Education through Animation: Designing Training Materials for Public Health Professionals

National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) / 2025 / Global & Public Health, Government

Featured image for the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) project designed by Graphicacy.

Overview

As one part of its broad mission, the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) offers training to personnel at over 3,300 local health departments across America. Graphicacy’s expertise in visual storytelling helped NACCHO quickly expand their educational offering with a new multimedia course.

Services
Data Visualization
Ideation & Prototyping
Information Design
Motion Graphics & Animation
Print Design

Background and Challenge:

NACCHO is the only organization serving every local health department in America. Through the NACCHO University digital education portal, health department staff can build up their knowledge and competencies around numerous priority topics.

Seeking to quickly add a new modular course on community-based suicide prevention, NACCHO engaged Graphicacy’s data visualization specialists to create illustrated PDF documents for an interactive workbook along with 30 minutes of corresponding animated videos.

The project’s tight deadline and strict budget parameters required Graphicacy to explore alternatives to conventional cost- and labor-intensive animation methods.

Opportunity and Solution:

Graphicacy and NACCHO opted for a novel approach combining limited use of generative AI tools with hand-drawn assets and human oversight of art direction, video editing and more.

Were time not a factor, Graphicacy’s designers would typically use a tool like Adobe After Effects for an animation project. In this case, they worked directly in Figma—a UI/UX design tool that promotes real-time collaboration and facilitates rapid storyboarding and animation work.

The resulting workflow allowed Graphicacy to put together first-cut videos in a matter of hours, rather than days. Early work included making key decisions around colors and how to represent people, icons and other images. This provided a foundation for later generative AI work to build on.

With their visual style defined, Graphicacy developed prompts for three different AI tools to rapidly iterate components of each image, curating a cohesive set of building blocks before editing and recoloring them by hand for the final, polished look.

The tools and processes chosen for this project enabled Graphicacy to complete most of the work in approximately six weeks from discovery to delivery—just a fraction of the time needed for more traditional animation projects.