CENTRE COLLEGE
Illustrating The Centre Experience
The Centre Experience is a theme we have spent a long time with during our time working with the college. It was the backbone behind what became a branding direction that appeared in numerous materials from websites to print to video.
Something we had not done, though, was communicate the organic and creative liberal arts environment where all these things take place. It’s great to see concrete examples of students studying abroad, participating in a research project, or creating original music compositions, but it’s nearly impossible to communicate how cumulative that experience is in a single image. The solution would have to involve magic of some kind.
In our case, we settled on the magic of combining photos, text, and hand-drawn illustrations to deliver everything all at once.
THE CHALLENGE
Effectively communicate a nuanced campus experience in single images to drive prospects to apply.
Everything, All At Once
In general, communicating a complicated or multi-faceted message like a college experience is something that takes layers of messaging repeated on various channels. The problem with those kinds of paths is they inevitably produce a high volume of dropoff. If we only have one shot to communicate everything we want to a prospective student in an ad, how should we present it?
Lighten Up, Francis
Paying for an education is a serious proposition. As such it was commonplace for materials sent to prospective students and parents to appear very corporate in terms of design elements. There’s a time and place for being serious, but there’s also a time to be the fun guy who stands out at the party. These ads allowed us to present a message about the serious impact that Centre could make on students’ lives in a more light-hearted format.
THE SOLUTIONS
We combined portraits of real students and faculty with illustrated experience elements to communicate a lot of information without dense text.
