Autism Speaks, as many well know, is an organization devoted to education and enrichment for people who have been diagnosed with autism, and laymen who remain unfamiliar with the disorder and the ways in which it effects those who have been diagnosed and their families. 

While Autism Speaks may have fallen under scrutiny and criticism from many who are diagnosed with autism, they remain one of the primary resources for information and education about autism, and agreed to partner with students at UMASS Lowell to create information motion graphics about autism and adulthood.

Though working in conjunction with an established brand, we were offered a fair amount of leeway in crafting the visual language for our motion graphic. Incorporating the core colors of the Autism Speaks brand was not communicated strictly as a 'must', but it seemed very heavily implied the soft, serene blue should be the focal point of color scheme, with colors chosen to compliment it.

Everything about our color palette was meant to be soothing and inviting, to draw the viewers in and hold their attention.

Our first attempt at executing the motion graphic as we had initially conceived it came with... mixed results. While most of our iconography was on point, our sound design sweet and endearing, the pacing of our creation was entirely off. What had on paper seemed like a perfect, metaphorical solution to crafting a 'timeline' for our character to follow up until the point of the dreaded drop-off age of twenty-two was, in reality, a crawling, ultimately unappealing plod along a line of facts with little visual appeal.

After our first render of the video, we realized there were many, many flaws; what we had thought would be a good idea in theory was, in practice... not as well thought-out as hoped. There were kernels of a good idea mixed into the initial attempt, but the project, as a whole, needed a lot of love and refinement to try and polish it off.

Taking the criticism offered during the second to last critique for the class, we returned to the video file and took another stab at it, trying to play with different tools and techniques to render our ideas in a better, more engaging way.

Revisiting the icon we meant for the viewer to connect to, we removed the stoic, bathroom-sign man and made character more soft and small and child-like, to better portray who, exactly, the simple character was.

Instead of following a straight-line path to the finish that culminated in an eventual decline after the age of twenty-two, we instead made the 'terrain' of the land riddled with more pitfalls and danger; the character is forced to run from the impending facts of ASD and navigate around the reality of their circumstance to the best of their ability. All told, it was a message much closer to our original intention that our first attempt.