of the body was enlarged and placed behind the vibrations, turned into a glow using a radial blur filter. It ended up looking like this:

This version here is just the beginning on YAB’s evolution. I’m not satisfied with the body shape; I’d like it to look less robotic and more free flowing. The vibrations are cut too perfect — I want them to be fading out into the background.

Our next steps will be updating the body into the different scenes in appropriate poses before preparing it to go into the app.


YAB or NAb?

What do you think about this concept? Cool? Lame? Good idea? Bad execution? Please be honest.


Ps. Have a look at some of Theo’s awesome mystical artwork here.

Thanks for following.

Push

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