FACIAL EXPRESSIONS | Animated Ideograms

Public Service EMOJIs Get a Face Lift

Facial expression is a universal language. That fact has not been lost on designers of informational signs and posters, who use highly simplified faces to communicate to a broad audience without the use of words.

It's refreshing to see such emoji-based signage well done, as in the Food Safety Rating chart, shown in Figure 2. Published by the Public Health Department of King County (where I live), these signs warn customers about the food safety practices and number of violations cited for a restaurant's kitchen.  I have no quarrel with the designer's facial expression progression from Neutral, to Slightly Happy, to Very Happy, to Laughing.  It's very readable and it easily tells me which establishments to patronize, or avoid.

PUBLIC SIGNAGE EMOJIs THAT WORK:

Figure 2. Restaurants in King County are required to prominently display inspection-based
food safety signs for customers to read prior to entering an establishment.  In a beta version of the poster,
​ all of the eyes were simple dots but, based on ​crowd-sourced research, the designers gave the two "happiest" establishments smiling eyes which improved public recognition.

At other times, I find PSA emoji-based signage appallingly bad and even counter-productive, as in this Pain Chart (Figure 3), translated into 52 languages and found in medical offices everywhere.  Simply because an artist is working with a very limited graphic language is no reason to create faces which have not the slightest relationship to the expression in question; in this case, pain.   And, wouldn’t the Pain Chart function better if the simplified faces actually looked the same as what real people are feeling?

PATIENT POSTER EMOJIs THAT DON'T WORK:

Figure 3. A commercially-available product, this Pain Chart is sold to medical practitioners all over the world.

Pain falls into the category of Expressions of Physical States, something I do not address in detail in my book on facial expression, but which I do illustrate in a few pages in the Appendix.  Besides pain, the faces in my Appendix include yawning, fatigue, shock, exertion, and sneezing. 

At lower levels of pain, the discomfort appears on the face as a sort of vague distress, somewhere between sadness and worry.  At higher levels of pain, the signs are much more unambiguous – violently squinted eyes, lowered brows, and a mouth radically compressed, shouting, or with clenched teeth barred.  I have created an alternate version of the chart based on actual states of pain in Figure 4.

PATIENT POSTER EMOJIs GET A FACE LIFT:

​​Figure 4. The artist/author designed his own version of the ubiquitous Pain Chart.

ORIGINAL VERSION

FAIGIN FACE LIFT

0 - VERY HAPPY, NO PAIN

The have-a-nice-day smile.  Hard to get this expression wrong!​

I start with eyelids and a neutral eye, so that I have somewhere to go with the eye.

1 to 2 - HURTS JUST A LITTLE BIT

Pain involves partly or completely closed eyes; in all the stages, Here, the eye is Hyper-Alert.  The eyebrows are in a very slight distress pattern (which stays the same for the next few stages), but the mouth is smiling, rather than distressed.

Slight pain does not have a signature look.  Here mild distress – sadness is close – is a reasonable version.​

3 to 4 - HURTS A LITTLE MORE

The mouth is neutral ; the eyes are identical to the previous and following faces.

The face is more miserable, due to eyes narrowed from above and below with a more pronounced frown.

5 to 6 - HURTS EVEN MORE

This is the best face of the sequence, which is not saying much.  The frowning mouth goes with the distressed brow.  We could call this slight discomfort

These last three faces are particular to the expression of pain.  Here the eyes are squinted, the brow is scowling, and the mouth is tightly compressed.

7 to 8 - HURTS A WHOLE LOT

The weird (rather original) tilted-arc eyebrows do not make the eye look the slightest bit more distressed than the previous face.  The only difference is a more frowning mouth.  This is pain at near-maximum?

The face shows a more intense squint and scowl, with the lips pulled back, and the teeth clenched.

9 to 10 - HURTS AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

If all else fails, add tears.  Identical to Nos. 7-8.  This is not the face of extreme pain, or even close.

This faces shows a more intense squint than the previous face, and the mouth opened in a tense shout.

Figure 5. The author compares the facial expressions in the commercial Pain Chart (left)
to his own version of facial expressions of states of pain (right).

Below is another PSA Emoticon chart, this one for educators working with children diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder for whom interpreting facial expression is not intuitive.  (I’m told that professionals in this field have found my book on facial expression useful, as well.)

