The ribbon is a metaphorical path we weave through many of our publications. It helps guide users attention to key information whilst adding visual depth to the page. It work particularly well online when linking our adverts across many slides and in the flagship Worldwide Pathways it runs unbroken across every spread.

We deliberately wanted to move away from some of the cliches of the international education industry (such as selfies in front of Big Ben). Through our communications with students we knew they saw the choice to study in the UK or US more than just a holiday, and they wanted to become part of their host countries population. The video and photoshoots were planned specifically to that our students are more than just tourists. Locations were very important to communicating the sense of place, whilst using our actual students provided the real stories.

The introduction of duotone to our images and videos not only causes us to standout in an industry that is often conservative with it imagery, it also allowed us to build up recognition of our brand colours (purple and blue) whilst giving a great background for other visual elements to standout and push the Your Path Your Way message like the lockup or ribbon.

We produced a series of illustrations in-house that allowed us to showcase aspects of the user journey or concepts that we may not have access to i.e. pre-arrival or visa acceptance. Illustrations we done to compliment the Pathways colour palette apart from the human subject. Bright non-natural colours were used for all skin tones in order to stand out putting full attention on their action. It also created ethnically ambiguous images allowing readers to better project themselves into the depictions.

In order to aid our international customers understanding we created an icon suit that helped limit extra written content by creating visual cues that can be understood across language barriers. Starting with an initial 14 subject icons, the suit has continued to grow with all icons having a large and small variety for different applications.