We interviewed a number of families affected by autism to hear their personal stories of how their children first expressed the signs.

With these stories, we built an entire scale-model world as a representation of the way an autistic child experiences autism.

The posters feature a real autistic boy named Jacob. Transformed into an animated character, each poster shows Jacob demonstrating a sign of autism as he described experiencing it himself.

This story, set, and character were built entirely from interviews with children that have autism (and their families). Every scene (and many of the props) were inspired by real-world stories and toys we filmed during the interviews.

Apart from the animated characters, which were created in CG, everything you see is made up of real, miniature objects. Lighting and shading were considered down to the smallest detail to enhance reality.

The print was created from high-resolution photographs of this created world. Typography was hand-designed by an illustrator to complement the distorted world of reality and autism.

Autism Speaks’ PSA has shown a positive trend with increases in awareness of the campaign, and parents paying attention to the issues and the awareness of the signs of autism. Our new Drivers Analysis confirms that the PSA drives the belief that autism is common, parents take action to learn more, and plan to have their child tested. Being aware of the issue, feeling favorable toward Autism Speaks, and having a child with autism continue to drive awareness and action.

To create as accurate and honest picture of autism as possible, we interviewed many families affected by it. Their stories tended to cluster around specific feelings and experiences. From that, we created visual metaphors to convey the signs. This way, we weren’t being overly prescriptive about what the signs of autism looked like in the real world. Instead, we were able to get parents to see the signs from their child’s perspective, an approach that was more impactful.

Because early diagnosis can make a lifetime of difference, we targeted both parents planning on having a family, and parents who have children under 36 months old. We also focused on Hispanic parents, as that audience has been neglected in the past.

Despite the fact that 1 in every 68 children is diagnosed with autism each year, parents are often unable to name or recognize its signs. This is because the signs are unique from child to child. So we knew we had to convey the individual signs in a way that every parent could recognize and understand. This led us to the use of animation, allowing us to create an open-ended canvas that each parent could imagine their own child within. It also gave us more emotional range to tell the complex story of autism.

To create as accurate and honest picture of autism as possible, we interviewed many families affected by it. The characters and experiences depicted in print were directly inspired by the stories of children with autism.

This was a national campaign. Our print budget was approximately $20,000 USD.