MandalaGaba

All mandalas that are saved by users are sent to us in a daily digest. Most mandalas we find cool are posted to our Mandalagaba Instagram account and today I decided to start posting the very best of them here as well.

Yesterday, Ben posted the following post on Reddit’s r/InternetIsBeautiful sub-reddit:

Play with Recursive Drawing

Kablamo.

We’re getting a decent influx of traffic onto Mandalagaba. As of this writing it is still ongoing peaking right now at 45 thousand visitors for more than 2 million hits.

Yesterday’s number were also faily overwhelming (29k visitors).

Reddit waves are quite something when you ride them. They allow you to test drive the platform’s performance, you get tons of user feedback, users giving you bug reports and on top of that you’re getting massive traffic.

Pretty productive use of copy-pasting a link.

It’s an art to master Reddit. Everytime I try I botch it and 80% of Ben’s postings generate results, and sometimes even climb their way up to the sub-reddit’s front page.

We got about 120 comments, most of which are very positive and helpful. Some are negative of course and some are both, like this one “This is pretty cool but man... sometimes this can also act as a migraine aura simulator”. We got tons of polishing to do on the recursive drawing facet so this facet can be somewhat of a brain teaser right of the bat, even for us.

Lara Laubert, whose outstanding talent is visible on this website in various posts (like: New drawing styles made possible thanks to recursive drawing) has created the following House Stark sigil surrounded by a super rad mandala.

Never had we thought our online mandala maker could generate the following pieces of mandala magic :

The creator of these designs is Lara Laubert, an amazing artist and regular user of Mandalagaba.

Please check out her work here:

Lara’s instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laralaubert

Lara’s Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.fr/Lara_Laubert

Lara used one of Mandalagaba’s new features which is recursive drawing to create those awesome effects.

Now that the website has been separated into multiple facets (you can read the blog post Complete Mandalagaba overhaul for more information on this), you can find the recursive drawing features here:

https://plant.mandalagaba.com: This is a fun little guided drawing experience we published to let users play around with recursive drawing

Last week we pushed a big update. The idea behind it was to separate various features we had built into Mandalagaba these past two years. We had various reasons to do this, the main one being that the interface was becoming an puzzling mess. Our theory is that 90% of our users were only using 10% of Mandalagaba’s features and tools, and we decided that was somewhat of a pickle if we wanted to increase our user base.

Sure Mg is fun and all (from now on Mg is Mandalagaba) but we have been dealing with the same number of users for the past year although we have implemented tons of new features, redesigned the controls menu, built an online presence, created marketing content, etc. Basically we’re stuck at an average of 500 unique visitors per day. By actively promoting Mg we are gonna get bumps here and there. When we get a wave coming in from Reddit, or from a Facebook post or ad, we can generate enough interest to flow in thousands of people (up to 28 000 visitors last December on our Snowflake Designer Reddit post we did last year) These waves and bumps have a tail of course, but its usually fairly short lived and doesn’t bring in much peeps on the long term.

We have our theories on why this is and most of them have to do with the overdose of icons the old Mg was undergoing leading to users not really knowing what to do with the platform once they fiddled arround with a design or two.

We also know that implementing accounts will help out in terms of having people come back to the platform, and those are on the way.

Anywho, to solve this issue we started thinking about ways to make Mg more user friendly and understandable, and one of the first solutions we found was to divide Mg into its different facets.

Here’s a little breakdown of the awesome entertaining zen mantra-guru-massage-lounge tools and features Mg offers to the world for free (‘cause that’s how we roll):

Mandala creator

Tessellation builder

Snowflake manufactuer

Matchmaker

Replays

A network engine

A session fork tool

Session statistics

A plant designer (this is brand new)

Recursive drawing apparatus (also brand new)

So to make things easier, we separated Mg into 5 facets for now.

Behold:

The mandala maker:

Is found at: https://mandala.mandalagaba.com

In effect, Mandalagaba allows people to draw mandalas. That much is fairly easy to understand. The etymology of Mandalagaba come from the ancient latin word mandaleum, which means “For where thou art, there is a mandala in thy hearth”.

That was made up.

Anyways, here is what the new Mandala facet of Mandalagaba looks like:

In this new version, we took out a lot of stuff to give it a breather. We want people to have a hands on approach to using the interface, and we want to reverse those percentages cited above: we want 90% of the users to master 90% of the tools right off the bat.

This is just the first step of our simplification process, and there’s still lots to improve in terms of design, but we believe this is a good first step in the right direction.

For good measure, here’s a beautiful mandala design by one of our users from Brisbane, Australia in 107 pen strokes.

A tessallation builder!

Can be found at: https://tessellation.mandalagaba.com

To tessallate: To form into a mosaic pattern

In other words tessallation are mandalas that are not only multi-axial, but also multi-centered.

We applied over-simplification to the tessallation facet much like we did for the mandala maker.

These are the controls you are left to play around with:

Here is superb tessallation created by one of users from Pocos de Caldas in Brasil in 62 pen strokes.

This next one is created by the infinitely creative Hava who helps us out a lot at Mandalagaba, who is super nice and who defied the laws of rationality and creativity in regards to how she masters Mandalagaba (I can assure you this is one of the most simpler ones):

A snowflake manufactuer

Can be found at: https://snowflake.mandalagaba.com

We added a neat little twist to the mandala maker allowing user to design snowflakes in a jiffy. It’s also a pretty efficient tool to create transformer masks.

