UCQC
Visually communicating engineering projects to industry partners
Successfully linking academia and industry
The UC Quake Centre is a dynamic partnership between the New Zealand Government, the University of Canterbury, and several leading industry groups, all working together to provide world-class knowledge, research and solutions for the engineering sector.
The annual workshop is an exciting opportunity to share project progress with the industry partners who fund and support them. The Quake Centre turned to Like-Minded to help them layout the complex and technical content as posters for use in the workshop, and as a takeaway booklet.
Filling the skills gap
The UC Quake Centre is a hive of activity with numerous projects on the go at any one time. The workshop usually allows for about 20 individuals to present on their area of expertise. Each presenter is invited to prepare content for one poster to share the key points of their project and progress to date. However, no two writers will write in the same way, nor do many of the writers have the visual design skills to create the posters.
In came Like-Minded!
To ensure visual consistency and a professional approach to the day as a whole, we were able to take the raw content from the researchers and used a pre-defined poster ‘style’, to create a suite of documents that had a similar look and feel.
Making the ‘different’ look ‘the same’
The first step to success, was to ask the presenters to use a template and fill it with their content. Our instructional designer liaised personally with each author to ensure that we fully understood the key messages and the proportional representation each message needed on the poster. They also encouraged the use of consistent language between authors, and in our visual design, we didn’t stray from our branded colour palette and treatment of graphics.
From NZ dam soil to concrete research, from seismic isolation to low damage dry-wall design, the posters all had the same coordinated, sharp, professional style.
Everyone loves a freebie!
With the complexity of the information and the number of presentations, nobody could be expected to remember the detail, let alone share it with others back in the industry workplace. The answer was to turn the posters into a handy booklet that the workshop attendees could take away with them.
We are rarely asked these days to develop print material, but this was one occasion where digital alone was not the answer. The result – a professional summary of a full and informative day that let the attendees focus on the spoken word, knowing they had a printed copy of each and every poster.
Process is everything
We have been supporting the UC Quake Centre workshops since 2014 and over that time have developed a robust process, based on documented standards and reusable templates.
Reusing this effective go-to process each year means that we continually save our client time and money, and they know they are going to be the proud owners of a professional product for each and every workshop.
“We are evolving a long-term partnership with Like-Minded and they have become an integral part of the learning delivery aspect of the Quake Centre business. Like-Minded are extremely easy to work with, are highly professional, and actually do what they say they are going to do! We have worked with them now on a range of initiatives from learning resources to complex, multi-party project management.”
Dr Robert Finch, Director, UC Quake Centre