# data[].attributes.body
Other-worldy motives and ideas that inspire their image making

“I’m a big collector and have always been intrigued by objects, especially how much you can tell about someone by their belongings...”

Using objects or motives in their work to create narrative and story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opulent, sleazy and filled with narrative: The illustrated world of Alice Bloomfield keeps on growing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The multi-talented, multi-faceted creative is constantly on the lookout for new ways to develop her art, and keeps a pocket full of references for when inspiration strikes.

# data[].attributes.body
‘Storytelling is regarded as a central tenet of illustration practice. [...] The ability to convey narratives successfully, here meaning to communicate as intended while maintaining audience interest, should not be taken for granted. It requires much deliberation, planning and development, both intellectually and through creative practice.’

Gannon, R. & Fauchon, M. (2021), ‘Authorship’ in Illustration Research Methods, London: Bloomsbury. p. 26

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
“If The Marks Are Perfect, How Can You Relate To Them?”: An Interview with Gareth Brookes - The Comics Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gareth Brookes may be responsible for the first comic about historical medieval plagues that was inspired by a real life Drake related Tik Tok craze, and if he’s not, he’s certainly responsible for the first one to be made utilizing pyrography. Joe Decie catches up with the cartoonist about why Brookes keeps attacking the page...and whether he can even stop himself at this point.

# data[].attributes.headline
Narration, Livia de Magistris Practitioner

# data[].attributes.subject
Narration, Livia de Magistris Practitioner

# data[].attributes.body
Livia Describes her work as “A cross between people, machines and animals”, you can tell that her work

Her work is inspired by medieval art, and has been influenced by the decoration in her family home and her father who studied ancient art

She mainly work analogue and digital

I like the use of 3D processes and how she has incorporated traditional work aswell

Her characters are also quite surreal and silly which I like

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Livia De Magistris' 3D world, you'll come across a whole host of strange beings. Some have heads, some have horns and some have bodies made up of blocks and wacky contraptions. Livia sees her creations as "a cross between people, machines and animals", for whom she creates a magical habitat to exist within. Such work is inspired by the strange creatures that pepper medieval art and imagery; her father studied the history of ancient art and her family home has "always been full of grotesque images, especially from illuminated manuscripts". Outside of her immediate surroundings, Livia also cites the sculptor Marisol Escobar as a key influence, famous for her folk-infused humanoid figures.

To create her creatures Livia hops between a multitude of methods, usually the result of "various transitions between analogue and digital", often starting with plasticine and pencil drawing, which she then alters digitally with Nomad, Blender, Illustrator or Procreate. Not stopping there, when she's completed her figures she'll print them in Risograph and then scan them, all in the pursuit of a film-like effect. Outside of her personal 3D practice, Livia freelances as an illustrator and regularly collaborates with the publisher Stolen Books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Are Livia De Magistris' 3D creations people, machines, or animals? It's up to you to decide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To make her fun artworks, Livia De Magistris non-stop hops between analogue and digital methods.

# data[].attributes.headline
Varrom - The storytelling Issue - also Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Varrom - The storytelling Issue - also Essay

# data[].attributes.body
Julian Glander p.10-12

"Narrative is the most powerful tool an artist can use to get their audience personally invested in a work. When youre held in suspense and curious to see where a story is going, you become totally open and let that story into your mind completely. it feels like magic.2

"...To me narrative is a promise and fulfilment of that promise, Every narrative piece starts with a 'promise'...the best ending is one that subverts the expectations you set up....but for the story to feel satisfying, the end has to be connected to the beginning in a meaningful way."

"...But whenever you make something with a start and end, narrative gets loaded into it. There's nothing you can do to stop it...."

Molly Mendoza p.93-103

Graphic novel about getting lost and trying to find the way back to their home

"To me, it's a story about finding ways to love and to forgive yourself."

# data[].attributes.body
Sophie Miyoko Gullbrants p.26-33

"...Gullbrants has been seeking warmth, drawing out the emotionality of complex stories and encouraging us to connect."

Their work narrates and evokes feelings of intimacy and softness.

"Light and shadow is interesting. On one hand, its a technical thing, they help to control colour and focus what you're looking at. On the other - thinking more conceptually - darkness, or shadow, symbolises the unknown, and for me the uncertainty throughout the pandemic. Light is what we're always reaching towards."

# data[].attributes.body
About rewilding the scottish highlands

Specifically the Caledonian highlands, so I will be researching about maybe plants from the this forest or anyother things that are special to it

# data[].attributes.body
"...Sign writing function as both ornament the decorative and ornament the communicative as well as being illustrative or used illustratively to tell a story."

"...Aesthetically and visually appealing to convince the public (to enter a circus)."

Using different colours and shadows on the letters to "Create depth or create interests..."

# data[].attributes.body
Waldron, H. (2022)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My work has always mirrored my life. Making for me has always been my way of processing what I experience, intuitively giving form to the thoughts and feelings as a way of navigating. Life is a…

# data[].attributes.body
Posture, J. (2023)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A conference on the history of the concept

# data[].attributes.body
Work inspired by nature and japanese folk art

Stencil illustrations, designs, and cyanotype prints using natural pigments. She works with "...magazine page collages, oil pastel, found objects, thrown-out plastic bags"

Work influenced by traditional Japanese stencil textiles and the Mingei Japanese folk art movement.

Believes in the concept of "mushin" 無心 - working selflessly without any agendas

I like how she uses natural paints, which really compliments the themes of birds and nature. Also the simple, yet elaborate ornamental shapes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bird paintings and art prints sustainably and locally made in Upstate New York with a Japanese folk art aesthetic by stencil artist Mayuko Fujino

# data[].attributes.body
Inspired by botanical art, medival lighting art, ornamentation and calligraphy. All of her work is meticullusly hand painted and reminds us of the renaissance era. She mainly uses watercolour and uses natural pigments as paint.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
2015-2023: "Calligraphic Ball" - an exhibition of calligraphy for students of the school of Evgeny Dobrovinsky. Littera Incognita, Moscow, Russia

2015-2023: Exhibitions dedicated to the Day of Slavic Calligraphy at the School of Historical Calligraphy, Moscow, Russia

2016-2019: Medieval Festival/International Exhibition of Calligraphy and Illuminations in Gubbio, Italy.

2017, September 1 - 10: 6th International Exhibition of Calligraphy at the Contemporary Museum of Calligraphy in Sokolniki, Moscow, Russia

2017, November 23 - December 3: Calligraphy exhibition "Italic-Italik". Promgraphics Gallery, Moscow, Russia

2018, April 24 - June 7: The exhibition "Primroses. Watercolors and drawings by masters of botanical illustration", Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia

2018, November 1 - 11: The exhibition of botanical painting and illustrations "Plants. Myths and Legends", Moscow, Russia

2018, October 18 - November 18: The exhibition "Botanical Painting. Science and Art". The School of Watercolors by Sergei Andriyaka, Moscow, Russia

2019, October 1 - 6. "Cyrillic: Yesterday and Today". Exhibition Hall of the St. Petersburg Union of Artists, St. Petersburg, Russia

2020, October 24: International exhibition "United by Calligraphy", organizer: Asociatia Liber la Educatie, Cultura si Sport, Bucharest, Romania

2021, January 9 - 15. Christmas calligraphy exhibition "Welcome Aleph" / Art Behind Glass. Promgraphics Gallery, Moscow, Russia

2021, April 6 - 8. The exhibition "Glagolitic and Cyrillic". Ivanovsky Hall of the Russian State Library, Moscow, Russia

2021, October 7 - 30. The work "Maya" was exhibited at the personal exhibition of the photographer Manon Ouimet as part of the presentation of the book "My Name is Maya". Belfast, Ireland.

2021, December 16 - January 23, 2022. International exhibition "Artist's book. Summing up". Nikolai Ostrovsky Museum, Moscow, Russia

2022 March 2 - April 4. Exhibition "Margoski". Ryazan, Russia

2023 May 12 - June 12. Exhibition "Red and Black. Graphics, calligraphy, ornament" Organizer: Association of Artists of Botanical Art. Moscow, Russia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2015-2023: "Calligraphic Ball" - an exhibition of calligraphy for students of the school of Evgeny Dobrovinsky. Littera Incognita, Moscow, Russia 2015-2023: Exhibitions dedicated to the Day of Slavic Calligraphy at the School of Historical Calligraphy, Moscow, Russia 2016-2019: Medieval Festival/International Exhibition of Calligraphy and Illuminations in Gubbio, Italy.

# data[].attributes.body
Works using a mix of abstract elements and is inspired by sci-fi. Very dreamy work and all his work has a sense of a story behind it

I like the use of 3D work as well as the fun textures. The colour palettes are also interesting. Also the use of the airbushed look for black colours and shadows

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Overclocking his mini but mighty Wacom tablet, Germany-based designer and illustrator Sandro Rybak creates texturally rich flat worlds that lean heavily into the fantasy genre. For Sandro, his work is "usually a mix of abstract elements" plucked from anywhere, whether it's alchemistic copper engravings to childhood cartoons, video games to comics. Like his sci-fi inspirations, he finds that his practice zips and zaps all over the place, touching on a medley of unexpected sources. "I get bored very quickly by my work," he states.

So far, his editorial practice has been featured in The New York Times, and his illustrations on album covers like Vienna-based indie pop singer Oska's debut EP Honeymoon Phase. Wherever it pops up, Sandro's appreciation for story, space and place is on full display - something he might have picked up from modernist painter Agnes Pelton, which is another inspiration of his. "Everything feels like a whimsical dream state frozen in time," he says. "I'm trying to give my artworks at least a small sense of a story, so they feel like there might be a whole universe behind the artwork."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sandro Rybak envisions new worlds in his textural designs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Overclocking his mini but mighty Wacom tablet, Germany-based designer and illustrator Sandro Rybak creates texturally rich flat worlds that lean heavily into the fantasy genre. For Sandro, his work is "usually a mix of abstract elements" plucked from anywhere, whether it's alchemistic copper engravings to childhood cartoons, video games to comics.

# data[].attributes.body
Work is about questioning "...ideas of beauty, form and decoration in design..."

Wants to create "...an enchanting world worth living in."

I like the hand quality that her work has, and the feeling that her work is free of restrictions - feels very playful

"...Investigating post-colonial, feminist perspectives in design in order to highlight the connections between “our visual culture, systemic power and sustainable futures”..."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Benedetta Crippa combines graphic design and ornamentation to create enchanting visual worlds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Stockholm-based graphic designer investigates the links between visual culture, systemic power and sustainable futures through her decorative design work.

# data[].attributes.body
Using watercolours, ink and gouache she creates intricate details in her patterns and illustrations., making it authentic and elevating each piece of work

I like the use of watercolours and fun bright colours as well as the patterns, such as for packaging, fruit patterns or soap box illustrations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Watercolour illustrations for packaging, publishing and editorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Enya Todd is a professional watercolour illustrator working in the fields of packaging, publishing and editorial. Enya Todd is based in the UK.

# data[].attributes.body
Looking at a few different designs and patterns in the book to try and inspire some of my work. I would like to try and include some of the botanical looking work, as I have not only been looking at some practitioners who are inspired by nature but also as I believe it fits well to the rewilding centre theme

# data[].attributes.headline
Ornaments By Natascha Kubisch and Pia Anna Seger

# data[].attributes.subject
Ornaments By Natascha Kubisch and Pia Anna Seger

# data[].attributes.body
I love their use of 3D materials, bold colours and textures, as well as the graphic design elements that add a feeling of depth and composition. Their surreal visuals are also really interesting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A visual artist based in Seoul, creating 3D +Abstract artworks.

# data[].attributes.headline
CJ from Black Lodge Press Practitioner - Persuasion

# data[].attributes.subject
CJ from Black Lodge Press Practitioner - Persuasion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Interviews with Radical Growers + Makers.

This new part of my blog is an excuse for me to reach out to people I admire and ask the personal burning questions I have, which wouldn't necessarily be appropriate under any other setting.

To start with a bang im featuring the brilliant CJ from Black Lodge Press. When I first came across CJ's beautiful political prints and posters I had a real heart beating, mind racing moment, I was immediately in love with his bold brilliant imagery and hungry to see more of it. it felt like the visual stimulus id been hunting for, each image more inspiring than the next. Im pretty sure you'll feel the same.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Interviews with Radical Growers + Makers - CJ from Black Lodge Press - Rosanna morris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interviews with Radical Growers + Makers. This new part of my blog is an excuse for me to reach out to people I admire and ask the personal burning questions I have, which wouldn't necessarily be appropriate under any other setting.