A plant grower!

Can be found at: https://plant.mandalagaba.com

Say hello to our new addition: the mandala plant creator!

Ben has been working hard on adding recusrsive drawing to the Mandalagaba engine, and now he’s got something pretty awesome to show for it. Most of the recursive drawing tools and parameters are only present on the “pro” facet of Mandalagaba which we’re gonna talk about in just a sec.

This plant growing facet is a cool variation that guides you into drawing alien like plants to which you can add leaves and flowers of different colors.

Mandalagaba Pro

Can be found at: https://pro.mandalagaba.com

If you want every single feature Mandalagaba has to offer all in one package, and that your brain is resilient to icon pandimonium, head over to the “pro” facet of Mandalagaba. We call this pro because only our hardcore power users tend to play with mosts the devices and gadgets this facet proposes.

It’s only in the Pro facet that you are going to find numerous paramters, tools and functions such as the recursions paramters, forking, access to match making, etc. Hopefully sooner than later we are goind to be dispatching all those tools more conveniently across Mandalagaba’s other facets.

The basics of Mandalagaba’s network engine

Mandalagaba has a robust networking engine at its core. Essentially this means it is possible to have multiple people drawing on the same session.

A word about Mandalagaba sessions:

Everytime one loads up Mandalagaba, he falls upon a random empty session. This sessions has an ID that can be found in the URL.

It is also displayed directly on top of your canvas:

This session ID is unique and links back directly to your session exactly as you last left it. This means that whatever you do on your session, everything is saved in real time and stays put indefinitely.

This also means that you can share this session ID with anyone so they can access your session at any time and start drawing on it. All they have to do is copy the ID and paste it right after the URL http://www.mandalagaba.com. (for example: http://www.mandalagaba.com/#uwCEeX).

A great number of people can connect at the same time on the same mandala session and collaborate together on creating amazing designs.

Mandala Matchmaking

We have been wanting to push the network engine aspect of Mandalagaba a bit further for some time. To do so, one feature we implemented recently is some sort mandala matchmaking engine.

The concept is very simple:

You head to http://match.mandalagaba.com and you are brought to a page where you wait for a random person to be matched to.

We added one filter option for now: your gender.

A very cool and insightful person by the name of Amy Walker made some awesome mandalas with Mandalagaba and printed them out on huge sheets of papers for people to colorfy them!

This happened during the annual Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival (http://stillmoon.org/) las week-end.

Write here…

Coloring our mandalas is something we are working on. We are going to let users decide whether they let other users color the mandalas they create on the platform. This concept will make much more sense when we will be adding user accounts and user galleries.

Another really cool aspect of this initiative is the collaboration side of it. Mandalagaba is built on a hefty network engine allowing collaborations between users, but for various reasons, most of whom are related to us not communicating enough about it, this features is unknown or misunderstood by 90% of our users.

Multiple facets of Mandalagaba either need to go through some fine-tuning or some simplifications to make our network engine more user friendly, and that is also something we are working.

In any case, we really appreciate that Amy did the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival.

We are currently working on making a simplified version of Mandalagaba.

The idea is to zenify the platform and strip it of all the little complex details and features that only appeal to our power users.

We want to produce an environment that will be ultra zen and that will focus only the essentials. We are also going to add cool stuff like background images and relaxation music for good measure.

On top of that we will have user account where it will be possible to actually save your mandalas and better network with others.

In addition to working on Mandalagaba, we are also putting together a little relaxing music project called InnerSelf Music.

In the same way creating mandalas through a computerized system such as Mandalagaba's provides a sense of empowerment to the user because of the immediate and simultaneous generation of multitudes of pen strokes on a canvas, producing simple music with the aim of soothing the mind is something we find quite fascinating.

You can listen to our first albums and subscribe to our playlists here: https://spoti.fi/2KI7Cml

The InnerSelf Music website: https://www.innerselfmusic.com/

Let us know what you think!

Also, if you produce relaxation music and want to placed in our playlists, shoot us a DM or an email.

As of yesterday, Mandalagaba is now a millionaire.

In pen strokes that is!

1 million pen strokes have been drawn on the platform since Ben published the website back in December 2016.

Awesomeness.

Man, producing what you just saw was frustratingly tough.

First time I set up the Leap Motion, I thought this was going to be easy. I thought I would be able to mass draw amazing mandalas just by waving my hands in the air like I just don't care. Turns out you have learn to master the Leap Motion before you manage to make anything more meaningful than a smudge on your screen.

Actually, the first thing that was super challenging was to get the stupid thing to left click. I followed the basic instructions and read best practices on the net on how to set it up but I was having a very hard time calibrating the damn thing. It kept on right clicking, making extremely irritating "Thump!" noises over and over again and being very good at being very imprecise.

At first I thought my Leap Motion had issues. I am still not putting that possibility aside entirely but here's the thing: the more I practiced using it, the more I mastered its quirks and managed to be precise.

That being said, I doubt I would ever be able to do anything fancy with it. To put this into perspective, I was thrilled to be able to produce the ultra simple mandala you saw in the video above. In other tryouts I had managed to do crazy things like changing colors (which I actually really got a hang of after a while), adding tessellation grids and even changing stroke thickness when I was really lucky, but making all that happen in a flawless single shot with no bugs felt impossible.