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Emvas

Emvas is an innovative take on Art Therapy brought directly to your mobiles. Each user starts off with a blank 9 x 12 canvas, They can choose a color that represents how they feel at that moment and add an optional note along with it once ever hour, for instance, red signifying anger or blue signifying sadness. Thus, creating a painting of their emotions that the user can reflect upon each week/month.

💡Inspiration

The idea behind Emvas generated from wanting to create something where the entire userbase progresses collectively for a common goal. It then shaped into a painting app where each user can choose a color for a single pixel on a large painting, ultimately making a painting where every single user is the artist and creator. I quickly realized this idea wouldn't retain its users on a regular basis, there's nothing left to do after filling in your own pixel. Brainstorming further from there, I came to emvas.

The original rough design:

📖Challenges and Learning

I am a designer and have never ventured out of UI/UX, this was the first time I had to use Flutter for something and learned it as much as I could from scratch this weekend itself. I'm immensely confident about my idea and plan on continuing learning Flutter to properly develop and publish the app after the hackathon as well.

🍀 Features

History:

Saves the last 9 canvases that you can choose to save as an image, (will try to keep the notes along with the canvas in history but can only download image)

Settings:

Privacy: people don’t want others looking at their canvas maybe, set up a lock for the app
Refresh the current canvas

New Pixel:

'Draw' opens a color picker that may look like this:

Note:

Any notes the user may have for whatever pixel emotion they’re filling out, maxes out at 150 or 250 words and is then stored with that pixel.

Canvas:

9x12 canvas with 108 pixels, would probably last a week-2 weeks depending on how frequently the app is used.
Each pixel stores metadata for notes, time and date of creation along with it which appears when it is clicked on the canvas.

Potential future features:

These are some features that are inessential for the initial stages of the app but could be useful or interesting to add at a later stage.

freeworld/creative mode where there’s no limit to how many you color at a time or which pixel you paint, in simpler words, a pixel art app inside the main app to do your thing and have fun. (no notes section here)

As far as my skills currently stand, I’m incapable of implementing these features, maybe as I grow along, these are some potentially cool ideas for the future.

Synced Wallpaper

Instead of the canvas system, maybe a whole other take on it by using generative art, user enters colors and notes throughout the day and at the end of every day, the application creates an image or a ?mood-board? using AI and google image scourge all the colors of emotions given to it by the user. Essentially creating something like this computer processed abstract art when the user enters the colors blue, red, dark blue, yellow that day.

🎨Color Scheme

Color	Hex
Primary	#0a192f
Background	#ffffff
Unselected	#B9B6BE

Font

Heading: Recoleta

Empty Gallery

Body: Helvetica

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Final Design

Home Screen

Locked Home Screen

Card Pop up

Similar Applications

There were practically 0 leads for a similar application except a project called ‘Groodles - Art Therapy App’. It is currently inactive and there is no information if it was ever live either, last tweet from the Dev team was in September 2020 and the app is currently non existent on the play store and app store as well.

📐Usability Assessment

A 2015 research paper brought five art therapists together to evaluate a mobile application for art therapy, their paper mentions desirable features for an art therapy app.

Link to paper: https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/30539.pdf