# data[].attributes.body
Surfers against sewage is a movement and campaigning charity against pollution in the ocean

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Life in our seas is so diverse but that biodiversity is under threat. A recovered ocean will benefit all of us. But why is it needed now?

# data[].attributes.body
I came across this video and find it deeply moving, I also like the use of text at the end of the video which I think I might like to include in some of my work

"95% of our oceans remain undiscovered, are we killing what weve yet to discover"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Killed by plastic pollution: unknown animal washes up on Cornwall beach. #TheCreature

# data[].attributes.body
Here I managed to find some quotes that I will be using in some of my work, they have a lot of percentages and statistics that I think will work very well to grab attention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Will you join us as a member, and fight for a thriving ocean? The blue planet you love is dying. Our entire way of life is under threat. But there is always hope. You can help us run change-making, ocean-saving campaigns, by giving vital funds to run protests, drive petitions, and fight for...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Use our real-time map to track sewage discharge and pollution risks around the UK.

# data[].attributes.body
Some photos I found with protestors, I like the different slogans they used and especially here, the use of the red colour to capture attention

# data[].attributes.body
I also like the use of the many puns in the slogans used

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Genderfail is a project devised and run by writer and facilitator Be Oakley with the primary aim of publishing the work of queer, trans and non-binary artists writers and curators. Started in 2015, Be describes the importance of such a venture: "Publishing is personal, it is a means of livelihood and a tool for the dissemination of imperfect but urgent content". The type design branch of the project arose in 2018, when Be was in graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University. Its first visual impetus was the poster "Mother Nature is a Lesbian", as Be explains that upon seeing it they were "so struck by the message and the beautiful vernacular handwriting." Prior to this moment, Be attests to having "no knowledge" of type design, but an understanding of how "powerful" it had the potential to be.

To create the typefaces, Be's process begins with a healthy dose of research, usually, a lot of googling of protest events which then leads them to "a very imperfect search engine". Sometimes, however, Be has the chance to use more efficient sources, and for their recent Seize Control of the FDA font they gathered information from the ACT UP oral history project. After researching, Be will then use photographic documentation from the protest event/s and then in Photoshop, edit out and crop each letter they are using. "Once the letters are cleaned and cropped from the images I bring each letter into illustrator", they explain, "in illustrator I do a simple live trace and tinker with the controls to get the resulting vector to look as close as possible to the original photo." Then, after the vendor is created, Be copies and pastes each letter into the intuitive type design program Glyphs Mini. Here, Be finds it important to stress that they are not a type designer - "the way I turn photo documentation into a useable open source typeface may not be typical to the way 'skilled' type designers work" - but their use of such media and resources proves how powerful and fruitful it can be when the right tools are put into the hands of people with radical intentions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Design can be a powerful tool for the creation of radical content": Genderfail builds typefaces from hand-drawn protest posters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Compelled by the lack of typography available from queer, trans and non-binary artists and designers, founder Be Oakley wants to embed radical histories within design.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Designers share open-access posters to amplify #WomenLifeFreedom protests in Iran and beyond

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the face of protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a platform of open-access graphics calls for audiences to harness modes of visual revolt in protests and online.

# data[].attributes.body
Uses bold lines and shapes, and only monocromatic colour palette is used, similar to Black Lodge Press with big fonts and text to grab attention and really interesting textures

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

# data[].attributes.body
Cameras are faster, and more acurate but courtroom artists they are still used in high profile cases

between transparency and integrity, centres around question of if its even possible to observe the justice system without changing the course of justice

courtroom artists were originally used as they do not distract the people testifying as photographers cameras in the 30s were loud and distracting and many believed that the courtroom was made a mockery of through newsreels, photographers and journalists.

For many years there has been a question of wether they should be allowed, as cameras and technology has become a lot more discrete, however live viewings and televised showings are still not really accepted by judges. This is due to a few different trials where it went smoothly with journalists and some where it was disruptive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier this year, the city of New York closed off several blocks around the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Instead of early morning commuters, the sidewalks around the building were flooded with reporters, photographers, and camera people. They were there to capture the arraignment of former president Donald Trump. Members of the media were so desperate to

# data[].attributes.body
Using Field Notes, shows process and whats "contained within". Mainly depicts work through imagery as opposed to writing

Embraces Nature, and quest is to get to know a place , wants to communicate the feeling of being in the place, and not just describing her feeling and experience of being there

wanting to integrate past and presence and materials together to create the feeling of being.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rachel Lillie Interview - The In-between: An Ode to Epping Forest by Fugueur

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interview with illustrator and artist Rachel Lillie about her exhibition at the Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow - 'The In-between: An Ode to Epping Forest'. 
Recorded by John Rogers at the Vestry House, July 2018

# data[].attributes.body
Discusses her Graduate residency project about London Kings Cross. Her work is about her experience of a place and not objective. And how her work shows that a place doesnt just exist as a place but with the memories that people have in that place, as well as how the same place has many different meanings to different people like a sort of layering of different memories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Her intentions from the offset were to create something incredibly subjective, and she's keen to impress the notion that "this was always a body of work that would be a documentation of my experience of a place, not an objective documentation of all that Kings Cross is and has been. It would be disingenuous and disrespectful to those who've lived there for generations to pretend I could ever create a realistic portrayal of such a complex site in six months." Wandering the streets, Peony replicated this "flaneur-type meandering" online, visiting message boards and speaking to people about their memories of the area. "I'd also visit the British Archives and see what I came across," she tells us. "These random interventions would normally spark seemingly unrelated paths of research (for one week I remember doing intense research into the poet Rimbaud who lived in Kings Cross in the 1800s, another week I'd be frantically trying to find one particular house mentioned in a random interview from 2005 with a support worker who went in foster care in Kings Cross)." Rather than complicating the work, this overlap of tangential information became the work. Peony continues: "everything that forms a place lies layered up on top of each other like silt, all present for you to sift through until you find something that resonates with you personally."

From this concept, she produced a hefty portfolio of work. There's a 12-page comic titled Nottingham to London, for example, which documents Peony's conversation with an elderly man playing one of the public pianos in St Pancras station. "He told me that for a while he'd been visiting London from Nottingham, where he lives in an assisted living centre. He said he missed playing for an audience so much that it was worth the journey just to play for the travellers and see them enjoy his music," she outlines. "He had to rush off to get his train and I never even got his name. I look for him every time I go through St Pancras nowadays, but so far I haven't seen him again." This story exists alongside comics detailing other serendipitous events. Besides that, there are a plethora of poetry pieces; the art form making up a large portion of Peony's practice. And observational drawings - one of the first things she started doing during the residency. "These drawings became something like the connecting points on a spiders web; I like that put together, they form something of a map of transitional moments in Kings Cross over a number of months," she says.

Once the pandemic hit, Peony's process, of course, had to change. After a brief (or not so brief) stint of worrying how a project documenting a place can go ahead when you can't actually go to that place, she realised it could actually be a good thing. "Instead of changing track completely I was just being forced to sit down and look at my work and the site from a new perspective," she explains. And all that looking paid off, for she realised several things about Kings Cross and what the work was saying about how places like it can exist. "They exist only partly in the physical 'now', the hard-fast-concrete present. In all other ways they exist in the set of connections, associations and memories we individually blanket them with," Peony says. "All this history and all these old lives and new lives layer and intertwine, and during our ordinary day-to-day, we only let in a portion of that. Every place exists in a different world for each person, in a way. What for me is a thorough-fare, for her is a spot of respite, for him a holy ground." That ability, for a place to be so many different things to so many different people - a kind of "invisible layering"- is what Peony began to focus on: "Something that begun as purely responding to a site turned into an act of remembering and reconstructing that place the best way I, as a visitor and voyeur, could."

Overlay is available to visit until 27 September.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Peony Gent's six-month documentation of Kings Cross examines how layered connections, associations and memories make a place

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The project features comics, poems, and observational drawings that Peony created during a residency with the House of Illustration. She details her considered approach to documenting a location and what she learned through that process.

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting colour palettes that she uses, and also the airbrush look is something I would like to try out

Fun bold and squigelie lines, feels flowy and playful

Also like the text that is included in the work

# data[].attributes.headline
Between an Illustrator and an urban place text - Documentation

# data[].attributes.subject
Between an Illustrator and an urban place text - Documentation

# data[].attributes.body
Discusses cities and the life that exists and interacts with that space as well as different people and their experiences and how that shapes the place as well as culture. They mention how illustration can convey these finer details of peoples experiences within a city. Cardoso also mentions how important public spaces and communities are and how illustration can help make complex themes more accessible such as public and social spaces as well as gentrification.

# data[].attributes.body
Short gifs and moving images

Otherworldly and cute characters

Creates Narrative through characters, gifs as well as books such as the "Jumble wood"

# data[].attributes.body
Creates hand rendered images of "...Everyday moments of urban life."

Narrates short snippets of everyday life that pass us by but we usually don't pay much attention to

# data[].attributes.body
“Art can be a great reminder that there isn’t an emotion you can feel that isn’t being felt by someone else right now, somewhere in the world.”

Jordan uses short poetic words and sentences within their comics to show stories. Even though these narratives and messages are quite short, they are very impactful and make the reader feel certain emotions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jordan Bolton creates deeply moving comics derived from simple language and imagery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After successfully writing a screenplay for a film but not having the resources to make it, the Manchester-based creative found himself turning to comics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
JULIAN GLANDER <3<3<3<3<3<3 The love of my life~

# data[].attributes.headline
Case Study - Julian Glander - also Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Case Study - Julian Glander - also Essay

# data[].attributes.body
Short gifs and animations

squishy and fun characters

3D processes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
GLANDERCO: The grafix practice of 3D artist Julian Glander

# data[].attributes.headline
Theoretical Research - Mi Youren's and Sima Huai's Joint Poetry Illustrations

# data[].attributes.subject
Theoretical Research - Mi Youren's and Sima Huai's Joint Poetry Illustrations

# data[].attributes.body
Discusses Mi Youren's and Sima Huai's work within Chinese art and how the poetry creates a stronger understanding alongside the image.

"...A painting like this is... a literary work, its feelings suggested by allusions in the accompanying poetry."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mi Youren’s and Sima Huai’s Joint Poetry Illustrations on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SUSAN BUSH, Mi Youren’s and Sima Huai’s Joint Poetry Illustrations, Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 64, No. 2 (2014), pp. 97-118

# data[].attributes.body
Bright and bold colours

Fun animations, with interesting concepts, spacing and timing and switches

Silly characters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Illustration, design and animation

# data[].attributes.body
Really fun colourful visuals and animations and a really fancy satisfying wesite :0

Music Video - Siamés "MR FEAR"

Nice use of panels within the animation to convey the narrative

Usted Señalemelo - Horizonte

Photocopy effect, and nostalgic look and feel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Directors & creators based in Buenos Aires Argentina.

# data[].attributes.body
A Poem about someone dreaming being is a field with someone and birds flying above them, then a black bird comes and kills the other bird and they turn around and the person is alone in the dream.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Once in a dream (for once I dreamed of you)We stood together in an open field;Above our heads two swift-winged pigeons wheeled,Sporting at ease and courting full in view.When loftier still a broadening darkness flew,Down-swooping, and a ravenous hawk revealed;Too weak to fight, too fond to fly, they yield;So farewell life and love and pleasures new.Then as their plumes fell fluttering to the ground,Their snow-white plumage flecked with crimson drops,I wept, and thought I turned towards you to weep:But you were gone; while rustling hedgerow topsBent in a wind which bore to me a soundOf far-off piteous bleat of lambs and sheep.

# data[].attributes.body
A quick video I watched, I liked the look of the traditional style when working digitally/animating, wanted to try it out.

# data[].attributes.body
Bold, bright and playful work

Their 3D gifs are really cute and fun

2D and 3D illustrator and gif artist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I make gifs. Plush! / Fb / Insta / NFTs / Tweets / Tiktok / iMessage food stickers / iMessage cat stickers

# data[].attributes.body
Designer, animator and illustrator

I came across the website and the frog gif instantly stood out to me. The smooth animation is really fun

Tactility and materiality/craft is also really playful and fun

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tony Babel | Multidisciplinary Designer, Animator & Illustrator. | Connect with them on Dribbble; the global community for designers and creative professionals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Looking towards her influences, Margo ponders that "maybe in another life I would have been part of an indie rock band or something," with an avid interest in music and story-telling. "My interests tend to fluctuate a bit," currently into "learning more about psychology and the human brain." Poetically, Margo tells us that "a lot of inspiration ends up coming from the rush I feel by soaking in lots of beauty all at once," a sensation felt after activities like listening to music, long walks or "being surrounded by nature, preferably with friends." With a feeling that is immediately recognisable in the work she produces, Margo describes feeling an energy fill her chest when overcome by these emotions.

