Motion Graphics for NHS North West

I recently worked with an NHS team in Leyland to create a video celebrating their progress.

They were a great team to work with, telling me their story and providing ideas to work with help articulate the story they wanted to tell. I created warm, eye-catching illustrations to capture the events that they wanted to recognize.

I started with some rough sketches suggesting how the video could look and put together an animatic, which is a rough version to show the team and make sure we were on the right Lines. I also got to work with a professional voice actor Drew whose vocals really gave the final work.

Do you have a story your looking to tell visually? Whether you have a clear idea or you're not sure where to start get in touch and I can help you create your vision. Below are some stills taken from the video.

Graphics taken from a storytelling  video, animation and illustration.

Turbine (robot dog assistant) on the benefits of using animated videos for your marketing;

Woof! Using motion graphics for marketing offers several benefits:

  1. Attention-Grabbing: They use animation and visual effects, making them highly engaging. They attract attention more effectively than static images or text, helping your marketing materials stand out in a crowded digital landscape.
  2. Enhanced Branding: Motion graphics allow you to incorporate your brand's visual identity, such as logo, colours, and typography, into dynamic and animated elements. This helps reinforce your brand recognition.
  3. Improved Information Retention: Animated visuals can be more memorable Woof! Using motion graphics, you can present complex information, data, or whatever you like in a visually appealing way.
  4. Increased Engagement: People are more likely to engage with and share content that includes motion graphics. The dynamic nature of motion graphics can evoke emotions, spark curiosity, and encourage viewers to interact with your marketing materials, resulting in higher engagement rates.
  5. Versatility: Motion graphics can be used across various marketing platforms and formats, including social media, websites, presentations, advertisements, and videos. They are adaptable and can be tailored to suit different purposes, making them a versatile tool for conveying your marketing message consistently across different channels.
  6. Improved Storytelling: Motion graphic animation allow you to tell stories in a visually compelling way. By combining visuals, text, and audio, you can create narratives that resonate with your audience, evoke emotions, and convey the essence of your brand or product effectively.
  7. Increased Conversion Rates: Engaging motion graphics can have a positive impact on conversion rates. By capturing attention and creating an emotional connection, motion graphics can drive user actions, such as signing up for newsletters, making purchases, or sharing content, leading to higher conversion rates.
  8. Modern and Innovative Image: Incorporating motion in your marketing strategy demonstrates your brand is up-to-date with current trends and appeals to tech-savvy audiences.

Overall, motion graphics offer a powerful way to communicate your marketing message, enhance brand awareness, and drive audience engagement, leading to improved marketing outcomes.

Useful links;

Leyland Primary Care Network

Robot Dog Assistant

Can AI help answer your questions about illustration and graphic design?

Ok, so this is an experiment. I went to an AI workshop and learned how to add an AI chatbot to my website. 'Argh' I hear you cry that's a terrible idea, what about the personal service? Well, that's very much still here. This is me John, typing this post as a human, and I'm well aware that the human element is key to good communication and good design. That's a constant.

This is an experiment, so see if it can help around the edges of things I get asked a lot. "How much" and "how long will it take", are questions I get asked a lot, but it's not just that. I don't like chatbots. So I wondered how I could change my own opinion, and the answer I came up with was to add character.

Call it a dog and name it Turbine.

By giving it a character and a name, I'm hoping to soften the edges and make interaction easier. I could be wrong, I've read how AI is both a great new tool, and the end of the world, and I think it's better to understand it than not.

I've used CodyAI, and trained it on my own content, and wrote a big post on tone of voice, what to say and what not to say, and trained it on that too. Now the plan is to monitor the website and see what kind of responses I get. An experiment.

Want to give it a try, say hello here.

Get answers to your design questions

Can you draw sound?

Do you know what Phononics are? Can you draw sound?

Here's some new work I did for Professor Will J. Parnell for the International Phononics conference this year. As a creative, I love learning new things when I make animations and visuals - and this is a brilliant challenge.

"Phononic materials are engineered media that can manipulate waves propagating through them due to their synthetic and periodic architecture" Got that? My rough understanding is how soundwaves move through materials, and how soundproofing works.

Illustrating sound waves was pretty straightforward, with waveforms. Soundproofing materials was trickier. I looked at maths-based art (as that formed the exciting logo) with all its geometry, tesselation and symmetry, and the two parts came together nicely to carry the theme of the event. But where does the sound come from? These are the questions, and that's when the train the visual whoosh came in at the beginning.

