Instructional Message Design: The Laws of Simplicity - Emotion

This week, I'd like to focus on Maeda's (2006) seventh law - Emotions. This law will require us to go beyond the basic level of black and white (paper and text) and add embellishments that convey further details such as the emotions that go along with the message we are trying to communicate. Maeda (2006) encourages the use of emotions in message design, and one of the things that stood out to me while reading that chapter/section in his book was the common proverb that "feeling follows form".

Reading this immediately had me thinking about the range of emojis I frequently use on several digital/mobile platforms such as Watsapp, Facebook, Instagram etc. The graphic below illustrates the range of emotions that I typically use multiple times...roughly every day I use these emojis/emoticons....especially in regular conversations with my family, friends, colleagues etc on Watsapp....and this platform provides quite a diverse collection of emojis to pull from (see below):

I find that they allow me to add a bit of my personality into the messages I'm communicating and certainly help in conveying feelings/emotions such as the feelings of happiness, confidence, frustration, sadness etc. I also use them to communicate higher level (figurative/metaphorical) messages. For example, if I'm trying to use sarcasm, humor just or just throw "shade" (as I explained in a previous post) I might use these:

 

 

It  seem strange but very often in these conversations I may not need text but just rely on emojis to convey my messages. This definitely showcases the interpretational function of graphics (Clark and Lyons, 2010). I think this is precisely why Maeda (2006) acknowledged the law of emotions as one of his ten laws of simplicity in message design. It's hard for me to break the ice, or be informal and loosen up with someone without the use of emojis via online/distant communication, so I agree with Maeda (2006). I've also found that GIFs are great ways of including emotions in messages....and these are quite common on social media platforms (as you can probably tell, I'm a HUGE fan of emojis, GIFs etc in my social media/mobile messages lol). 

With the GIFS below, tell me what kinds of emotions do you gather/interpret, and how would you use them in your message designs?

This second GIF I used in last week's post on context, so I'm interested to see what emotions might you attach/interpret from this GIF below. Hahaha.....and here is perhaps where we can see multiple laws that we previously discussed (e.g. time, reduction, context, emotions) being combined in one message/graphic.