When lacking in inspiration however it's Vimeo that is Margo's comfort:"I love animation so much, and it makes me feel such a rush to go and make stuff, I usually watch whatever is being recommended on my feed." Returning to her roots, this is an inspiration lingering from her childhood obsession with "cartoons and anime," which initially got Margo into drawing.

The signature concept across the illustrator's work is one which "orbits around the topic of human relationships," she explains, in doing so expressing "very humane, common feelings such loneliness, longing, self doubt, wonder and love," to name a few. This theme goes hand in hand with the expression of movement felt in Margo's illustrations, pointing out how "I'm inspired by movement and by things that dance a little bit." Using the example of the "wavy" elements of her work being referential to Margo "thinking about leaves blowing in the wind or light reflecting in the water." More playfully, recurring features also seem to be "big pants, flowy hair, and silly dancing poses," translating the joyful, simple pleasures found in normal life.

A recent project of Margo's is a short zine she made and published on Instagram, Kerning/tracking, made when reflecting on the polarising nature of internet debates, "and how the comments sections on facebook or twitter are often so filled with hatred." Finding an interest in the anonymity of internet trolling, as well as the lack of tone of voice innate to messaging, Margo considered "nonverbal cues and nonverbal ways of communication, that often guide us when talking to one another face to face." Kerning/tracking therefore acts as a "visual catalogue of different types of nonverbal means of communication," drawing iconographic visual and physical cues amongst written text, telling a narrative of its own. Utilising medium, method, image and text, Margo concludes, "it feels great when all these little factors come together to tell the story you want to tell," explaining that the title is a "poetic take" on what kerning and tracking really means.

Margo aims to expand on some of the ideas found in her Kerning/tracking zine, most likely re-contextualising the project to be about "communication in current times." Hoping to look further into "tools that might help dialogue occur more easily," she's also aware (and critical) of the "power imbalances, social and cultural factors that are obstacles to a fully empathetic kind of communication." Yet, what she has found is that "communication is a lot about looking outwards and inwards at the same time, constantly deconstructing yourself and asking 'what is keeping myself from being open to this idea'...or something like that."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Margo Ferreira's vulnerable and communicative practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Looking towards her influences, Margo ponders that "maybe in another life I would have been part of an indie rock band or something," with an avid interest in music and story-telling. "My interests tend to fluctuate a bit," currently into "learning more about psychology and the human brain."

# data[].attributes.body
Squishy and soft looking characters and work

Really nice soft colours as well

Human connection and intimacy

Food is also a topic that appears in her work a lot

I would also like to try and create work that has a visible feel to it

# data[].attributes.body
should find more connection between my work and the theoretical research and case studies

artist who do moving images, roto scoping imagery

Could try making one detailed frame, and leaving the rest simple, just to show style and save time

More work like the eye gif, zooming into eye, is interesting, do more weird transitions!

Current poem - dream like, make it not make sense, e.g cut pigeon in and then straight back to dreaming,

animation memes on youtube - Wonderland ll meme e.g.

Could try using shadows as a transition. Or scenes of still images, simple movement.

Try and Limit how much stuff moves, but see if can still represent the story.

# data[].attributes.headline
Poem "The Sock Goblin" by Michael Anderson

# data[].attributes.subject
Poem "The Sock Goblin" by Michael Anderson

# data[].attributes.body
In the shadows of the laundry room, it lurks,
A mischievous creature, a tiny goblin that smirks.
It feasts on socks, a peculiar appetite,
Leaving behind pairs, incomplete each night.

The dryer's whirr, its invitation to play,
As the sock goblin claims his prize, day by day.
An enigma of cleanliness, a whimsical sprite,
The sock goblin dances, its delight taking flight.

# data[].attributes.headline
Glover, H. - Animatory Thinking Thesis - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Glover, H. - Animatory Thinking Thesis - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With such character-centred productions forming the basis of Joe's pool of inspiration, it's no surprise to find characterisation being one of the strongest facets throughout his work. Whether it be crooked-teethed rabbits, long-nosed wizards or frantic-looking cats, Joe has a way of making such disparate characters come together to create a positively wacky world. When creating a new character Joe tells us that he usually starts with the eyes and mouth, essentially, "the facial expression". "Sometimes it's a bit of a surprise what sort of personalities these create," he expands, "and it guides the rest of the character." Aside from this basis, Joe doesn't really have many rules that he abides by, but he does have some features that he finds himself returning to. For instance, with rabbits Joe sees "a lot of extra expression can come from the ears," and with birds (which he's been drawing a lot more of since his lockdown walks) "a lot of personality can come from the plumage".

It was when studying at art school that Joe realised he loved drawing. But, he later chose to study graphic design at university because he assumed it would be the only way to get a creative job. Graphic design ended up not satisfying his desire to draw and create surreal characters and scenes. After a few years, Joe found himself in Berlin, aiming to start working as a freelance graphic designer while having some time to work on his own drawing style. Through all this time, Joe tells us that he never really considered himself a "real" illustrator, and it was only when he moved to Random Collective - a collective, co-working space "full of great illustrators" - that Joe really began to trust his creative instincts. "The feedback and advice I got there was invaluable and it gave me the confidence to stick with it," Joe adds.

Since becoming a full-time illustrator, Joe has completed some pretty impressive projects, including some fun interstitials for the TV series Cake and a low budget Ted-Ed animation. His favourite project, however, is his personal project, a series of looping gifs. Being a "satisfying" way to work, Joe feels as though the gifs he can "really get into the details of the animation as it's only ever a few seconds long". Also loving the feeling of "infinitely falling into a loop" when watching them, they go hand in hand with his love of repetitive music. With this in mind, Joe has hopes of releasing his own music, but for the moment, he's pretty content creating "short beats" to go alongside his utterly hypnotic, wonderfully weird looping animations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Organic in style, wacky by nature: discover Joe Taylor's brilliant animated illustrations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With such character-centred productions forming the basis of Joe's pool of inspiration, it's no surprise to find characterisation being one of the strongest facets throughout his work. Whether it be crooked-teethed rabbits, long-nosed wizards or frantic-looking cats, Joe has a way of making such disparate characters come together to create a positively wacky world.

# data[].attributes.body
Creates sequences of images, and comics, that mainly handle themes of of stress, "...relationships and codependency and claustrophobia."

Her work is very humorous

"..Many of my strips are close to animations."

When the sequenced images are shown one after the other, it shows a sort of short moving images

Her work has movement and flow and she manages to bring the images and characters to life through sequence

# data[].attributes.body
Aeroplane safety cards -

The way the characters and events are represented in interesting ways, outfits are "stuck in the 1950s"

"especially fascinated with the way that they depict a plane crash, like its this alternate version of events, ...no blood.... nobody's distressed..."

The history of the cards - safety cards can save lifes, and help with our understanding of how we can survive a crash

In the beginning there were no regulations, and it was marketing this idea that travel was safe and luxurious, and the cards back in the 30s/40s werent very clear

After realising that the evacuation is so important for survival, they started to increase the safety on board

They then removed the text and just left images, for universal understanding

This shows us that clear narration is so important for understanding, especially in cases where it could be life saving.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Do you remember... airplane travel? Packing into a tin can with 200 other people all breathing each other's air? These days most of us are still avoiding plane travel. But, in the Before Times, when we boarded a flight, we all received the same familiar set of instructions.

If you've ever flown on a plane, you've been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket. Every passenger plane, commercial or private, has to have safety cards on board. Mo LaBorde is a reporter who has been collecting safety cards for almost ten years, and one day she started wondering how the modern safety card came about.

Fly the Skies! Don't Think About Dying!

In the beginning, safety cards weren't even really about safety. In the 1930s there was no regulation about what should go on the cards and airlines could put anything they wanted in them. This is because at the time airlines had to convince people to get on planes, so for many decades cards were all about soothing passengers and selling them on the idea that air travel was safe and glamorous.

They were essentially miniature versions of those travel posters, like little advertisements for the airlines. The book Design For Impact by Johan Pihl and Eric Ericson, a compilation of historical safety cards, is filled with old cards like this one, many of which are incredibly stylish, but not much else. If you opened a card, you'd discover the instructions were usually hard-to-follow text.

By the mid-60s, carriers like Pan Am actually began begun to make a good faith effort into designing accurate cards. They created "fleet cards," which were almost like a booklet that you would pick up, and it would have the safety and emergency instructions for multiple plane models in it, and each set of instructions would be in multiple languages. The problem was, no one wants to have to flip through an encyclopedic book in the middle of an emergency.

Things really started to change in the late 60s, when airlines started noticing a troubling pattern when it came to crashes. Psychologist and airplane safety expert Dan Johnson, explains, "Impact survival was possible, but not escape." Johnson says that in the 60s the airlines knew that their airplanes were technically safer than ever before. They crashed less often and when they did crash, the crashes were increasingly less fatal. All of which should have added up to more survivors." But what they realized was that survivors weren't getting off the plane in time.

It turns out that both back then and today if you're in a serious crash, it's not the impact that kills you. It's the smoke and the fire inside the cabin after the crash. So the key to surviving is getting out of the plane as fast as possible. Accident investigators found that, in your average crash, you had 90 seconds to get out of the plane before it became "unsurvivable." But again and again, all through the 60s and even 70s, passengers weren't making it out in time.

90 Seconds

In 1968 Douglas Aircraft decided to improve their safety record by hiring Johnson and another man named Beau Altman. Altman and Johnson decided to found a company together to improve the airline's safety procedures. They called it the Interaction Research Corporation, and their specialty was running tests in mock plane cabins full of research participants. They would start by making each test as realistic a simulation as possible. They always made sure there were so many people under the age of six, so many people over the age of seventy and give them only as much information as they'd receive on a normal plane flight.

Then they'd toss a smoke bomb into the plane.

They would create a realistic simulation where the lights would go off and everyone would need to find their way to the exit, and when they did... the exit would be 15 feet off the ground and they would need to slide down an inflatable slide in the dark.

One of the most important things Beau and Dan learned was that one of the very best ways to get out of the airplane in time was to read the safety card. When they had people read the safety cards, and when those cards had the relevant information, the evacuation times improved dramatically. So they began applying what they learned in these experiments to the design of the cards. But since neither Altman nor Johnson were artists, they turned to Larry Bruns. Today, Larry Bruns and Brock Fisher are a grandfather and grandson safety card design team that runs Air Safety Art International, but back in the 60s, Bruns helped design the classic safety card look that we all recognize today.

They used pictures to tell the entire story of how to exit the plane. They zoomed in on specific actions like opening a door. And there were also things you might not necessarily consciously notice, but which really help, like using red for all exit related arrows and making sure the word "exit" is the only printed word in the sequence. The cards contained all these visual strategies that nudged the reader towards comprehension. And as a final design flourish, their cards even fit in the seatback pocket just right, so the title of the card peeks out and entices people to open it up.

Tenerife Test

Dan, Beau and Larry's cards got put to the test in March 1977 on the island of Tenerife. Tenerife is in many ways the Titanic of travel. Since it involved two large planes, it's still the single deadliest aviation accident in history. Why it happened is still up for debate, but what is known is that a 747 belonging to KLM collided on takeoff with a Pan Am 747 that was still on the ground and tore its roof off. On the KLM plane, everyone died, but on the Pan Am flight, 67 people survived, and it turned out Dan and Beau designed the safety cards on the plane with the survivors. Some of the survivors later explained that they knew how to get out of the plane thanks to the safety cards.

After Tenerife, Altman and Johnson actually testified before Congress about the need for better airline safety procedures, and it's around then that all visual safety cards pretty much became standard throughout the industry. It also revealed that there are two large hurdles in airplane safety in disaster situations: that some people become so stressed out that they freeze, and that there are many people who don't read the safety card in the first place.

Altman says the 96% of people who don't look at the cards fall into one of two categories: Either they just completely resign their fate to the hands of the pilot when they board a plane, assuming they have zero control over the worst-case scenario. Or they have an optimism that's made of steel. These are the people who never look at the pamphlet because they know how unlikely a crash actually is. The truth is we all need to actively participate in providing for our own safety.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do you remember... airplane travel? Packing into a tin can with 200 other people all breathing each other's air? These days most of us are still avoiding plane travel. But, in the Before Times, when we boarded a flight, we all received the same familiar set of instructions.

