This is actually a by-product of a research project for my MA design study, where I looked into redesigning public health communication through the use of visual stories like webcomics. Through my research, I created a visual storytelling cards system, with a bunch of different techniques that can guide anyone to create a simple visual story.

#HappieInJuly was meant to be a 'test' for me to test out the effectiveness of the techniques from my visual storytelling cards. So I decided to keep the core idea of the story simple to allow for more flexibility for future development. Essentially, it is a story of how a girl learns and deals with her depression.

My key inspiration came from the story of Winston Churchill and his black dog, which was a metaphor for depression. I created July to represent the rest of us... people who heard about depression, but in fact do not know much about it.

And even though Happie is meant to be a "black dog", he is blue for 2 reasons - 1) He is forever feeling blue, and 2) I've set the color palette for the comics to essentially be blue and pink (with a small dash of yellow, and hints of blacks and whites).

I am primarily targeting the younger audience for this set of comics, so July was designed to be a young lady in her early twenties (easier for the younger audience to relate to her), while Happie was designed to be as cute-looking as possible. I was hoping that readers would be attracted by these 2 characters first before they want to read on further to learn more about heavy issues like depression and mental wellness.

I've already established the base story with the first few chapters (Chapters 1 - 6), so right now, I'm alternating one chapter of the story with another chapter that is more informative. And surprisingly, I realized that more people liked the informative chapters instead (i.e. a chapter about Winston Churchill, and another one about the drowning rats experiment are the most popular).

I hope that this webcomic can spark more conversations about depression and mental wellness, and also make this topic more approachable to a wider group of audience.

There are still a lot of stigmas whenever we discuss "depression" and "mental health".

In a way, July kind of represents me... as a "researcher" who wants to find out more about depression. Future chapters will see her meeting up with more characters, e.g. a therapist, her inner child, and even other mental health patients (with more black dogs).

I'm hoping that more readers can write in to share their thoughts and experiences with depression, which I can hopefully include in future chapters.