Bare Emotion is a project born of a need to understand my own emotions in a therapy setting. Acknowledging the importance of emotional literacy in the present context, this project explores past and current views on emotion, feelings and affections in order to better understand them.

Enabled by the practice of communication design, we explored how to discuss emotions through diagrams, infographics and illustrations with an educational approach. The objective of this project is not only to promote emotional literacy, but to also generate awareness of the increasingly important topic that is mental health.

The project consists in a series of posters illustrating the basic emotions proposed by Paul Ekman (1999). A companion to the posters, the Bare Emotion research book provides further insight into the emotional world – The history of emotions and affections, its terms and the way we perceive them. For each emotion, a mood board was built. The result is a very colourful book dealing with the abstract, as well as the sentimental.