# data[].attributes.headline
Joi Fulton, article - Theoretical Research - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Joi Fulton, article - Theoretical Research - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Joi Fulton is one of those rare instances where an artist's name matches up so exactly to their work, that it almost feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by this, we mean to say that Joi's work is simply joyful. The Chicago-based illustrator and animator creates 2D and 3D worlds alike that pop with graphic colours, dense texture, and a smiley face or two. It's hard to look at Joi's work and not feel overcome with a sense of juvenile happiness, something akin to watching your favourite cartoon television show, or nostalgically revisiting your favourite iconography as a child. "What I love about 2D illustration is just how limitless it is in what I can create," Joi tells It's Nice That. "And then to tie that into 3D and be able to bring my little characters and worlds into a three-dimensional space." It's true that Joi's 2D and 3D works tie into each other with aesthetic ease, maintaining a cohesive vision throughout that feels inviting and exploratory for audiences. "The mediums both complement each other beautifully," they add. Despite how confident and capable Joi's work may seem, there is a remarkably greater sense of the unknown in mastering a 3D technique. "Most of the time with 3D I honestly feel like I have no idea what I'm doing," she says. "But that's really the fun part I feel like."

"I'd definitely say I have a signature style," Joi says. "It's very bright but also nostalgic, and I think that resonates with a lot of people that come across my work." One particular nostalgic reference that comes to mind in Joi's work is that of the old cartoon Miffy, which Joi remarks as something she's been told before. "It's one of my favourite shows so I was very happy to hear that," she says. However, it's not just the factor of nostalgia that creates Joi's signature style, nor is it solely responsible for her litany of fans across social media. "Another visual indicator of my work is the simple shapes that I tend to use, and that comes from my time working with young kids and making sure my work is digestible for them," she explains. "And so with having these recognisable shapes, it makes it more enjoyable for them and also easy for them to draw." This experience has certainly influenced Joi's clean, elegant, and fun style - but there is an undeniable refined and mature talent in the young artist which often shines through.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joi Fulton inspires happiness and nostalgia in her blend of 2D and 3D illustrations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We talk to the Chicago-based young artist on the vast expanse of her incredible talents, and marvel at her unwavering positive disposition.

# data[].attributes.headline
Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics - Essay

# data[].attributes.headline
Julian Glander - The New York Times article - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Julian Glander - The New York Times article - Essay

# data[].attributes.body
The Love of Mai Life <3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While this process is underway, young people are put in a rather delicate position. Though they tend to be highly rational when calm, if they become upset, their new, high-octane emotional structures can overpower their yet-to-be upgraded reasoning capacities, crashing the entire system until it has a chance to reset.

I have enthusiastically recommended glitter jars to several parents and colleagues knowing that some teenagers will instantly benefit from having a concrete model of emotional distress. That said, I have come to appreciate that a glitter jar's main utility is in the instructions it provides to those who are caring for the overwrought: Be patient and communicate your confidence that emotions almost always rise, swirl and settle all by themselves.

Not long after I returned from Texas, I ran into a visibly upset sophomore in the lunchroom of the school where I consult each week. She looked stricken, and her eyes were red from crying.

Urgently she asked, "Are you free?"

"Yes," I replied, turning her toward my office.

Once there, she buried her hands in her face and broke into heaving sobs. Soon, she slowed her breathing and looked at me, even as tears continued to stream down her face. In the past, I would have taken that opening to quiz her about what had gone wrong. In retrospect, I now see this as the verbal equivalent of further shaking the mental glitter jar. Instead, I asked if she wanted a glass of water, or some time alone to let her painful feelings die down. She declined both offers, so we just sat there quietly.

Not a minute had passed before she relaxed completely. Then she volunteered that she had done poorly on a test that morning and had fallen down a rabbit hole of worries about what a bad grade might mean for her future. Now, with her glitter nearly settled and her mind more clear, she regained perspective on the situation. Within moments she decided that the low grade probably wasn't such a big deal, and if it was, she'd figure out how to make up for it in other ways.

This is not to say that letting glitter settle is the solution to all teenage problems. But I have found it to be a better first response than any other. Every time I stop myself from trying to figure out what made a teenager upset, and focus instead on her right to just be upset, I find that doing so either solves the problem or helps clear the path to dealing with it.

It's critical to recognize that when we react to psychological distress as though it's a fire that needs to be put out, we frighten our teenagers and usually make matters worse. Reacting instead with the understanding that emotions usually have their own life cycle - coming as waves that surge and fall - sends adolescents the reassuring message that they aren't broken; in fact, they're self-correcting.

So, when you next encounter a young person in full meltdown, take a deep breath and think to yourself (Dallas accent optional), "First ... let's settle your glitter."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Help Teens Weather Their Emotional Storms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While this process is underway, young people are put in a rather delicate position. Though they tend to be highly rational when calm, if they become upset, their new, high-octane emotional structures can overpower their yet-to-be upgraded reasoning capacities, crashing the entire system until it has a chance to reset.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

The "bouba-kiki effect", where "bouba" is perceived round and "kiki" spiky, remains a puzzling enigma. We solve it by combining mathematical findings largely unknown in the field, with computational models and novel experimental evidence. We reveal that this effect relies on two acoustic cues: spectral balance and temporal continuity. We demonstrate that it is not speech-specific but rather rooted in physical properties of objects, creating audiovisual regularities in the environment. Round items are mathematically bound to produce, when hitting or rolling on a surface, lower-frequency spectra and more continuous sounds than same-size spiky objects. Finally, we show that adults are sensitive to such regularities. Hence, intuitive physics impacts language perception and possibly language acquisition and evolution too.

Introduction

One central property of natural languages is the arbitrariness of the sign: the sounds of words do not generally inform about their meaning1. Still, systematic sound symbolic exceptions to this principle, found in a wide range of languages' lexicons, have always intrigued scientists and non-scientists2,3,4. The so-called "bouba-kiki effect" or "maluma-takete effect" is the textbook case for sensitivity to iconic sound symbolism. When presented with a sound-shape matching task, perceivers almost systematically associate auditory pseudowords such as "bouba" or "maluma" with round or smooth shapes, and others, such as "kiki" or "takete," with spiky or angular shapes5,6. Since its first report, the bouba-kiki effect has been robustly replicated across languages, cultures7,8 and stimuli, see9,10, for reviews, suggesting that it relies to some extent on universal cues11,12.

Yet, two major problems remain. First, the stimuli parameters involved in this effect are still unclear. For instance, both consonants and vowels appear to play a role in the bouba-kiki effect (though consonants to a larger extent9). Some studies suggest perceptual roundness could be induced by acoustic continuity10,13, phonetic continuancy14, spectral tilt10, pitch13, voice shimmer10, or body actions of the tongue15, lips16 or even hands17 that would be mirrored in visual round shapes. However, none of these parameters have yet shown to provide a coherent answer, accounting for the variety of experimental results in the literature. The second issue deals with the underlying mechanisms that could explain such audiovisual associations and whether the bouba-kiki effect is innate or can be learned through exposure to audiovisual regularities in the environment. In spite of being very robust in adults and shared by most language and cultures11,12, a meta-analysis18 showed that infants in their first year were only sensitive to a bouba effect (i.e. a tendency to associate bouba sounds with round shapes). The kiki effect (i.e. a tendency to associate kiki sounds with spiky shapes) was not present before the second year and remains smaller in size than the bouba effect, even in adults9,11,12. Thus, rather than being fully operational at birth, the bouba-kiki effect seems to increase with age, suggesting that it could be learned.

In this paper, we solve the first problem, by uncovering the universal acoustic parameters at play in this phenomenon. We then solve the second problem, by finding out the physical principles that could be at the basis of the cross-modal regularities underlying the bouba-kiki effect. We thus demonstrated how it could emerge through exposure to such regularities present in the environment. Finally, we discuss how this causal mechanistic account provides a complete and coherent resolution of the bouba-kiki effect enigma, and we raise some new perspectives on how language and human multimodal perception of natural scenes are intrinsically linked.

Results

Solving the first problem: a universal phenomenological model of the bouba-kiki effect

The sound of round is spectrally low and temporally smooth

Gathering published reports about the bouba-kiki effect in adults9,10,13,14,16,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26, a consistent pattern emerges. Some speech sounds such as the nasal /m/, the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, the liquid /l/, or the back vowels /u o/ as in bouba and maluma are rather round (i.e. more often associated with round than spiky shapes). In contrast, others such as the unvoiced coronals /t k/ or the front vowels /i e/ as in kiki and takete are rather spiky (i.e. more often associated with spiky than round shapes). A phonetic analysis provides a straightforward interpretation of this phenomenology, showing that round speech sounds have lower-frequency spectra (or lower spectral balance) and display more continuous temporal fluctuations of their acoustic envelope (see Supplementary Information, for more details). In other words, the sound of round is spectrally low and temporally smooth. Surprisingly, while these simple acoustic properties have recently been mentioned for possibly being at the origin of the bouba-kiki effect12, they have never been tested.

Predicting the bouba-kiki effect from spectral balance and temporal continuity

In this section, we combined a meta-analysis with a computational modelling approach to quantitatively assess the possibility to predict the bouba-kiki effect from spectral balance and temporal continuity parameters. Thanks to their authors, we gathered data and speech stimuli from 8 publications (10 experiments, total of 394 participants, 1086 speech stimuli, five languages) on the bouba-kiki effect (see Table 2 in " Methods" for more details). In spite of the large dataset variability in terms of languages, linguistic contents and stimuli, we opted for a simple and single computational phenomenological model to extract spectral balance and temporal continuity parameters from the acoustic speech stimuli. The goal was to capture the trends shared by the entire dataset, even though it would likely be sub-optimal for each individual experiment.

The phenomenological Balance x Continuity model is displayed in Fig. 1 and described in details in " Methods". For each speech stimulus, it performs basic acoustic analyses resulting in the computation of two parameters: the spectral balance between low and high frequencies (Balance parameter) and the temporal continuity between minimum and maximum amplitude (Continuity parameter). It then predicts a round (over spiky) score from these two parameters only.

Schematic representation of the phenomenological model used for predicting round (over spiky) score based on the properties of each stimulus s (t) for each experiment. First, a spectrogram is generated thanks to a classical gammatone filter-bank inspired from auditory filtering52. Then, two independent analyses are applied. Spectral analysis (top pipeline) provides the Balance index defined as the difference between summed energy in low and high spectral components around a boundary b (Eq. 1). Temporal analysis (bottom pipeline) provides the Continuity index based on the ratio between the minimum and maximum energy through time within the corresponding stimulus (Eq. 2). Finally, the round (over spiky) score is linearly predicted from the combination of Balance and Continuity values. For more details, see " Methods" and Supplementary I nformation.

To measure how well the Balance x Continuity model could predict the bouba-kiki effect, we conducted separate linear regressions for each experiment between the model's round score predictions (Model) and the experimental round score (Data). For each experiment, we also computed experimental round score percentage of variance r 2 explained by the model. These analyses were conducted using R27 and the work package "lm". Their results are displayed in Fig. 2 and detailed in Table 1. All linear regressions were significant (alpha level: 0.05, see Table 1), explaining quite large percentages of variance (mean r 2 = 60%, range: 26-94%, see Fig. 2). In other words, predictions of the Balance x Continuity model were very accurate for the entire bouba-kiki effect dataset (see also the Supplementary I nformation for more discussion).

Model round score predictions (Model, y axis) as a function of Experimental round score data (Data, x axis, on the same scale as in the original studies, see Table 2 for more details) for the 10 experiments. For each speech stimulus (displayed by empty circles) in each experiment, the round score prediction in the model is obtained for the boundary b value providing the best fit for the corresponding experiment (cf. " Methods"). Linear regression lines and corresponding explained variance r ² between experimental and predicted round scores are added to each display.

Table 1 Statistical analysis of the linear regression fits for the 10 already published experiments and the Noise band experiment (synthetic non-speech stimuli) as well as their number of stimuli N.

Importantly, we tested whether the Balance x Continuity model could also efficiently predict, for non-speech stimuli, similar sound-shape associations as in the bouba-kiki effect with speech stimuli. More precisely, the goal was to assess whether artificial manipulations of spectral balance and temporal continuity parameters in non-speech stimuli could drive the participants' associations of these non-speech stimuli with round or spiky shapes.

