Josh Fehr, creative director Tribal DDB Vancouver spoke with us and says there were two art directors for the project: one working on the site and doing interactive work (connectionsforlife.ubc.ca) and one working on print and collateral material. Before starting the project, Fehr says his team went out and collected all the materials they could find from other schools and found that they all relied on the same visual techniques. The idea, he says, was to differentiate UBC from its competitors and create the idea of a school with a connection to the present and the future while creating a cohesive package.

Tribal DDB Vancouver's campaign for UBC was inspired by social media

The print materials were inspired by a magazine's look and feel, he says. “There was no cover shoot, it’s a graphical execution,” says Fehr. “A flat colour with a varnish that reinforces the idea of UBC as a connection.” As for the photography, it follows the trend of social media. “[It's] not slick marketing material,” Fehr says, “[but] more student inspired, coming from the student perspective. Some of it was sourced by things that we found on Flickr.” 

Fehr says there are a few unique traits to the website. One is the social media dashboard which runs an un-moderated UBC Twitter feed. It also pulls in local news and weather to give students and parents an idea of what it is like in the area. “Another cool feature,” says Fehr, “is the idea of creating a binder. As the student moves through the site they can select pages to put in and bundle them into a pdf which can be emailed or printed.”

Even though it is a site for international students, all those who attend UBC are expected to read and write English. There are, however, pdfs of key information for parents available in multiple languages on the site. Contact: Tribalddb.ca, Connectionsforlife.ubc.ca