EMOJIs FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM:

ORIGINAL VERSION

Figure 6. Educational poster for students
​with Autism showing expressions on Lego block heads.

FAIGIN FACE LIFT

 Figure 7. The author's re-imagined facial expressions on ​Lego block heads, with explanations below.

Here are the reasons for my "corrections:"

• Eye Highlight:  I took out the eye highlight as a distracting and unnecessary graphic element.
• Confident: A symmetrical smile with eyes gently closed expresses confidence/self-satisfaction much more clearly than the generic half-smile in the original chart.
• Skeptical: Skepticism is not a real expression; it requires context to be interpreted.   There is no expert consensus on what this face should look like.  I can't quite decipher the two dark shapes at the mouth level; a moustache?
• Scared: The expression of fear requires a mouth stretched wide at the lower lip, eyes visibly widened.  The mouth shape in original poster is not bad for anger, but the wrong shape for fear.
• Ecstatic: This is what I call the "eager smile."  My main change is to make the eyes visibly widened, which adds intensity and excitement.
• Sad: The eyes should be visibly narrowed from above, and the frowning mouth should be more strongly drawn.
• Angry: The scowling brow in the original poster does not drop low enough to register clearly, and the frowning mouth is too slight to overcome the ambiguity of the eyes.
• Mischievous: The expression of the cartoon villain.  Closed-mouth smile and scowling brows.  Completely unclear in original poster.
• Happy: The difference between the two versions speaks for itself.  Love those compressed eyes!
• Enraged:  The eyes in the original poster are okay, but the mouth shape is bizarre.  Exaggeration only works if the artist exaggerates in right direction.  Here the dogleg where the mouth stretches down and to the right doesn’t correspond to anything anatomical.  My mouth has a slight snarl, and eye/brow configuration is given more clarity as anger.

No matter what the level  of stylization, a familiarity with the specifics of expression can radically improve the readability of the message.  Well-designed simplified faces may not be great at subtlety, but they definitely do well in clarity.  ​

HAVE A NICE DAY!  :-) 

Figure 8. GOOD - Are you driving above or below the speed limit? No speed number ​ is required.

Figure 9. GOOD - Unhappy, Stop, Neutral, Caution and Happy, Go!

Figure 10. "3 km" NOT GOOD ("2 km" and "1 km" are fine) - "Nog" means "still" or "more" in these amusing construction slowdown signs used in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. 

Figure 11. GOOD - Found in a railroad bathroom in Paris, this sign asks patrons, who paid to enter, to push the button that best describes the cleanliness of the toilets. The decision to use "dot" eyes and a straight-line mouth for the neutral face, and then to reverse the occlusion of the eyes and the arc of the mouth for the smiling and frowning faces is both simple and effective.

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Credits: Figure 1 - Smiley Face, designed by Harvey Ross Ball, 1963 ; Figure 2 -   King County Public Health Department Food Safety Rating System; Figure 3 - "Are You in Pain?" Wong-Baker FACES Foundation (2016). Wong-Baker FACES® Pain Rating Scale. Retrieved 07/15/2017 with permission from http://www.WongBakerFACES.org. Originally published in Whaley & Wong’s Nursing Care of Infants and Children. © Elsevier Inc.; Figure 4 - Revised Wong-Baker Chart "Are You in Pain?" by the Author; Figure 5 - Comparing Figures 3 and 4; Figure 6 - "How do You Feel Today?" LEGO educational poster (artist unknown) included in article, "Using Lego and other visual supports to help Autistic children understand emotions," Amy KD Tobik, Editor-in-Chief, Autism Parenting Magazine, June 11, 2015; Figure 7 - Revised "How do You Feel Today?" LEGO educational poster by the Author; Figure 8 - Traffic Speed Sign, from 03/10/2003 www.BBC.co.uk news story, retrieved on 07/15/2017; Figure 9 - Traffic stop sign from Switzerland, retrieved from Pinterest on 07/15/2017; Figure 10 - Traffic slow down signs, retrieved from www.Research-Live.com on 07/15/2017. Figure 11 - “Êtes-vous satisfait de la propreté de nos toilettes aujourd’hui?” Signage in SNCF Gare de Paris, Montparnasse by www.feedbacknowfrance.fr.

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