According to the simulations from the Balance x Continuity model obtained for speech stimuli from pre-existing data, round scores should increase as non-speech stimuli display lower-frequency spectra and more continuous envelopes. We developed a new corpus of synthetic non-speech acoustic stimuli. We used white-noise bands modulated in amplitude, deliberately manipulating two parameters. We manipulated their spectral balance (called "Experimental_Balance" in the following) by controlling the central frequency of the band (Fig. 3a, top). We also manipulated their temporal continuity (called "Experimental_Continuity" in the following) by controlling the amplitude of a temporal dip inside the stimulus (Fig. 3a, bottom). Then, in a novel experiment (Noise Band Experiment, for more details, see " Methods"), we tested the tendency of adult participants to associate these stimuli with either round or spiky shapes using the same forced choice task as in previous bouba-kiki studies6,9.

Stimuli manipulation and results from the Noise Band Experiment. ( a) Top. Spectral content of the non-speech stimuli in the Noise Band Experiment made of bands of white noise, centered at values varying from 300 Hz to 1,200 Hz (Central frequency). Bottom. Amplitude modification of the stimuli to manipulate temporal continuity. Non-speech stimuli were 500 ms long and modulated by an envelope containing a dip from 225 to 275 ms, at an amplitude taking 4 possible values at 0, 0.1, 0.5 and 1 relative to the maximum value (Dip amplitude: 0 meaning a silent dip, and 1 meaning no dip at all). The amplitude was constant from 0 to 225 ms and from 275 to 500 ms. ( b) Experimental results for the non-speech stimuli. The percentage of round (over spiky) score is averaged across participants as a function of the central frequency of the noise band and the size of the envelope modulation dip. Error bars are standard error from the mean.

Each participant's response was coded as 1 for a choice for round shape or 0 for a choice for spiky shape. We then used a logistic mixed-effects model to analyze these non-averaged data with R27 and the "lme4" package28 (alpha level: 0.05, two-tailed). Experimental_Balance (300, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1200 Hz) and Experimental_Continuity (0, 0.1, 0.5, 1) were within-participant fixed factors. The Experimental_Balance in the value 300 and the Experimental_Continuity in the full discontinuity (0) condition were used as intercepts. As predicted, results presented in Fig. 3b revealed a significant influence of Experimental_Balance (Estimate = -0.07, SE = 0.009, t = − 7.33, p < 0.001), indicating that stimuli with low-frequency spectra were more often mapped onto round shapes whereas stimuli containing high-frequency spectra were more often mapped onto spiky shapes. Still according to our predictions, results also revealed a significant influence of Experimental_Continuity (Estimate = 27.3, SE = 13.7, t = 2, p = 0.046), showing that continuous acoustic stimuli were more often associated with round shapes than discontinuous stimuli. Interaction between these factors was not significant (all t < 1). Simulations showed that the experimental data from the Noise Band Experiment were also well captured by the Balance x Continuity model (mean r 2 = 69%, see Table 1).

Taken together, these results demonstrate that the bouba-kiki effect applies to non-speech acoustic stimuli as well as to speech utterances29. More importantly, they clearly confirm the predictive power of spectral balance and temporal continuity in the sound-shape associations of the bouba-kiki effect, capturing most of its universal phenomenology.

Solving the second problem: explaining the cognitive mechanisms of the bouba-kiki effect phenomenology

The goal of this section is to provide a mechanistic framework for the bouba-kiki effect. More precisely, we determine how acoustic spectral balance and temporal continuity can generate in perceivers systematic associations with visual roundness/spikiness.

Can one hear the shape of a drum?

The title of this section is the exact title of a famous paper published by the mathematician Mark Kac30. In this paper, Kac mathematically demonstrates that the spectrum of a resonant two-dimensional surface, a "drum", depends on its size, but also, for a fixed size, on the shape of its contour (see Supplementary I nformation, for more details). To be precise, he shows that the distribution of the frequency resonance modes of the sound of a drum is driven by both the area (size) and the perimeter of the surface. Classically, the larger the area the lower the mode frequencies: large objects produce low frequency sounds. But also, for a fixed drum area, the smaller the perimeter, the lower the mode frequencies and thus, the lower the spectral balance of the drum. Crucially, for a given surface area, the shape minimizing the perimeter is a circle: thus, the rounder the shape of a drum, the smaller its perimeter and the lower its spectral balance. Conversely, increasing the spikiness of a drum increases its perimeter, making its spectrum expand towards higher frequencies. In our view, one solution to the bouba-kiki effect enigma lies in this mathematical (and thus physical) fact, largely overlooked by researchers working on sound symbolism: round objects have overall lower spectral balance than same-size spiky objects.

We posit that perceivers are sensitive to this audiovisual regularity, which would drive the bouba-kiki effect.

To test this hypothesis, we designed an online forced-choice auditory experiment in which participants were presented with sounds produced by either a round or a spiky object and had to decide whether the object was actually round or spiky (Beating Toys Experiment, see " Methods", for more details). To do so, we selected ten similar-size ordinary objects, five rather round and five rather spiky, from a set of children's toys (plastic fruits and vegetables, Fig. 4a). We recorded the sound produced by each of them when mildly hitting their base (for round objects) or their tip (for spiky objects) on a plane hard surface. We observed that they indeed differed by the spectral balance of their resonance spectrum, round objects producing lower-frequency sounds (see Fig. 4 b, for examples of typical resulting sound spectra). The resulting sounds were all normalized in terms of intensity and similar in terms of duration (200-220 ms). At each trial, each object sound was presented together with two images (one of a round and one of a spiky toy) presented side by side. Participants had to match each sound to one of the two toy images.

Stimuli and results from the Beating Toys Experiment. ( a) Images of the visual stimuli (children's plastic toy reproductions of fruits and vegetables). ( b) Typical frequency spectrum resulting from hitting the base of a round (apple) or the tip of a spiky (watermelon slice) object on a hard surface. The spectral balance is lower for the round as compared to the spiky object. ( c). Percentage of round (over spiky) score averaged across participants as a function of each stimulus object and Toy Shape Category (from left to right, Round: Apple, Lemon, Potato, Strawberry, Tomato; Spiky: Banana (tip), Carrot (tip), Cucumber (tip), Fennel (tip), Watermelon slice (tip)). Error bars are standard error from the mean.

Results are presented in Fig. 4c. Data coding and pre-processing were the same as in the Noise Band Experiment. We then applied a linear model analysis on the round scores averaged across stimuli using the "lm" function in R27 (alpha level: 0.05, two-tailed). Object Shape Category (Round, Spiky) was a within-participant fixed factor. Results revealed a significant influence of Object Shape Category on round scores (Estimate = -48.3, SE = 4.8, t = − 10.02, p < 0.001), indicating that participants could successfully identify the shape of the object by hearing its sound. To better assess the strength of the effect, we estimated the percentage of variance r ² explained by the factor Object Shape Category, by computing the squared correlation between the response variable and the predicted values, revealing a large effect size ( r ²  = 64%). In other words, participants were able to exploit the correspondence between sounds and shapes, with their judgments in agreement with Kac's round-spiky property.

Can one hear the shape of a rolling drum?

The second parameter we identified influencing the bouba-kiki effect is temporal continuity. We posit that the explanation of this second factor also lies in another very simple physical fact. Round objects, when rolling, have a more continuous movement trajectory than spiky objects, producing sounds with smooth fluctuations of their acoustic envelopes. Alternatively, spiky objects yield more discontinuous trajectories than round objects, resulting in faster and larger fluctuations of their acoustic envelopes. This cross-modal regularity between shape and temporal continuity is also an inherent property of the physical world. We then tested whether perceivers are sensitive to this other cross-modal regularity.

To test this hypothesis, we conducted one last online forced-choice experiment, asking participants to recover the shape of a rolling object, by listening to its acoustic envelope (Rolling Balls Experiment). We used a 3D-printer to construct two similar-volume 3D balls: one perfectly round sphere and one sphere with spikes (see Fig. 5a). We recorded several instances of the sounds (original sounds) produced when flicking each ball to roll on a hard plane surface, made of plastic or wood. Unsurprisingly, recordings showed a smoother acoustic envelope for the rounder ball (e.g. Figure 5b). We then presented these original sounds and synthetically modified sounds. To create the synthetically modified sounds, we applied the original temporal envelopes either from the round or the spiky balls to spectrally controlled sounds with either a low-frequency spectrum from the round ball or a high-frequency spectrum from the spiky ball (see " Methods" for more details). At each trial, each sound was presented together with two images, one of the round and one of the spiky ball. Participants had to match each sound to one of the two ball images.

Stimuli and results from the Rolling Balls Experiment. ( a). Picture of the two 3D balls (one round, one spiky) propelled by a flick on a plane shelf used in the forced-choice task. The balls were made with a 3D printer. ( b) Examples of spectrograms of two original sounds produced by the round and the spiky balls rolling on a shelf. The acoustic envelope, drawn in black, is smoother for the round ball. Darker areas represent more intense low- (for the round ball) or high- (for the spiky ball) frequency bands. ( c) Experimental round score averaged across participants for the Rolling Balls Experiment. These scores are represented as a function of Acoustic Envelope (Smooth-circles vs. Sharp-triangles) and Spectral Balance (Low-Frequency, LF, in blue vs. high-frequency, HF, in red) for the original and the synthetically modified sound stimuli. Big circles and triangles show overall means. Error bars are standard errors.

Results are displayed in Fig. 5c. Data coding and pre-processing were the same as in the Noise Band Experiment. We then used a mixed-effects model to analyze these non-averaged data with R27 and the "lme4" package28 (alpha level: 0.05, two-tailed). The data for the original sounds and the synthetically modified sounds were analyzed separately. For the original sounds, Ball Shape (Round, Spiky) was the single within-participant fixed factor. For the synthetically modified sounds, Acoustic Envelope (Smooth from the round ball, Sharp from the spiky ball) and Spectral Balance (Low-Frequency from the round ball, High-Frequency from the spiky ball) were within-participant fixed factors. Initially, rolling Surface Material (wood, plastic) was also declared as a random factor, but it did not significantly increase the variance accounted for and was thus excluded from the final models. The Smooth Acoustic Envelope and Low-Frequency conditions were used as intercepts. For the original sounds, results revealed a significant influence of Ball Shape (Estimate = − 71.7, SE = 3.3, t = − 22.1, p < 0.001), indicating that participants could successfully identify the shape of the ball by hearing it rolling on a hard surface (the percentage of explained variance r ², computed as for the Beating Toys Experiment, displays a large effect size, r ² = 69%). For the synthetically modified sounds, results revealed a significant influence of Acoustic Envelope (Estimate = − 36.7, SE = 4.3, t = − 8.7, p < 0.001), indicating that participants could successfully identify the shape of the ball by only hearing its envelope (effect size moderate but clearly non-negligible, r ² = 31%). The effect of Spectral Balance was tendential (Estimate = − 7.2, SE = 4.3, t = − 1.7, p  = 0.08) suggesting that in this specific situation, its role was probably concealed by the massive effect of Acoustic Envelope. In other words, results clearly show that participants were able to exploit the dynamics (temporal continuity) of the acoustic envelope to determine the shape of the rolling ball it was coming from, for both original sounds and their spectrally-controlled synthetical counterparts.

In sum, we posit that the mechanisms of the bouba-kiki effect result from two simple physical properties of round vs. spiky objects in the environment. We showed that these physical properties influence the spectral balance and the temporal continuity of the sound produced by these objects. Last, we demonstrated that human adults can use this intuitive audiovisual physical knowledge to identify the shape of novel objects, by hearing them hitting or rolling on a hard surface.

Discussion

In this paper, we provide a coherent explanation of the bouba-kiki effect enigma, resolving the two problems raised in the introduction. We first identified two universal acoustic parameters involved in this effect (spectral balance and temporal continuity). We then unveiled the underlying cognitive mechanisms at play in this phenomenon. A sound is perceived round or spiky because it is likely to be produced by a round or a spiky object hitting or rolling on a hard surface. Round objects, as compared to similar-size spiky objects, have lower-frequency acoustic resonance modes resulting in sounds with more energy in the low-frequency part of the acoustic spectrum, explaining the role of spectral balance. When rolling on a hard surface, they also produce smoother trajectories than their spiky counterparts, thus producing sounds with more continuous acoustic envelopes, explaining the role of temporal continuity. Human participants appear to be sensitive to these physical properties (see Supplementary I nformation for more discussion).

