Character design · Animation · Illustration 4 min read

British Council

Characters and an animation style for bite-size animations for 3–6 year olds, designed to feel familiar in classrooms around the world.

Role: Character and animation style designer, working directly with the client
Team: The client and a team of graphic designers
Tools: Illustrator, Photoshop
Impact: Characters children anywhere could understand

01 · Problem

Characters any young child, anywhere, could feel close to.

The British Council needed characters and an animation style for a series of bite-size animations for children aged 3 to 6, to be used in different regions of the world. They had to be engaging and interesting for very young children, and work across a wide variety of classrooms and cultural backgrounds.

Grid of 24 coloured squares in green, yellow, blue, purple and mint, each with a simple face showing a different expression

02 · Research & insight

Looking at classrooms around the world.

Working directly with the client, I looked at how schools look in different countries, using references such as The Guardian's photo series of schools around the world for UN World Teachers' Day. That shaped characters and environments that don't belong to any single place.

Insight 01 Classrooms look very different from one country to the next.
Insight 02 Children aged 3–6 read faces and body language before words.
Insight 03 The fewer specific details, the more easily any child can relate to a character.

03 · Solution

Simple characters built from the brand's shapes, where expression and body language do the talking.

Built from the brand's shapes

After several iterations, the characters were built from shapes taken from the British Council brand, in different sizes for children and adults, with only a few tacit characteristics such as glasses or tufts of hair.

Grid of eight coloured squares, each with a simple face drawn in dark purple lines, showing different expressions

Expression does the talking

Keeping features minimal leaves facial expression and body language as the main way the characters communicate once animated, so a child in any part of the world can understand them.

Four style explorations of the same characters, in plain line, pastel colour, a hand-drawn scene with a ball, and a paper-cut classroom

Exploring the style through iterations

We tried line, colour, pastel, hand-drawn and paper-cut treatments together to find the right balance of warmth and simplicity for very young children.

Paper-cut style classroom with rows of white shape characters at desks, waving at a tall teacher character seen from behind

Environments that fit any classroom

Simple desks, walls and boards, with no features from any one country, so the scenes feel familiar in classrooms everywhere.

Four watercolour animation frames of a tall teacher character with glasses, looking surprised, pointing to five numbered children at a desk, and answering a child's question

Character sheet of white shape characters sitting, dancing and waving, plus a frog face and a speech bubble

Character sheet with front views of each character shape, blank versions without faces, and the teacher character in six poses

04 · Impact

A set of characters and an animation style used in bite-size animations for children in different parts of the world.

05 · Reflection

What I’d take forward

This project taught me to adapt: finding a creative answer to a problem that had to be universal. It took several rounds of ideas and iterations to get there. The result looks simple, and that simplicity is exactly what lets any child, anywhere, connect with the characters.