Short animated storytelling: designing science-based global health messages for extreme scalability

In 2025, amidst unprecedented threats to public trust in science and public health, delivering engaging, accessible, and scalable health messages to global audiences is more important than ever. This Comment highlights short, animated, wordless storytelling as a promising approach to designing science-based health messages that can overcome barriers of culture, language, literacy, and education. Drawing on five years of experimentation and testing, we synthesize six design recommendations for researchers and practitioners. These recommendations reflect both empirical evidence and practical lessons learned, while acknowledging the institutional advantages that supported our campaign’s global reach. By distilling these insights, we aim to advance the practice of digital public health communication.