MY FEELINGS BINGO
I had the privilege of working and laughing for a few months with the loveliest of teams at Laurence King while creating this bingo for kids to learn about their emotions. Although kids are the main audience, I do know more than a handful of adults that would greatly benefit from naming and and talking about their emotions better - we cover 48 of them!
The game includes this awesome booklet masterfully written by Dr. Emily Midouhas, who's a developmental psychologist. She describes each emotion very tenderly and gives wonderful tips on how to communicate them and navigate the difficult parts of feeling all the feels.
The game can be purchased here and here.
Role: Character Designer
(2022)
The full set of characters:
The process for this project was very special and a great example of how design is not always a straight and clear path. When I started sketching, my first approach was to try to create characters based in each emotion, translating the feelings directly into shape. It didn’t quite work as expected: I was not happy with the results and felt super blocked.
So I decided to start from scratch, forget about the emotions for a while and just focus on creating fun and playful characters with interesting shapes first. Once our cast was locked, I did a careful pass of assigning emotions to characters, exaggerating, refining and pushing poses and silhouettes so they would translate each feeling successfully. I was amazed by how the tiniest adjustments could change so much about how emotions were perceived. Body language is an infinite and wonderfully rich world!
Another more technical challenge was accommodating all of our design dreams and needs into a small printed format. We wanted to portray full body characters and make sure they were playful and had diverse body proportions. But facial expression is extremely crucial in terms of communicating emotions and I had to make sure faces would be easily read when printed in that scale. This also required a good deal of adjustments and print tests.
The game:
