Can Gary clean up the document in time to save the town from a public health calamity? Or will Comic Sans really destroy us all? 

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This featured clip is from Make it Shine is part of a four-part series featuring Gary, a once disheveled document miraculously transformed into a shining model of plain language. In each episode, Gary tackles a different clear communication challenge.

 

The series was created for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the CDC. The animations introduce each training module within an intranet plain language writing course. 

 

Full disclosure: excluding my experimental stop-motion commercial, this was my first professional animation project. Shortly after joining the team at Communicate Health as an illustrator, I was presented with the opportunity to learn animation on-the-job. In addition to a full workload of graphic design projects, in less than a year, I produced (including storyboarding, illustration, animation, video composition and editing, etc.) the four-part series. Looking back, there's a million things I'd like to adjust, trim down, speed up, etc. Given the learning curve, budget constraints, and a tight fiscal timeline, I'm extremely happy with the results. (So was the client.)