Montréal’s École supérieure de mode de l'ESG UQAM —or ESM— is the only francophone higher education fashion education centre in all of the Americas and has been churning out top-tier fashion professionals since 1995.

Historically, its brand hadn’t succeeded in embodying its spirit, being overshadowed by the parent schools in which it is embedded. They wished to redesign their identity and the website in order to reflect their place among world-class fashion schools and attract a wider audience.

To this end, we created a vision for the brand’s core messaging and visual language as well as rolling it out for the website’s concept, narrative and design.

The end-all-be-all for this project was the student.

While surveying the competitive landscape, we rapidly realized that most of the competitor schools failed to engage their audience, or to anyone for that matter: they were mostly monologuing. We set out to engage by inspiring curiosity, eliciting a sense of belonging and empowering would-be alumni in making a career choice.

This was done textually by centering copy along two core messages:

“What if?” for the students to reflect and envision themselves in relation to the school.

“Don’t follow” to irreverently dare them to lead.

Visually, we envisioned pairing the student work with minimal but highly contrasted and pragmatic design structure: one typeface, striking visuals and a whole lot of tension.

Carrying the vision for the website, we drafted a narrative structure so that the student could feel in a conversation with the website. Each visual stacks were conceive carefully to strikingly highlight each item while also maintaining a very clear visual hierarchy.

This was articulated through a carefully high-contrast type scale unfolding in assymetrical layouts interspersed with generously sized visuals. All of this polished off with delicate interactions to make for calculated intense browsing experience.

Made in collaboration with Mat Desjardins.