Visual Minutes

Some great photos from an event at Z-arts & MADE in Old Trafford. 'Exploring The Creative Potential for Manchester to become a UNICEF Child-Friendly City'.

Photos by Lizzie Henshaw

Other images from live art events;

Animating for #WorldAutismAwarenessWeek

Helping the NHS Cheshire tell positive stories of the experience of autistic people for their Autism Awareness Strategy.

The NHS Cheshire & Wirral are launching their new autism awareness strategy and were looking for someone to help promote it with some animation. Hello.
What was so cool about this project, is how open to ideas they were when I suggested using characters to tell a 'day in the life' story. We are all keen to get it right and make it really engaging. So less data and more story. It became a really positive collaborative process.

The Characters
Taking feedback from a group, the team tested a few types of characters, from basic shapes to talking animals and, settled on people with easy-to-read expressions.
Robbie, who brought me into the project had seen my pandemic comic strip, Distance, and was keen to use that style to render the characters, giving the animation (motion graphics to be fair) a comic strip feel to tell the story, some of which was taken from his own life experience.

The Script

The script was created collaboratively. I wrote up a first draft, a jumping-off point to work from. The team then added, edited and in our online meeting gave me plenty of notes to create a more well-rounded, story while keeping a light-hearted tone. If you want funny stories about real life - crikey, the folks in the NHS have loads of them!

The Recording

I did a first run, and then Robbie suggested recording people with lived experience. This made perfect sense, and as we weren't budgeting for full lip-synched animation and made the piece a lot more authentic.

Summary

In discussion with the NHS team, we looked at details like the use of colour, sound and clear facial expressions of the characters of Andy and his pal Seema. Big thanks to Maddy, Sharon, Lesley, Robbie and Mahesh for getting me in to be their art director, and creator of this video animation.

Do you have a story to tell? Not sure how to get started with it or just need some ideas?
Get in touch to see how I can help bring it to life.

Unearthodox ways to get a new website

A website can be many things. Unearthodox is an organisation dedicated to research, change and getting their word out. Their website is a marketing and information resource to share their pioneering work.

My role was taking the concept designs made by Radley Yelder and building the site in WordPress. There were plenty of moving parts in getting the 250+ page website up and running, and WP scaled brilliantly to the task.

What do you use your website for, and what do you need it to do?

Getting down to the nitty gritty, the Unearthodox website had great design, and engaging case studies. The team wanted to be able to add content easily, and categorise projects so they could keep track of the diversity of their output. I added interactivity and motion to create a really modern website.

In terms of getting the word out, the new Unearthodox website uses Google Analytics 4, and pulls the statistics directly into the site, so no need to go to the rather complex looking Google control panel to see what visitors are clicking on, it's all there to see in the website dashboard. This is really helpful see whats popular and help your content strategy.

The project 'slider'.

Is it worth having a website in 2023?

I'm biased as a website designer, but a website will give you a level of control that social media can't. With your website sitting on your own bit of internet 'land', you can do whatever you want with it and choose how you present yourself to audiences and search engines.

Why not just use social media?

Sure, social media is easy to use and services are often free, but you'll never own the content you post. Social media can change how they function too (I'm looking at you twitter) which can have a knock-on effect of how you're seen. The key difference is SEARCH. On social media, you're just one of the thousands of companies being catered for, so how you appear in searches can be limited.

Is WordPress any good?

In my opinion, it's the best tool out there. Certainly, this 250+ page website would be impractical with other off-the-shelf website builders. Of course, not every website starts at 250 pages, and WP's scalability is one of its great assets. Need a 10-page website? WordPress will do it, and will still be there in 5 years as you grow to 50 or 100 pages (the area where other builders become more cumbersome).

I still see WordPress websites that are mishandled, and I think that's just WP becoming a victim of it's own popularity. WordPress is open source. That's great for progression and innovation, but means it can fall prey to intrusive plugins and page builders. Getting a skilled WordPress developer is key to a good WordPress website.

Podcast cover artwork

Here's a sample of podcast cover illustrations.

Check out these links for more graphic design and illustration work.

Latest Showreel

Here's my latest showreel with new work added. There's more to come with a few projects in the pipeline that I can't wait to share once they're live.

Later this year I'll be re-launching a newsletter to update folks when new work is added, head over to the home page and sign up.

