Dive deep into the colorful world of Annette Jacobs!
Annette is an illustrator and animation artist from Düsseldorf and specializes in paper art, stop motion animation and flat illustration.
Her unique style of illustration is characterised by a special mix of traditional craftsmanship and modern technology. She likes to work with her hands or with scissors. The illustrator is particularly fascinated by paper and its diverse properties. While experimenting with haptic things, her extraordinary ideas and picture concepts arise. In our fast-moving and digitised world, analogue work has something special and authentic.
Paper art animations are particularly popular in the educational and social fields because they present content in creative and fun ways, offer a distinctive visual aesthetic, and become so-called "thumbstoppers" - people like to take a closer look.
Annette sees the clear added value of her handmade animations in the emotional connection to the viewer: paper art motifs have a warm and human quality that distinguishes them from purely digital implementations.
Paper art in conjunction with stop-motion animation offers an interesting combination of textures, colors and movement sequences in the analogue-digital mix. The handwork made of paper brings personality, naturalness and depth to the visual design, the digital technology enables a high degree of precision - for good technical feasibility and efficiency in the production process.
Possible applications for paper art animations are for example:
- Explanatory videos to explain complex topics in a simple and understandable way
- Advertising campaigns to convey a distinctive and unique message.
- Social media, as they are highly visible and entertaining on small screens.
- Websites to draw visitors' attention to important messages and increase the time spent on the site
Here we show you some projects with which you can get to know Annette and her work a lot better:
BZgA Liebesleben Awareness Campaign
"Liebesleben enlightens" is a fun and informative social media explainer video format that provides sexual health information in an easy-to-understand way. In cooperation with Liebesleben (BZgA) and the Das Hochhaus agency, Annette produced five episodes in stop-motion animation. The series plays with paper illustrations in bold colors and simplified shapes, the character design is based on an iconic paper figure. In order to create individual and varied looks for the figure, Annette has lovingly added funny details made of different materials such as wool, fabric and glitter. You can find all episodes on the Liebesleben Instagram-Account!
SWSee Annual Report Pop-up-Book
Annette created a handmade pop-up book out of colored paper for the digital annual report of SWSee (Stadtwerk am See). The fold-out book tells a little story about SWSee on six double pages. It was animated in stop-motion technique and brought to life with over 1000 frames. The project was recognized by the German Design Award in the category of excellent communication design for online publications.
Huawei Media Pad Campaign
For a Huawei Media Pad social media campaign, Annette designed ten different theme worlds as paper animations using stop-motion technology. The hand-animated motifs show topics for different target groups such as hobby travellers, business travelers and creative people. The campaign was launched on Instagram and Facebook and reached over 300,000 viewers per film.
Annette's creative repertoire also includes digital flat illustrations:
For Annette, these have their very own charm and are particularly appealing because of their simple and reduced aesthetics. Complex concepts are presented in a simple and understandable way. The style is timeless, easily scalable and can represent both factual and emotional topics. It therefore works well for a variety of projects such as brand illustration and infographics, or even as a mural.
In her flat illustrations, Annette values a simple and reduced aesthetic that is nevertheless clear and concise. Shapes and colors are combined in a simple but effective way. She pays attention to a consistent aesthetic and color palette to create a coherent overall picture.
Her experience with paper art flows into the creation of her flat illustrations, and vice versa: there are often overlaps and similar visual approaches that Annette develops and refines in both areas. In the design process of her works on paper, a digital illustration is often created as a preliminary stage in order to plan the composition and colors. – and her experience with paper illustration helps her with digital flat illustrations in dealing with light and shadow.
Batata Bioeconomy Website
Batata is a research project on visions of the bioeconomy in the Global South. Annette designed the website and a number of illustrations and infographics for this. The design is inspired by the colorful culture of Tanzania, the key visual shows a person looking through binoculars into a vision of the future: a sustainable African bioeconomy and a thriving life for farmers and herders.
RTL Rebranding
Annette designed the key visual for RTL United's new, colorful brand identity. When the rebranding started, her illustration not only adorned the RTL building in Cologne in large format, but also many posters, screens and print media nationwide. Additionally she illustrated visuals for the RTL brand principles: “We act responsibly” and “We are close”. These colorful illustrations focus on community and diversity.
