The brief

The Primary Care and Child Psychology Service had the clinical content already written. What they did not have was a way to put it in front of people who would never sit down and read a leaflet about low mood.

The ask was a short animated explainer per topic, in a general illustrated style rather than anything clinical or cold, built from scripts their own psychologists had written.

Working from a script somebody else wrote

When a client supplies the script, the useful question is not what it says but what it looks like on screen. A line like “she notices her breathing settle” is one sentence to write and a whole scene to draw.

So we asked for the script back with a second column: what is happening visually at each line, and what each character should be doing. That one change removes most of the back and forth later, because the disagreements happen on a document rather than on a finished animation.

The bit nobody plans for

Draft videos were going up on Google Drive for review. HSE devices block Google Drive under their security settings, so the team could only watch drafts by forwarding them to personal phones.

That is not a design problem, but it was slowing the project down, so we sorted delivery around it. It is the sort of thing that only shows up when you actually work with public bodies, and it is worth knowing before you promise a client a review link.

The poster that ties it together

Videos are only useful if somebody finds them. Alongside the series we designed the campaign poster, with a QR code per video so a person standing in a waiting room can scan straight to the one that applies to them.

It went through a few rounds. The team wanted the video order kept exactly as they had it, which was a clinical decision rather than a design one, so that is what we did. The campaign then rolled out nationally rather than regionally, which meant going back and adjusting the poster so it worked everywhere rather than for one area.

What it is worth

Four explainers now sit publicly on our channel and are still used. The feedback on the poster from the team was simply that they were all delighted with it, which for a public health campaign going out across the country is the result you want.