Character design for GMFringe - 2023 Update

Here's a great way to get a lot of mileage from your illustration work, refreshing or updating what's already there.

For 'Liza Beenelli', the brand mascot of the Great Manchester fringe, it seems just right to update her image for 2023. She's had loads of updates, and she still looks great.

If you need illustration you want to get as much value as possible. Here it makes sense to keep the 'master' illustration and change little bits at a time, so we still recognise the brand mascot.

Brand mascots are cool.

And they work too. From Tony the tiger or the meerkats to Colonel Sanders. Having a character that captures your brand is a wonderful wordless attention-grabbing way to remind everyone who you are and what you do. All in a single relatable image. So why don't more companies do it?

I'm speculating, but from my experience, I'd say budget plays one part but also, consistency over time.

Many creative agencies have in-house graphic designers and outsource illustration, this is a practical and pretty sensible decision. Graphic design is more affordable to replicate in-house if there's a staff change later, using a style guide. With brand mascots in illustration, "drawing a new face" in the style of an existing image can be a much trickier ask* further down the line.

This project works because it's a direct relationship with the illustrator. It's John (hello, this is me). If a brand mascot it something you're thinking about to give your brand a bit of personality, I can happily answer any questions. How much? how long? More importantly, what is your brand's spirit animal?

Manchester Fringe festival illustration 2023

Wrap party update - 2022

April 22022.
Here's a great example of a full design package, for the GM Fringe. The central illustration has been reused across the different designs to maintain a strong identity while getting maximum value from a piece of the original illustration.

This is Liza Bee-nelli, the mascot for the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival. The character design is a reimagining of the Fringe Mascot from 2017, when she was first introduced to promote shows. For this new version, I started with a pencil sketch in ClipStudio, then took it into Affinity Designer, my new favourite playground for designing vector artwork, as the mascot had to be flexible enough to be recreated at any size.

I've been using Affinity designer for around 16 months now and it's more than proven itself as a professional workflow tool, it just clicks with me a lot more than illustrator ever did. In particular features like layers and gradients are just a joy to use.

Here's the previous character design mascot logo from 2016, designed in illustrator. She's come a long way!

Greater Manchester Fringe Festival
2016 Lisa mascot

My thoughts on AI art.

Artificial intelligence in art is a hot topic right now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it. Software like mid-journey and Dalli2 have disrupted the industry. At the time of publishing this blog there are two super high profile court cases happening in the USA, where the big stock image providers like Getty are taking to task the code the has consumed millions and millions of images to feed the logarithm. Time will tell how this plays out.

Graphic recording for live events

It's been a busy year and a lovely way to round it out live drawing the national firefighters' conference, back again for the second year.

Graphic recording, capturing talks given by the guests there was a lot to digest. A lot of focus was on well-being and health, and I'm pretty sure the firefighting service isn't alone in having this as a priority to discuss. It was their 25th year and they had a lot to celebrate. My favourite talk was on sleep by Dr Sophie Bostock, as after 2 days of drawing solid I was quite ready for a power nap!

Graphic recording, live scribing, live art, whatever name it is given here are some more samples of artwork created at live events.

To find out more about getting live art an event please get in touch.

Links

Big detailed Wall Illustration.

Here are a few excerpts from a large-scale wall art illustration I did recently. The final pieces are very big and I can't show you the whole thing, but this gives you a flavour of the final pieces.

These pieces are super detailed illustrations, not quite Where's Wally level wall artwork, but they did have to convey a lot of information and be engaging enough to stand the test of time if people were going to be seeing the work every day. It was a great project to work on and also time intensive!

Turning messages into illustration

The process of creating illustration work like this involved taking a lot of text content and then boiling it down. Turning those messages into visuals that were inspiring. Generating a lot of ideas and being imaginative with the messages was key to creating a good piece of wall art.

The whole project was done digitally, although it could have easily been done live on the wall. First off I created a series of sketches to cover each topic then needed depicting, and then these were arranged onto a larger canvas to find a good composition that would be narrative (tell a story), and not be confusing.

The sketches were drawn up in clip studio and converted into vector graphics from there. Vector conversion has come on a long way in recent years to convert pixel art into vectors, a format that can scale to any size. However, it's not perfect and still has a problem with very detailed artwork becoming muddy. Some of the original sketches had to be output at very high resolutions in order to convert without losing detail. The final pieces were tweaked by hand to smooth out any rough edges and then delivered to a very happy client.

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