When you want to turn an icon into a character, the instinct is to give it eyes, because a face makes emotions readable.

I wanted to know if motion alone could do the work. The globe is five strokes: a rim, a meridian, an equator, two parallels. It doesn't have any human elements. I used Fable to animate it, describing emotions in words and letting the tool translate them into tempo, amplitude, easing and phrasing.

Twenty-two states came out of that process. Some are obvious: joy bounces, a sneeze builds and snaps. Others are more subtle. You can tell when the globe is thinking because the latitudes drift. You can tell it's working because the meridian grinds. It's not always perfectly clear, and that's fine. It doesn't need to scream. It just needs to underline the situation, the way punctuation does.

What surprised me is how little you need. Consistent constraints and room for the motion to breathe. If the rules are tight enough, a sphere can salute you.