Among Taplin's early designs were "Kingcup" and "Sun-lit". In the mid-1930s she designed the "highly modern" "Moonlight"; "Winter Morn", with simple grey petals and leaves on a lavender background with silver highlights; and "Falling Leaves", a stylised leaf pattern in green and silver. "Moonlight", "Winter Morn" and "Falling Leaves" were among eleven Taplin designs chosen by Wedgwood for an exhibition of predominantly tableware at Grafton Galleries in London in 1936, along with a smaller number of works by Skellern, Star Wedgwood, Keith Murray, John Skeaping and others. According to Cheryl Buckley, these and other hand-painted designs of the 1930s were "simple, but bold" in their patterns, using "subtle" shades of green, grey, blue and lavender. Diane Taylor considers Taplin, Wedgwood and Skellern to present a "coherent stylistic approach... based upon simplicity and restraint", while Buckley characterises the work of male designers such as Skellern as more Modernist than that of Taplin and other contemporary Wedgwood women designers, such as Star Wedgwood and Daisy Makeig-Jones. Buckley considers that Taplin's tableware designs, as well as those of other women ceramics designers in the 1930s, represent "a clever application of modernism", working within the constraints on the British pottery industry of the time, finding a balance between modernist design and saleability to English consumers in a diminished market after the financial crash of 1929. They were reasonably inexpensive and targeted at relatively young purchasers with "some taste but no money". Amy Gale characterises Taplin as "conservative", stating that she "updat[ed] the tradition of floral decoration."