The two-components phenomenological model of the bouba-kiki effect appears very efficient, explaining a large part of the variance of experimental data. This is even more impressive considering that it is only poorly fitted to the precise acoustic content of the stimuli and specific experimental paradigm of each experiment. Indeed, the speech stimuli were considerably diverse in terms of language used, phonological structure and content, speaking style and gender, word length, etc. (see Table 2 and further discussion in the Supplementary Information). Yet, we acknowledge that additional acoustic factors likely intervene in the fine tuning of the bouba-kiki effect, particularly concerning pitch13, or the vocal source in relation to its shimmer10. Orthographic factors together with phonotactic and phonological constraints also play a role in this effect and in sound symbolism in general (see12,23,31 for recent overviews). More globally, the bouba-kiki effect may be part of a larger system of sound-to-semantic associations which could involve higher-order factors such as arousal (termed "activity" in32).

Table 2 Presentation of the data and speech stimuli of the 10 published experiments assessed in the computational phenomenological model.

Importantly, the mathematical analysis by Kac30 shows that first size and then, when the size parameter is neutralized, contour shape of a drum influence the spectral balance of its sound. The link between these two mathematical properties can be interpreted in simple intuitive terms. A spiky shape has locally small parts (spikes), providing local spots with higher spectral components, thus shifting the overall spectral balance. This is what happens when hitting a plastic watermelon slice on its tip (Beating Toys Experiment). Note that this kind of object can sound either round or spiky depending on the part of the object that is hit on a hard surface. The spiky character feature here must be appreciated globally, as an average of all local aspects of the object. Conversely, a round shape is locally always as large as possible, resulting in a lower spectral balance. This could result in a possible confound between these two factors. However, experimental studies suggest otherwise. For instance16 showed in their Experiment 1 that size estimation is rather related to differences in vowel height (in the first formant region) and vowel duration. Other findings suggest that pitch and intensity also play a role in size estimation33,34 with a number of consequences in terms of vocal exaggeration of body size and deceptive communication signals (for an overview see35). When hearing a sound, it is thus possible that first, a gross estimation of size operates, mainly provided by vowel and prosodic features. Then, more subtle processes for shape estimation can occur, based on spectral balance and temporal continuity cues. Another possibility is that the use of same-size visual shapes and explicit shape judgement tasks in bouba-kiki paradigms drive participants to fully interpret spectral balance only as a cue for estimating shape.

Since the sensitivity to audiovisual regularities relating shape with spectral balance and with temporal continuity is likely rooted in physical properties of objects, these regularities could be learned during development. In the context of the debate contrasting innate vs acquired mechanisms for the emergence of sound symbolism36,37,38,39,40,41,42, we provide a novel and decisive argument. Indeed, we demonstrated that the bouba-kiki effect is not speech specific and relies on universal statistical regularities of object sounds that are present (and potentially frequent) in infants' perceptual input. Similarly, audiovisual correspondences involving pitch and visuospatial height have been shown to be rooted in regularities of the physical environment43.

One could then hypothesize that language evolution itself could have been influenced by the regularities of environmental scenes. In line with this hypothesis14 found in the adult English lexicon that round or curvy objects are slightly more often associated with labels containing voiced consonants with low frequencies (e.g. /b/ in bouba) than with unvoiced high frequency ones (e.g. /k/ in kiki). Other studies also showed that the audiovisual correspondence underlying the bouba-kiki effect favors word learning and language generation4,14,42,44. Sensitivity to these audio-visual regularities could be learned through ontological development as a cross-modal part of the intuitive physics system and then play a role in or even bootstrap language learning.

Last but not least, if the bouba-kiki effect is actually learned from non-speech audiovisual regularities available in the physical environment, it could also be learned by animals. So far, two recent studies on adult apes suggests that they are not sensitive to the classical bouba-kiki effect45,46, while other studies with adult chimpanzees suggest that they are sensitive to other audiovisual correspondences47,48. Yet, the apparent lack of sensitivity to the bouba-kiki effect could be due to several reasons. First, the use of abstract 2D pictures of the shapes in both studies have been shown to be difficult to interpret in a 3D mode by animals49. In our interpretation of the mechanisms behind the bouba-kiki effect this parameter is crucial as only real 3D objects can produce sounds when hitting or rolling on the ground. Second, the use in these studies of a great number of novel speech items (20 pseudowords) and of human speech stimuli that are infrequent for apes - even though they have been trained to some of them in one of these studies46 - could have prevented them to spontaneously form an audiovisual association with a corresponding visual shape. Indeed, spontaneous cross-modal matching tasks have been proven to be difficult for apes, see48 for an overview. Our findings that the bouba-kiki effect can be produced by simple non-speech sounds provides novel perspectives for exploring the origin of this effect. As hypothesized for human ontological development, non-human primates could be sensitive to simpler audiovisual associations between non-speech sounds (e.g. high- vs. low- spectral frequency noise band) and 3D object shapes, after experiencing and learning the same audiovisual regularities in their environment.

Methods

Solving the first problem: a universal phenomenological model of the bouba-kiki effect

Data gathering for the meta-analysis

Simulations were applied to the experimental data contained in eight publications, providing altogether 10 experiments (Table 2). We followed the PRISMA statement50 for selecting and reporting the studies to be included in our meta-analysis. We decided to include articles if they were testing typically-hearing and typically-sighted adults, assessing whether participants would associate certain auditory pseudo-words rather to round or to spiky shapes, thus, testing both round (or bouba-type) and spiky (or kiki-type) cross-modal correspondences.

The selected studies involved explicit rating of the roundness or the spikiness of pseudowords, using a binary choice or a quantitative scale (7-points Likert rating tasks) between a round and a spiky shape. Note that we do not directly address here the possibility that round and spiky scores could vary independently. Other work51 showed that separate quantitative Likert rating tasks of roundedness and spikiness mirror both one another: words rated higher on the rounded scale were rated lower on the spiky scale and vice versa. Moreover, the same study also showed that the responses given in the two-alternative forced choice task between a round and a spiky shape are highly correlated with the ones given for the same stimuli in 7-points Likert rating tasks.

To explore the acoustic components at play in the bouba-kiki effect, we selected studies testing a large number of speech stimuli (N > 10) presented auditorily (excluding written presentations) and testing each speech stimulus only once (e.g. excluding implicit association and word learning tasks). We then requested from the first and/or last authors of 14 original articles their acoustic stimuli and the mean score (round vs. spiky choices averaged over all the participants of a given experiment) associated with each speech stimulus. Authors of eight articles kindly provided their stimuli and data in a usable format for the present paper, for a total of 10 experiments. Each consisted in a set of auditory speech stimuli with their corresponding round score rating averaged across participants (defined in Table 2, "Dependent Variable" and "Experimental round score" columns).

Balance x Continuity model description

Each acoustic speech stimulus of each experiment was processed in the computational phenomenological model displayed in Fig. 1. The model was defined as follows. The stimulus was fed into a gammatone filter-bank made of 64 filters from 50 to 20,000 Hz52. The resulting time-frequency representation was then processed in two separate pathways, respectively computing Balance and Continuity. In the Balance pathway, the mean spectrum S 1..64 was computed by averaging spectral frames over time for each of the 64 frequency channels. The spectral balance value was then obtained by subtracting the summed energy values in frequency channels above and below a fixed boundary b:

$$Balance=\sum_{i=1}^{b}{S}_{i}-\sum_{i=b+1}^{64}{S}_{i}.$$

The value of the boundary b was varied between channels 20 (800 Hz) and 30 (1800 Hz) corresponding to the middle range of the acoustic spectrum around 1 kHz. This enabled to compare low-frequency regions (i.e. below 800-1800 Hz) typical of phonemes associated with round shapes (e.g. the voicing bar or nasal murmur for voiced or nasal stops, the burst spectrum for bilabial or labiodental consonants or the region of the first two formants for back vowels), with high-frequency regions above 800-1800 Hz, typical of phonemes associated with spiky shapes (e.g. the burst spectrum for coronal consonants or the high second or third formants for front vowels).Temporal analysis began by computing the summed energy E 1..T across all 64 frequency channels for each temporal frame from 1 to T (T being the stimulus duration in number of frames). From there on, the temporal continuity index was obtained by comparing the minimum to the maximum value inside the stimulus:

$$Continuity=\mathrm{log}\left(\frac{{min}_{t=1..T}{E}_{t}}{{max}_{t=1..T}{E}_{t}}\right).$$

Importantly, this index was computed only for di- or tri-syllabic speech stimuli, containing a consonant phoneme in between a sequence of two vowel phonemes. This computation enabled the capture of the magnitude of envelope decrease during the consonant between two peaks of intensity associated with the two vowels. This was possible for all experiments except for the Consonant-Vowel stimuli used in the study16, Exp. 1 and the Vowel-only stimuli used in the study24, Exp. 1b (see Table 2 for more details). Finally, the round scores for all stimuli of a given experiment were linearly predicted from the values of Balance and - if available - Continuity. We conducted separate linear regressions for each experiment between the model's round score predictions and the experimental round score as a function of the value of the boundary b between channels 20 and 30. The b value maximizing explained variance was selected for providing predictions of the Balance x Continuity model in Table 1 and Fig. 2. The pattern of variations of r 2 values with the boundary b across all experimental data sets is further discussed in the Supplementary Information. These analyses were conducted using R27 and the work package "lm".

Experiments

All the experiments in this manuscript including human participants followed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and was approved by a local ethical committee (CERGA, "Comité d'Ethique pour la Recherche, Grenoble Alpes", Ethical Research Committee Grenoble Alpes n° 2020-07-01-1). This means that methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations for testing human participants in the European Union. Notably, informed consent was required from all participants before participating in the study.

Noise Band Experiment

Participants

The 31 participants were all anonymous French native speakers recruited and paid for their participation through the online platform Prolific (mean age: 26.6 years, range: 18-49). Five additional participants were rejected from the final sample for failing at one or more catch trials (3) or for completing the study in less than 5 min (2). None of them reported a known history of hearing, vision or language impairment.

Acoustic non-speech stimuli

Thirty-two noise stimuli were created using bands of white noise, 500-ms long and centered at eight possible frequency values (Experimental_Balance) between 300 and 1200 Hz within the set [300, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1200], with a sampling frequency at 44,100 Hz (Fig. 3a, Top). These noise bands were created in Praat53 by filtering white noise by a formant filter centered at the target frequency between 300 and 1200 Hz and with a bandwidth equal to a tenth of the center frequency. To manipulate temporal continuity, their envelope amplitude was modulated from 225 to 275 ms by a dip taking 4 possible values (Experimental_Continuity) at 0, 0.1, 0.5 and 1 relative to the maximum value (0 meaning a completely discontinuous silent dip, and 1 meaning no dip at all, complete continuity, see Fig. 3 a, Bottom). The remaining amplitude envelope was fixed at 1 from 0 to 225 ms and from 275 to 500 ms.

Visual shapes

The visual shapes were the same as the ones used in9, Exp. 2.

Procedure

The task was performed online on the platform Qualtrics. Participants were required to sit in front of a computer or a phone monitor in a quiet location and were strongly encouraged to listen to the acoustic stimuli through headphones. They were able to test their sound quality on two acoustic examples before the test. For each trial, one round and one spiky shape appeared on the screen, against a white background. Participants could listen to the acoustic stimuli by clicking on a dedicated play button. At each trial, participants had to choose which of the two shapes they felt that the acoustic stimulus referred to more closely. The whole experiment contained 32 test trials and two additional catch trials in which the acoustic stimuli was a recording explicitly asking participants to select either the round or the spiky shape. Those catch trials were there to ensure that participants were paying attention to the acoustic stimuli. Each acoustic stimulus was matched with a pair of round-spiky shapes. Round and spiky shapes appeared an equal number of times on the left and right sides of the screen, and the order of trials was randomized.

Beating Toys Experiment

Participants

Twenty-nine anonymous French native adult participants were recruited and paid for their participation through the online platform Prolific (mean age: 28 years, range: 19-42 years). No additional participant was rejected, that is all participants from the final sample succeed at catch trials and completed the study in more than 5 min. None of them participated in the Noise Band Experiment nor reported a known history of hearing, vision, or language impairment.

