Guide: Creating New Products
The Talking is Teaching campaign creative – posters, clothing, and signage – are specially designed to most effectively communicate the talk, read, sing message to parents and caregivers. As the campaign grows and expands to new cities, we aim to make the creative as versatile as possible to meet the needs of communities across the country. We want campaign leaders and design staff in every Talking is Teaching community to have access to as much relevant creative material as possible. To help make a lasting impact, we must also take care to maintain consistency and to preserve the look and feel of the original creative work. To that end, here are a few guidelines intended to empower communities to produce new work when possible, and to create a clear process for approval when necessary.
Creating new products with existing creative is OK
Feel free to create new products like tip sheets, flyers, and even posters using existing illustrations and layouts. If a template exists for the product you intend to create, that’s a great place to start.
After creating your design, please submit it for approval through our Multimedia Submissions Form.
Please use language guidelines
Unlike illustrations, almost every new product will require new copy. For copy used in art products like posters, please refer to our detailed language guidelines for speech bubbles, prompts, and similar copy. For all other copy, please refer to similar, existing products.
Consider children’s developmental stages
Please keep in mind the stages of children’s language development when designing each piece. For example, our onesie for three- to six-month-olds has a “let’s talk about hands and feet” design. This prompt encourages parents to talk to their infants about things that matter to infants – their own bodies! Prompts are also designed to help parents anticipate pre-verbal responses. As children get older, the prompts get more sophisticated: our toddler-size T-shirt “let’s talk about color” introduces new vocabulary, open-ended questions, and rhyme. Our 4T design “let’s talk about numbers” uses prompts that include complex early math concepts, such as “more” and “less” and whole numbers. Knowledge of these developmental stages has been essential to helping us pick topics, prompts, and designs that are most effective for the age group that they target.