Overview: This project is a study of “nonverbal” communication and emotional expression through text messages. It includes a series of animated onomatopoeias that can be sent in text messages to enhance communication.

Tools: Google surveys, Google Scholar, Photoshop, Keynote, After Effects, Illustrator, pens and paper

When speaking verbally, humans use body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, body temperature, hand gestures and many more indicators to communicate their intended message.

Many of these non verbal indicators are lost in texting and lack of clarity leads to miscommunications.

Research Methods: I began this project by reading academic articles on one way that this problem is already being solved: Emojis. If you are interested in this subject, let me know and I can send you some of the papers that I read!

I also went back through my text messages and looked for interesting examples of Emoji, sticker, GIF and meme usage in me and my friends conversations.

Insights: After all this reading and observing I developed 5 principles of good Emojis

I decided to tackle expressive noises: onomatopoeias. Facial expressions are already covered by emojis and moods or feelings are already expressed by memes and stickers.

I asked my community via a Facebook survey what common onomatopoeias they used and what they meant to express with them.

From this survey, I learned that some onomatopoeias are used to express different things depending on tone of voice.

I did lots of sketching, brainstorming and listing Onomatopoeias before beginning to animate

Design Exploration 1: The first design exploration uses roman characters, speed, acceleration, shape and size to express an emotion.

Design Exploration 2: The second design exploration uses only shapes, color, speed, acceleration and size to express an emotion. The precise Onomatopoeia noise is lost in these iterations, but the emotion is still expressed.

I began this project simply by exploring the problem of miscommunicating emotions over texting and it developed into an interesting set of expressive GIFs. The sample of people who contributed and provided feedback are mostly English speakers, from a limited community. A wider array of people and designers from different backgrounds would need to be consulted to create a full set of onomatopoeia GIFs. Although these GIFs can be used to solve some miscommunication issues, the amount of noises and emotions that can be expressed are limited by the number that I can animate.

Although these GIFs can be used to solve some miscommunication issues, the amount of noises and emotions that can be expressed are limited to the number that I can animate.

I decided to explore options that would allow for more customization and expression.