Acoustic and visual stimuli

We recorded a total of 30 sounds produced by five round and five spiky objects (3 sound occurrences per object), when gently hitting them on their base (round objects) or on their tip (spiky objects) on a hard and plane surface. Sounds were all normalized in terms of intensity and similar in terms of duration (200-220 ms). The high-frequency part of the spectra for sounds produced by spiky objects was clearly more intense than for sounds produced by round objects. Conversely, the low-frequency part of the spectra of sounds produced by round objects was clearly more intense than by spiky objects. Typically, there was more energy below 500 Hz for all round objects compared with spiky ones, and more energy between 500 and 2000 Hz for all spiky objects compared with round ones. Examples of spectra corresponding to the sound of a round or a spiky object are displayed in Fig. 4b. The objects were plastic fruits and vegetables from a set of children toys. Pictures of these objects being hit on a hard surface either on their tip (spiky objects) or on their base (round objects) were used as representations of these objects in the forced choice task (Fig. 4 a).

Procedure

The task was performed online on the platform Qualtrics, following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and was approved by a local ethical committee (CERGA n° 2020-07-01-1). Participants performed the task online in the same conditions and following the same general forced choice procedure as in the Noise Band Experiment. At each trial, participants had to choose between the image of a round object hit on its base or a spiky object hit on its tip, that they felt was more likely to produce the single sound they were presented with. The whole experiment contained 60 test trials and four additional catch trials. Each acoustic stimulus was repeated twice and matched with its corresponding object (presented once on the left side of the screen, once on the right) and with two different distractors (one distractor per trial). Round and spiky objects appeared an equal number of times, and an equal number of times on the left and right sides of the screen. The order of trials was randomized among participants.

Rolling Balls Experiment

Participants

Thirty anonymous French native adult participants were recruited and paid for their participation through the online platform Prolific (mean age: 21.9 years, range: 18-32). No additional participants were rejected from the final sample, that is all participants from the final sample succeed at catch trials and completed the study in more than 5 min. None of them reported a known history of hearing, vision, or language impairment nor participated in the previous experiments.

Acoustic and visual stimuli

Using a 3D printer, we first printed two same-size 3D balls: one round and one spiky. We then recorded the sound produced by these two balls rolling on a hard wood or plastic surface (see Fig. 5a). This provided 12 original sounds, from two objects (round and spiky balls) x two surface materials (hard wood and hard plastic) and 3 instances per object and surface material per condition (see examples of corresponding envelope fluctuations in Fig. 5b). To control for differences in frequency spectrum between round vs. spiky objects, we estimated the mean spectrum of all sounds respectively produced by round objects and spiky objects. We used the Praat Speech_Shaped_Noise script53 to generate two noise stimuli "shaped" by these mean values for round and spiky frequency spectra. We then estimated the acoustic envelope of each of the 12 original stimuli using54 and we modulated in time the two shaped-noise-spectra stimuli by these 12 envelopes. We obtained a total of 24 additional synthetically modified stimuli with two spectral shapes (one low-frequency from the round ball and one high-frequency from the spiky ball), with the temporal envelope from the sounds produced by the round or the spiky ball rolling. This gave rise to a final set of 36 acoustic stimuli (12 original ones plus 24 additional synthetic ones) along with two visual stimuli (picture of the two balls). Sounds were similar in duration (around 200 ms), and they were all normalized in intensity. Unsurprisingly, a smoother acoustic envelope was found for the round ball. Indeed, local intensity variations are both large and rapid for all spiky trajectories (greater than 8 dB within less than 40 ms) and smaller and slower for all round trajectories (less than 6 dB within more than 40 ms), e.g. Fig. 5 b.

Procedure

The task was performed online on the platform Qualtrics, following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and was approved by a local ethical committee (CERGA n° 2020-07-01-1). Participants performed a forced choice online in the same conditions and following the same general forced choice procedure as in previous experiments. At each trial, participants had to select which object, between the round and the spiky ball, was more likely to produce a sound they were given to hear. Each sound was presented in a random order, associated to the pair made of the spiky and the round images from Fig. 5 a. The task of the participants was to select the object (round or spiky) corresponding to the sound. The precise instruction was the following: "At each trial, you will listen to a sound obtained by rolling one of these two balls on a hard plastic or wooden shelf, propelled by a flick. Your task is to tell if the sound corresponds more to the sound obtained by rolling the round or the spiky ball". The whole experiment contained 36 test trials and two additional catch trials. Each acoustic stimulus was presented only once to each participant. Round and spiky balls appeared an equal number of times on the left and right sides of the screen. The order of trials was randomized among participants.

Acknowledgements

We thank Radu Horaud (INRIA, Grenoble, France) for his crucial advice on the mathematical work by Kac. We thank Eric Guinet (LPNC, Grenoble, France) for his help with the 3D-printing of the balls in the Rolling Balls Experiment. We thank Ferran Pons (University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain), Julien Diard and Olivier Pascalis (both from the LPNC, Grenoble, France) for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript. We thank the authors of the articles who provided their data and stimuli for the meta-analysis.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Laboratoire de Psychologie Et NeuroCognition, UMR 5105, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

Mathilde Fort

2. Centre de Recherche en NeuroSciences de Lyon, UMR 5292, Université Lyon 1, Lyon, France

Mathilde Fort

3. Grenoble Images Parole Signal Automatique, UMR 5216, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, Grenoble, France

Jean-Luc Schwartz

Contributions

Conceptualization: M.F., J.L.S. Methodology: M.F., J.L.S. Investigation: M.F., J.L.S. Visualization: M.F., J.L.S. Funding acquisition: Not Applicable; Project administration: M.F., J.L.S. Supervision: Not Applicable; Writing-original draft for text and figures: M.F., J.L.S. Writing-review & editing for text and figures: M.F., J.L.S.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mathilde Fort.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Fort, M., Schwartz, JL. Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects. Sci Rep 12, 19172 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23623-w
Download citation

Received:

Accepted:

Published:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23623-w

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects - Scientific Reports

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "bouba-kiki effect", where "bouba" is perceived round and "kiki" spiky, remains a puzzling enigma. We solve it by combining mathematical findings largely unknown in the field, with computational models and novel experimental evidence. We reveal that this effect relies on two acoustic cues: spectral balance and temporal continuity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Poetry Comics, Peony Gent - Solrad - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Poetry Comics, Peony Gent - Solrad - Essay

# data[].attributes.body
"I’ve always valued comics for being, at their heart, a vulnerable medium. The artist is forced to leave all their trust in their reader as they put together the delicate balance between word and image themselves from panel to panel"

"...epurposing of the everyday, but one that, again, is primarily about creating an emotional connection with the viewer rather than just conveying pure facts."

"...a lot of the weight of the storytelling also relies on his color choices."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I've always valued comics for being, at their heart, a vulnerable medium. The artist is forced to leave all their trust in their reader as they put together the delicate balance between word and image themselves from panel to panel, with no confirmation that the interpretation they take away will be the original one intended. And more than just that - the vulnerability to pour so much energy and time into sometimes laboriously created artwork that is, to be very honest, almost always, taken in almost at a glance.

Something about the balance of this relationship, the intimacy and sense of empathy involved, has always fascinated me. Both within my own practice as an illustrator and in that of others, I find myself searching for this moment of revelation and recognition between viewer and creator, of the opening up of a space that connects them over a shared experience or emotion.

Poetry comics by Peony Gent
I feel this is a relationship best exploited and examined within the art of poetry comics - a loose term that I personally believe can be applied to any collection of static sequential images that prioritizes emotional storytelling over anything else.

A quote that's always resonated with me is this one from Daniel van der Velden (one half of , a research and design studio based in Amsterdam who produce poetic works for a fine art context) - " poetry transforms what can be seen and sensed into what can't be forgotten ". This perfectly captures the only necessary specification of what makes poetry poetry - and a sentiment that rings equally true of illustration!

The best of illustration and the best of comics takes something either commonplace or incomprehensible and makes it both understandable yet unforgettable. This could be through humor, a sense of poignancy, or even through shock. It's an act of transformation and repurposing of the everyday, but one that, again, is primarily about creating an emotional connection with the viewer rather than just conveying pure facts. Even those visual scribes who need to keep facts at the core of their work almost always insert a degree of charm and humor into their illustrations to make the facts themselves more memorable.

To explain that point slightly better I want to step back to the 'poetry' half of the term poetry comics. I'll start by referring to yet another quote by someone better versed than I: the London-based poet Holly Pester, who's following words I scribbled in the corner of a sketchbook while listening to her speak on a panel at London's Royal College of Art last year. She was explaining her belief that, in many ways, she saw poetry as a " resistance to articulation": that while a writer may explore certain feelings through poetry, or present them for the reader to reflect upon, poetry rarely attempts to overly analyze, clinically dissect, or overly articulate.

I see illustration in much the same way, very much a powerful tool of communication, but also one that in many ways resists being overly analyzed. It's a medium that relies often on the reader's own set of associations and skills of interpretation - prioritizing the creation of an emotional connection over a strict conveyance of information. See the art of subconscious drawing in particular, the purest form of expression without articulation.

Kingdom by Jon McNaught, NoBrow (2019)

Take these pages from Jon McNaught's Neighbourhoods and Simon Moreton's What Happened as an example - both pure visual poetry. In both Neighbourhoods and What Happened, the reader is not just being informed of the literal events of the narratives (that of a family on a camper van holiday at the British Coast, or two pre-teens hanging around a small village), but they are truly transported there. Through minimal exposition and a trust in the viewer's own sense of empathy, McNaught invokes the poignancy and slightly bitter tang of the complex emotions that come with looking back on memories of childhood and family relationships.

I also find it interesting to consider how McNaught and Moreton use opposite techniques to achieve the same effect here: exploring the idea of memory from slightly different sides. In Neighbourhoods,the art is stylized, yet overall realistic, and rather cinematic in its extended pauses and careful framing. A lot of the weight of the storytelling also relies on his color choices: soothing blues and purples reminiscent of the very memories they are conveying, those of long and rainy summer evenings spent in caravan parks with not much to do.

In contrast, Moreton forgoes realism and color completely - his drawings are not just quite invoking specific memories, but they are invoking the act of remembering itself. His linework fills in only what is necessary, capturing the rough outlines, the way most minds will only ever be able to retain the vague gist of events that long past.

What Happened by Simon Moreton, Kilgore Books (2016)

However different, both the cartoonists are deeply poetic in their approach to emotional storytelling and in the way that the majority of their stories are told through this relationship between reader and author - through the trust they give their audience to take away their own interpretation of what is being offered them.

Despite the emphasis I've put on the role emotion plays within poetry comics, I also want to emphasize how, in many ways, I see poetry as a form of resistance: a way of confirming the importance of the personal and the inner self in a world that puts little value on either. There is power in reframing the world through this act of communication, in finding emotional solidarity where previously there was only you. In a world where to be sincere is often seen as to be weak, and to be emotional is to be seen as 'unstable', there's true value in that.

There's also something fitting therefore in that the most thriving scene for poetry comics is the DIY Zine scene, where work is made and shared with little expectation of major financial gain, where capital is not the goal. Instead, the priorities are communication and collaboration, of finding a connection with someone otherwise a stranger.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poetry Comics: Communication, Collaboration, and Connection - SOLRAD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Guest writer and cartoonist Peony Gent considers the nature of poetry comics and their vulnerable, emotional storytelling.

# data[].attributes.body
Discusses her turning aubergine, made up of 100 different stills and put together to create an immersive turning aubergine experienc

Discusses social inequalities and sexism towards women, and how womens bodies are stigmatised

Mentions the vagina monologues, and her film that she made about female sexuality and liberation and made the film in protest of these issues and the patriarchy

# data[].attributes.headline
Abstraction in Comics - Hackney Comic + Zine Fair - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Abstraction in Comics - Hackney Comic + Zine Fair - Essay

# data[].attributes.headline
Beyond Manga, Asian comics - Hackney Comics+ Zine Fair - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Beyond Manga, Asian comics - Hackney Comics+ Zine Fair - Essay

# data[].attributes.headline
The Comics Journal - The art of Graphic Narrative -  Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
The Comics Journal - The art of Graphic Narrative -  Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Art of Graphic Narrative: An Apology for the “Lascaux Hypothesis” - The Comics Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back, look at the whole picture of comics, and figure out: what kind of language are we using here? What is this art form we’re talking about, and are we doing an accurate enough job talking about it? Also: CAVES.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sciencealert - The history of animation and cave art - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Sciencealert - The history of animation and cave art - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The World’s Oldest Animations Stretch All The Way Back to Cave Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From France to Indonesia and Australia, ancient life is painted across the walls of darkened caves, seemingly motionless silhouettes in earthen colors that echo an earlier time.

