We designed a Visual Communications course, promotional video, and digital community to bring employees across offices up to speed on the principles of design and quickly get better at communicating.

When Covid took over how we interact, our reliance on in-person relationship building and collaboration was seriously challenged. The switch to only virtual was imperative but we found that a large number of coworkers in the organization were suddenly responsible for visual content without having basic design skills. As a small team that’s used to taking on large tasks, keeping our eyes on all visual work from all 5 offices seemed a bit impossible. We knew this sudden shift had to be approached differently - for the sanity of us all.

We created a course to introduce and practice the principles of visual communication touching on communication theory, design thinking as well as the basics of typography, layout, colour and multimedia storytelling.

To garner attention for the course we designed an animated video to help promote the training further. To prepare, we surveyed colleagues in all offices to form the course based on their needs.

Zoom-fatigue in mind, we maintained a workshop styled structure allowing colleagues to use examples in their day-to-day, quickly quizzed participants to test their ability, organized breakout groups to apply the lessons in context, and followed up with “office hours” to help colleagues tackle some of their unique challenges.

Immediately following the course participants had access to our digital community filled with design news, short lessons, a forum to ask questions to the group, and ongoing content going more in depth on branding, design trends, inclusive design and best practices managed by the design team.

“The level of knowledge of the instructors was high and they were very effective in sharing these concepts with a broad audience providing practical skills/tools, and not just abstract teachings about being a better communicator.”

Marketing Specialist, New York

F E E D B A C K

200 participants across
the US, Europe and Asia

“Both the content and the trainersexceeded expectations. This was aninteractive and extremely interesting experience. I encourage the Forum to expand this work as it has the power to raise our collective level of quality, consistency and effectiveness.”

Lead, Public Engagement, Japan