Conveying Ideas with Animations

Animated videos have been quite popular on the internet ever since YouTube became big.

The reasons for the popularity of animated short explanation videos could be many: Whether it is because people have a limited attention span, or don’t want to read through hundreds of words of text, or this new medium allows more expressiveness.

Personally, I have very high hopes for creating understandable and easily consumable explanations and to explore this (for amateurs) relatively new medium of animations with voice over. I see a great future for decently produced animations, and they are just so much easier to share in the social web than unwieldy, long text.

So I’ve set myself the megalomanic goal of producing animated videos to express some psychological, philosophical, spiritual concepts. Much like xkcd, the first attempts have a good chance to be crap, but over time I should be getting better at this.

Of course, I am not getting started on this immediately – NOO! In my usual procrastination mode, I first have to develop a set of dozens of pictograms to visualize some of the most abstract concepts out there. And where better to start drawing pictograms than buying 10 books on pictograms on Amazon? Yes, I admit it, I am a fanatic, I am obsessive.

In order to document my progress, here are some Public Domain pictograms I have collected on the internet, based on which I am now planning to develop my own ones. Who would have thought that this could be so damn hard ;) I would have loved to find many, many more public domain pictograms, but many on the web are licensed under Creative Commons (which I find difficult to attribute for pictograms), and also of unclear authorship.

The book I found most useful for getting an overview of the creation, goals and guidelines for pictograms was Pictograms, Icons, and Signs:

The next step is now to develop my own pictograms for concepts such as enlightenment, consciousness & happiness, to choose the right tools for creating animations (Keynote, Powerpoint, Apple Motion, prezi, etc.) and to actually get going.

Hope to be showing you my first results soon. Wish me luck ;)

Update: I am currently looking through some more cliparts of the openclipart.org collection which is actually completely Public Domain. You can also download the whole library

Seeing how openclipart.org seems to be down for a while, another nice website to search for free clipart (including much of the open clipart library) is clker.com.

Resources:

• A smorgasbord of public domain sources can be found here
• gcons – free as in beer, but not as in speech.
• modern pictograms – Open Font License. Requires any part to be accompanied by the license.
• map icons – CC0, Public Domain
• health and safety – license probably public domain
• rafael.js – MIT license, if only I could convert them to SVG.
• icons from 32signals – CC0, Public Domain
• – use it, do not host or sell the icons.

Further Resources:

• Stock Exchange – restriction free pictures with a difficult interface
• IconSweets
• Brightmix
• Mono Icons
• gcons icons
• Web Designer’s Icons
• IconFinder license overview
• Modern Pictograms
• Web Icon Font
• Rafael Font
• Modern Pictograms Font
• Web Symbols Font