# data[].attributes.body
This article goes into depth about dance, animation and 3D.

It dicusses the use of 3d space within animation and how, in some animations, we can only see the dance movements go from side to side, whilst in other animations, such as Betty Boop (1932) episode, we can see the Samba movements, are more 3 dimensional and use the space, and not just the sides to show the dancing.

This also discusses the use of Rotoscoping and how it has been used to create more realistic, 3D looking sequences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fleischer’s use of Dance Sequences in Depicting Three Dimensions | animationstudies 2.0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dance sequences appear in a significant amount of Fleischer Studios cartoons throughout the 1920s and 1930s. These sequences presented the audience with an aesthetic sense of realism and an increased illusion of a third dimension, even though Fleischer’s cartoons were traditionally hand animated.This text examines these dance sequences as unique examples of the depth of three-dimensional movement that was pioneered by Fleischer Studios.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you're having a bad day, just turn to the work of Dan Kelly - you'll find your serotonin boost soon enough. The Seattle-based animator and motion designer has recently lit up our Twitter feeds with his fantastic draw a dog tuesday series, which is a concept as good as it sounds. Every Tuesday, Dan takes to the Twitter account to draw a different variation of a dog, which is then animated and posted online for masses to enjoy. "I started the series in January of 2013 after lurking on Twitter and saw Anthony Clark and Brian Lee contributing every Tuesday," Dan tells It's Nice That. "It started way back in 2010 on the Something Awful forums, and it seemed like a fun prompt to make sure that I would draw at least once a week in a short deadline." But, what makes Dan's series so great for us, is his lo-fi idiosyncratic style to the series. It's endlessly charming, strangely heartwarming, and very satisfying. It's a style he tells us is inspired by "Bob Sabiston's Inchworm Animation app for the Nintendo DSi/3DS in the spring of 2013," and what led him to animate the dogs in a 100x100px canvas with an aliased 1px brush. The rest is history.

"When it comes to personal projects, I'm just trying to figure out how to make things fast enough that I don't get too self-conscious or precious about whatever I'm making and just get it out," Dan explains to us. It doesn't just stop there, however. Dan's style bleeds seamlessly into his technical approach to the craft, both of which align with his own hilarious disposition. "Maybe my visual language is akin to an elementary school diorama project that was put together over 48 hours, but the teacher assigned the project a month ago and the project was really about time management," he adds. "But the diorama got done, and it still looks good, right?" He asks it rhetorically, but we can't help to agree with the aptness of his summary. On the dogs specifically, there is a little more method to the madness it seems. "I'd say maybe the dogs have a more specific look due to the visual guidelines I set for them," Dan explains.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Much to our delight, Dan Kelly draws a dog every Tuesday on Twitter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you're having a bad day, just turn to the work of Dan Kelly - you'll find your serotonin boost soon enough. The Seattle-based animator and motion designer has recently lit up our Twitter feeds with his fantastic draw a dog tuesday series, which is a concept as good as it sounds.

# data[].attributes.body
Ideas and brainstorming for research document

I like how they managed to convey animation and gifs within a book

Really interesting and colourful front page illusion, that is made to mimic a gif or moving image

Colour and typography remind us of gifs, with bold bright strong colours and dark backgrounds to make them stand out

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Giphy’s new book proves the gif art form can exist just as animatedly offline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The online gif database and search engine has today published Frame By Frame, the first animated book of its kind.

# data[].attributes.body
A short film I absolutely adore!!

I love the animation style and the story is really nice! <3

# data[].attributes.body
Illustrator and animator based in Kansas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Illustration Portfolio | Caleb Worcester | United States

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Home of Kansas City based illustrator and graphic artist Caleb Worcester

# data[].attributes.body
Different ideas I could text and try out:

Idea with different colours and lighting

One with materials

One with reflection

One with goblin and socks flying

Try different textures

# data[].attributes.body
Anna Ginsburg's "Spin The Aub"

Made up of 100 different images of aubergines and put together to create a cohesive animation of an aubergine turning around

# data[].attributes.body
Interactive website, with fun mouse colouring in the page as you move it

Also uses different colours as you move on to the next page each time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cities are complex and in constant flux. How can illustration address something as overwhelmingly cacophonous and vast as the urban environment? What role can illustration play when it seeks to intervene in the fabric of the city itself?

Humans are becoming city-dwellers in increasing numbers, with over half of us worldwide living in a city today. Cities offer many ecological, cultural, economic and social benefits. However, their shortcomings are also significant, such as pollution, cost of living, quality of life and imbalances of power. In our second issue of Colouring In we tackle the relationship between illustration and the city: from street art to urban mapping, representations of fictional cities to the visual dérive, we explore illustrative strategies to draw out urban histories, reveal city dwellers' struggles for space and visibility, and present polyvocal narratives that uphold the vitality and richness of our urban environments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Colouring In is a collaborative research project examining the impact of illustration on areas of critical importance to global debates.

# data[].attributes.body
Interactive and immersive website

Tells a story, and with the mouse you can view the images from slightly different angle

beautiful 3D artwork :0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's time for the big journey! Experience Nomadic Tribe, our interactive tale for this new year. May it bring us many exciting surprises. Happy 2019 from makemepulse.

# data[].attributes.body
Interactive storytelling, which keeps the viewer engaged

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Atelier Heschung - The beginning of the adventure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While waiting for Christmas, the Ateliers Heschung, in collaboration with Vincent Broquaire, will introduce you to the brand's universe.

# data[].attributes.body
Interactive weird christmas card sending website

Fun and silly

You can drag on the whole page and the page extends which I would like to try on my website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share some holiday spirit with these historical and bizarre old Holiday cards. Laugh, love, and have a weird Christmas!

# data[].attributes.body
Fun website that tells you your fortune

Fun fortunes and fun colour and text

Imagery is also playful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let our tarot-reader predict your digital future.

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting and vibrant colour palettes

Fun but simple shapes such as squares and circles

Simple but fun typography

The layouts are also nice, I like the one on the left and would also like to include a slideshow to present some of my images on my own website

# data[].attributes.body
The preloader page is really fun, and I would like to add a preloader to my website

Fun interactive portfolio page

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Peter Oravec - Front-end Developer | Javascript | Angular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to my beautiful and (a bit) creative personal portfolio web page. I am a front-end developer with more than 12 years of experience. My main focus is front-end development, Angular and JavaScript.

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting and fun way to represent the work, almost like an online gallery with fun information and images.

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting and fun typography

Fun inspiration from nature that is visible in her type

I would Like to make some simple letters to add to my quotes.

# data[].attributes.body
Convey the experience of the unique texture of mochi through a campaign

The Video campaign should convey the ideas of "Instinctively mouth boggling and joyfully confusing to the mouth" through fun, gloopy and squigy characters and type

Using Virtual Reality, they created the virtual play doh characters, which is supposed to represent a similar look or texture to the mochi balls.

I really love the fun and colourful characters which bring a feeling of silliness and playfullness to the campaigns and adverts and immediatley draw you in

The colours are also fun and analogous which I think I would like to try out

The typography fits well to the adverts as it feels similar, texture-wise, to the mochi.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The campaign's pink and purple characters, or "wigglies" as Alex coins, aim to reflect the strangely curious sensation experienced by My/Mochi. They're designed to make "zero sense and yet feel completely right". The fictional creatures do indeed feel right at home in the campaign; friendly, spritely and inviting.

The campaign's typography, equally as playful, takes its cue from the doughy texture of the mochi balls. Alex explains that they wanted the headline to feel as "desquishious" (another Alex-coined term) as the product itself. Not only does the typography aim to create a tummy-rumbling yearn for the squidgy My/Mochi, but simultaneously attempts to induce the wonderfully dreamy, pillowy state-of-mind indicative of the campaign's ads.

"The campaign's fusion of animation and live action", says Alex, "helps viewers appreciate the weird experience our protagonists are having." Director Jamie Whitby aimed to have the human beings convey a "funny mixture of confusion, a momentary loss of control and pure delight" as they bite into the My/Mochi for the first time, sentiments echoed throughout Yonk's character design. They've ended up calling it the 'Mmm' face.

The campaign will run till the end of July through TV commercials produced by Agile Films alongside outdoor and digital ads in major cities across the US.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lovers' psychedelic My/Mochi campaign features squishy type and doughy 3D characters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The campaign's pink and purple characters, or "wigglies" as Alex coins, aim to reflect the strangely curious sensation experienced by My/Mochi. They're designed to make "zero sense and yet feel completely right". The fictional creatures do indeed feel right at home in the campaign; friendly, spritely and inviting.

# data[].attributes.body
Mainly tests out the different "anthropromorphic qualitites" in different letters and alphabets, mainly concentrating on gifs

Started with FontStruct, where she used limitations such as only using a few building blocks or a grid to create letters and fonts

She started seeing personalities in the letters she created such as an and sign that she animated to look like a boxer

"...How can you treat a letter like its a plant...what happens if you treat a flower as if its a font."

I really like the idea of animating the letters which I would like to include

She started off with different tests of types (december) and questioned how she could create them in a slipery, fluid way etc. At first it wasnt legible, so they used other fonts and created a gif, to transition between them, so that you could understand and read it better.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to transform static words into beautiful, moving type | Anna Mills

# data[].attributes.body
I remember researching about this practitioner for the ornamentation brief and remeber finding their website really interesing

I like the way it scrolls to the side

Fun way of displaying their work along side the text, on their work page, as well as the home page.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Work | EUN JEONG YOO (유은정) — VISUAL ARTIST & 3D ILLUSTRATOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Selected works by EunJeong Yoo. A creative artist reimagining the ordinary through abstract interpretations in 3D visuals. Still image, Motion Graphics, Graphic Design.

# data[].attributes.headline
Comics Art Museum - The invention of the comic strip - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Comics Art Museum - The invention of the comic strip - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The invention of Comic Strip — Comic Art Museum - Brussels

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Home / Exhibitions / Permanent exhibitions / The invention of Comic Strip

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction

1. Illustration research
Definitions
Illustration as process
Identity
Language and terminology
The principles of illustration practice
Shifting roles - an expanded practice
Can illustration ever be authorless?
A social practice
Research into, through and for illustration - a framework for categorising methods
Rigour in illustration
Originality in illustration

2. Authorship
Tell me a story
Narrative components
Narrative inquiries - different ways of thinking of narrative research
The autoethnographic illustrator
Adaption and interpretation
Picture visual research
Illustrative writing

3. Reporting
Illustrator as reporter
This is research
How to
Drawing from life
Sketchbooks
Listening
Observation
A multisensory lifeworld
Walking
Me you and everyone else
Is this real
Reporting the news

4. Crafting
Illustration and craft, a happy marriage?
'I already know what I'm going to do'
The meaning in the mark
Tools of the trade
The meaning of material
The stuff of life
Illustration as object, 3d, physical and virtual form
The illustrated object or the object illustration?
Collected
Fabricated
Immaterial technologies

5. Activism
Am I political?
Power play
An informed practice
The visual identity of protest
Detournement
The illustrators joke
Who do you think I am?
The meme
Future visions
Illustration as event
Models of behaviour
'How can I help you?'

6. Education
What is your philosophy?
What is an education space?
Signature pedagogies
Shop talk
Learning through illustration
Residency as method
Documents of experience
Illustration-based research
Data visualisation
The language of reliability
Interactive illustration
7. Illustration futures
Appendix
Proposals
Working with others
Interviews
Reflective practice
Positioning
Who benefits?
Legacy
Informed consent
Illustration research

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shortlisted for the 2021 British Book Design and Production Awards for the Best Jacket / Cover Design**For years illustration has lacked a strong critical his...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
People systematically overlook subtractive changes - Nature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Observational and experimental studies of people seeking to improve objects, ideas or situations demonstrate that people default to searching for solutions that add new components rather than for solutions that remove existing components.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sophie Koko Gate, Animation World Network - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Sophie Koko Gate, Animation World Network - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
AWN @ FMX 2019: Sophie Koko Gate Talks ‘Slug Life’ and Ugly Filmmaking

# data[].attributes.headline
Short article on the psychology and emotion of animation - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Short article on the psychology and emotion of animation - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Psychology of Animation: How It Impacts Our Emotions and Behavior - HOUND STUDIO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are you curious about the power of #animation and how it shapes our emotions and thoughts? Join us to explore more.

# data[].attributes.headline
Joi Fulton practitioner, website - Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
Joi Fulton practitioner, website - Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Illustrations & Animations by Joi Fulton - Joi Fulton's Portfolio

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2D & 3D Illustrations by Joi Fulton! Her works consist of bright punchy colors, and simple friend shaped buddies!