Mesh Monthly - A mid-summer recap - #MeshRefresh, New Designers, Around 2024
Hello! Welcome back to #MeshMonth, a regular recap of the latest industry and company news. In this edition, we’ll be recapping our #MeshRefresh, our time at New Designers and the Big D&T Meet and sharing some details about our upcoming workshop at Gravity Sketch’s Around 2024 Festival. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn or follow us on Instagram to be the first to know about upcoming courses, software updates and company news!
Company News!
#MeshRefresh - New courses, new content, new opportunities.
We hit July with a bang and ran a brand relaunch campaign coined: Mesh Refresh. This included an overhaul of our course structure, social media content, branding and company direction. We’re now adjusting our services to focus on providing new opportunities for the next generation of innovators and designers.
The eagle eyed of you may have seen our site has had a little ‘facelift’. Our new bold, yet neutral appearance aims to represent the strides we’re taking to make VR an integral part of the design and technology curriculum without disrupting the natural workflow and core skills designers need to build.
Our courses have also been updated! To align with the new Gravity Sketch Certification Scheme and ensure we continue to provide the highest quality training, we’ve reviewed and adjusted our existing standardized courses and bespoke training packages. Our beginner and intermediate training has been transformed into Certified Designer and Certified Professional Accelerators. As with any new software or skill, it’s crucial to start on the right foot and master the fundamentals. These new courses offer an in-depth, in-person introduction to various Gravity Sketch tools and techniques, all aligned with the certification scheme and completed in as little as four hours. Our courses are engaging and easy to follow, featuring industry-oriented activities and challenges. Held in-person and up-to-date with the latest software changes, you can access immediate support from our certified trainers, eliminating the hassle of poor internet connections, hard to follow YouTube videos and delayed email responses. For now, we have paused our advanced course to focus on our accelerator courses and bespoke training. Be sure to follow our social media channels to be the first to know when the advanced course is re-released.
Our bespoke training package continues as normal however, we have now added preset team training and group onboarding sessions. These predominantly follow a standardised course, however our team will adjust the activities and add in extra content to align to your needs and industry. As always, headsets are provided and we can conduct training at your location, wherever you are in the UK!
In response to community feedback, we’re now offering a series of online support. Our core training programs and group sessions will always be in-person however, we’ve received requests for 1:1 support across the globe and now offer a new online, bespoke 1:1 training service with our co-founder, Priten. In addition, we’re also offering a certification assessment service and free certification reviews to help you earn your Gravity Sketch certifications. For educational institutions who we’re not able to support due to distance, we now offer a syllabus set up program where we can write a bespoke lesson plan for your students, tailored towards a specific project or design brief. To support this, we would recommend that you book on to a 1:1 training session so that we can walk you through the syllabus and ensure you have all the material and software understanding that you need to teach your students.
The Education Pledge
As part of our Mesh Refresh, we’ve pledged to prioritise support for Design and Technology education in schools and colleges to help inspire the next generation of innovators and designers. To assist this, we’re offering cost effective training packages, specialist teaching resources and free workshops for secondary schools across the UK. As designers who have gone through the design education pipeline from school to university to industry, we understand the importance of experiencing new opportunities to elevate our design work. Having read the Design Council’s Design Economy report indicting the rapid decrease of A-level and GCSE entries, we knew we had to offer some support to boost numbers again. We do not anticipate that our workshop will return numbers to where they used to be however, we want to be a source of inspiration for students to see where design can take them and let them experience new technologies to reignite the creative spark within them.
Degree show and exhibition road trip
In support of our Education Pledge we’re taking the initiative to actively engage with the local design community and have been travelling around the UK visiting a number of industrial design degree shows and STEM exhibitions. Over the past few months, we’ve visited Nottingham Trent, De Montfort and Loughborough University’s degree shows, exhibited at Leicester Grammar School’s BrightSparks STEM fair and The ‘Big D&T Meet’.
We had an awesome experience at the 'Big D&T Meet,' a national conference for Design and Technology teachers in the UK. Our stand, we showcased how Gravity Sketch can enhance classroom learning through interactive demos and design activities. As former D&T students, is was incredibly inspiring to see the passion that is shared amongst the community and the drive that teachers have to support the next generation. A big thank you to Kate Finlay and her team for organizing such a standout event.
It has been a fantastic opportunity to share the world of immersive design and introduce teachers, lecturers and students to Gravity Sketch. We cannot wait for the next academic year to start and begin to bring the new age of design into the classroom and lecture theatres! Here’s a few of our highlights from the events:
Around 2024!
We’re extremely proud to share that we’ve been given the opportunity to conduct a live Gravity Sketch workshop at this year’s Around Festival! The details of the workshop is currently under wraps however, we can share that the workshop will be free to join (registration is required) and it will take place on Thursday, 19th September 2024, 8:15pm → 10:15pm BST.
For those that may be new to Gravity Sketch, Around is an annual event hosted by Gravity Sketch to ‘celebrate the work of creative minds by opening up new possibilities to think, create, and communicate in 3D’. It’s a fantastic event, jam packed with engaging talks, live music and interactive workshops ranging from the footwear industry to automotive and sculpture design . We’re looking forward to:
‘The evolving role of education in design’ by Lance Rake and Jack Winkler.
Gravity Sketch Updates!
July saw the launch of Gravity Sketch's 6.3 update introducing several new features! Key additions include; texture mapping, new export options for timelapses and video turntables, and a revised file management layout for enterprise users. The update also sees the launch of a community creations folder, showcasing some of the fantastic work from around the globe. We’re really looking forward to showcasing these new updates in our next training sessions with you. Fow now, check out this short video by Gravity Sketch, highlighting some of the new features:
That’s about everything for this edition of Mesh Monthly. Be sure to follow our socials as we have some really exciting content and opportunities coming up!
See you in the next one!
-Priten :)
