Our target was patients with aphasia and their clinicians. To resonate with them, we needed to demonstrate a deep and thorough understanding of aphasia. We depicted words literally “on the tip of the tongue” because that is something we have heard referenced directly by both groups on numerous occasions.

The illustration depicts our main character, the sheep, on the tip of a tongue. In the US, the expression “it’s on the tip of my tongue” refers to a word that a person can’t quite remember or say, but they know they almost have it. Since many aphasia patients use this expression to explain how they feel when struggling to get the right word out, we chose to feature this concept in our illustration.

Similarly, when a patient is struggling with a word “on the tip of their tongue,” the brain may confuse it with similar sounding words, making it more difficult to say the right one. Every character in the illustration that we see fighting against the sheep (i.e. shark, shirt, shower, etc.) represents a word in English that starts with the same “sh” sound.