Photo-to-Illustration Guide: A Resource for the Development of Health Communication Visual Materials

"Often, we rely on images to model a behavior and to motivate individuals, families or communities to try a new behavior and, ultimately, to adopt the behavior or behaviors we are promoting."

This guide is designed to orient social and behaviour change (SBC) managers on the basic principles involved in a specific technique for creating high-quality illustrations - photo-to-illustration (PTI) - and to outline the benefits of using this technique in developing visual materials for nutrition and other SBC programming.

The guide's creator, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Strengthening Partnerships, Results, and Innovations in Nutrition Globally (SPRING) project, explains that, particularly low-literacy or multi-language settings, visual images can "stimulate interest and curiosity, capture attention, communicate difficult concepts, and add context." In SBC work, visual aids with high-quality images "also convey a professional look which helps target populations to trust the information and encourages them to accept the messages as important and valuable to them. High-quality images can present complicated ideas quickly and succinctly to a wide population, and can effectively supplement (or even replace) written materials."

The PTI Guide serves as a complement to the Community Infant and Young Child Feeding (C-IYCF) Counselling Package, a global resource developed by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) for the promotion of key nutrition practices. The technique presented in the PTI Guide expands upon the basic steps for the PTI process for developing illustrations outlined in the UNICEF adaptation guide.

In brief, PTI is a process involving tracing a reference photograph and then scanning and importing the resulting line drawing into a computer programme, such as Photoshop, to add colour, shading, and patterns. In this way, the image can be manipulated and transformed into a realistic illustration that can capture the cultural context, provided that the reference photos capture that as well. They can also reflect a high level of detail when compared to most cartoon-style illustrations. Furthermore, once they are created, illustrations of this type can be edited according to feedback from technical experts and the intended audience or community. They can also be adapted to other cultural contexts by changing hairstyles, skin colours, or clothing, without necessarily needing to recreate or reshoot a model or scene.

The PTI Guide reviews the process, beginning with the initial concept development of an image, and then through the process of photography, illustration, editing, testing, and adaptation. In this way, SBC managers can hopefully more effectively direct and guide artists to achieve the high-quality images needed for effective communication. In fact, the PTI Guide may be shared with graphic artists as a "primer" for the type of graphic work the SBC manager may be looking for, though it is not meant to provide a complete graphic design training on the PTI technique.

Additional resources in the PTI Guide include tips for SBC managers on incorporating this process into a programme, including overviews of budgeting for this work, incorporating the process in a work plan, contracting an artist, and working with artists.

SPRING has created additional resources to complement the PTI Guide and the C-IYCF Counselling Package. First, the Photo-to-Illustration Tutorial is a video explaining the PTI process through a real-life example; it may be accessed below. Second, created through a partnership between SPRING and UNICEF, the IYCF Digital Image Bank provides a growing repository of images created using the PTI process. See Related Summaries, below, for access.