Design and Mental Health

I've been inspired to do an animation relating to mental health, and here are some articles that are helping me to stay inspired.

The goal was to make it emotionally neutral. We didn't want to affect the user's mood or state, so we opted out of using facial expressions and extreme body poses.

 Just as physical health is vital for the functioning of the human body, so is mental health. Due to a sophisticated cocktail of factors – biological, genetic, personality and environment – everyone is prone to suffering from mental illness. Mental health cartoon videos are a great way to communicate messages that help tackle the subject.

When you create animated video, you can easily show the step by step development and escalation of the different psychiatric issues and conditions. This enables the ordinary person to identify these conditions in themselves or a loved one. Additionally, you can include the steps that one can follow after identifying the signs of escalation.

A solid understanding of Timing, Follow-through, Appeal, Anticipation, and Squash and Stretch will be useful in web design, for example. While concepts like Staging and Solid Drawing, however, are mostly irrelevant.

We refer to these Disney greats not because they tell us how to make cute characters dance around, but because they teach us how to have finite control over movement.

An appreciation for what can be expressed with easing is a big benefit of understanding the 12 classic principles. The principles of Timing, Spacing, Follow-through, Anticipation, and Exaggeration can all potentially be expressed with the easing you choose for an animation. These are factors that affect the way that weight, energy, and emotion of your animation are perceived; all potentially wrapped up in one property choice. This is why taking advantage of custom easing options (like cubic-bezier functions in CSS) is so important. Limiting yourself to only “ease-in” and “ease-out” arbitrarily limits your animation’s capacity for expression.

Timing and Spacing explain how to express weight, emotion, causality, and more with our animation choices. Follow-through and Anticipation explain how energy can be implied across movements. Squash and Stretch shows how manipulating the shape of an object can suggest traits about the material it’s made of.