ArtCenter College of Design
Learning to Create Change
Founded in 1930, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. Their unique conservatory-like approach to teaching and learning encourages students to make work that is both thoughtful and rooted in craft.
To attract prospective students and connect with industry leaders, alumni, and donors, we created a new digital platform that included a website, a series of films, and a campaign to reach a wider audience.
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Intelligently Relevant
ArtCenter attracts students from all over the world and we needed to develop a website that would be capable of serving relevant content to the right people at the right time. We did this by leveraging our contextual engine, which automatically detects a user’s location, time of day, and weather to dynamically display content.
Los Angeles
A person in LA would see upcoming events they could attend in person and an invitation to tour the campus.
Seoul
While someone in Korea would be able to view a video about LA and schedule a video chat with an admissions counselor.
Discover ArtCenter
We directed a series of 19 short films to bring people into the ArtCenter studios and show how working professionals teach students through hands-on projects, from concept to prototype to final piece. In addition to the world-class faculty, we highlight the cutting-edge facilities and workshops throughout the campus. We shot over 135 interviews with department chairs, faculty, and students over six months, amounting to hundreds of hours of footage.
To bring these stories to life on the site, we created an interactive section that dynamically builds an experience around users based on their interests. A prospective student could select Transportation Design and then switch to Entertainment Design in the same interface. Each selection brings up a different set of tailored videos, student galleries, photos, featured classes, and events around those majors.
Unique, Yet Unified
By structuring the site around a responsive, modular grid, we were able to design a series of interactive components that gives ArtCenter complete flexibility and control. We developed a content management system with a drag-and-drop visual editor for fast and easy editing. Our system allows for unique, but unified pages without forcing them into templates.
Building a Creative Community
We created Connect, an area where ArtCenter can engage with their community as a thought leader and collaborator. Connect curates social media stories on ArtCenter Now, helps visitors mark their calendars with Events, and features editorial articles from Dot Magazine that share the College’s point of view.
“We teach courage. The courage to be who you are, what you’re about fundamentally, how you can engage with the world, to have the courage to do it well. To do it rooted in intelligence, with great skill, that is what an ArtCenter education is all about.”
— Lorne Buchman, President
We directed L.A. Create Here to show prospective students what it means to go to school in the creative capital of the world.
The new ArtCenter website has seen a 46% increase in users and received 31% more pageviews. Additionally, we lifted their daily total reach on social media by six times during the campaign period.
