Drawing what a photograph could not show

A household water safety campaign for an international NGO, run across three districts. Illustration was not the cheap option here. It was the only ethical one.

Photography would have identified people

The campaign is about unsafe water storage in homes. Photographing it means photographing real families in real houses, and publishing those pictures identifies the household to their neighbours as the one with the problem. In a campaign whose entire mechanism is persuading people to change a domestic habit, that is not a small consideration; it is the reason the campaign would fail.

Drawings show the same behaviour without naming anybody. The kitchen is recognisable as a kitchen in that district without being anyone's kitchen.

Field tested before it was finished

Eighteen panels went to two community groups in draft, printed on paper, and came back with two problems we had not anticipated. The first was a water vessel drawn in the shape used in one district and not the other. The second was a sequence read in the wrong order, because the layout assumed a reading direction that the illustrations themselves did not reinforce.

Both were cheap to fix at draft and would have been expensive to fix after a print run of several thousand.

A campaign that has not been shown to the people it is for is a campaign being tested at full cost, in public.

Two languages, one layout

Bengali and English were drawn to the same layout rather than one being fitted around the other afterwards. Bengali sets longer and taller, so the panels reserve the space the longer language needs and the shorter one sits comfortably in it. Neither version looks like a translation of the other.

What was delivered

Eighteen panels, as print-ready poster and leaflet files for three districts, with the working files handed to the NGO's own communications team. They have since produced two more panels in the same style for a related campaign, which was the point of documenting it rather than just drawing it.