Understanding the Design Space for Animated Narratives Applied to Illustrations

Animated illustrations are a genre of graphic design that communicate a specific contextualized message using dynamic visuals. While animated illustrations has been gaining popularity across different applications, exploring them through the storytelling lens has received limited attention. In this work, we introduce a design space for animated narratives applied to illustrations. The design space combines a dimension for object types of animation techniques with one for narrative intents served by such animation techniques. We derived our design space from the analysis of 121 high-quality animated illustrations collected from online sources. To evaluate the effectiveness of our design space, we ran a workshop with 18 participants. The results of our workshop indicated that the design space can be used as a tool that supports ideation and increases creativity for designing expressive animated illustrations.

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