McMaster University
Developing Photographic Style and Massive Image Library Look for McMaster University
McMaster University employs more than 15,000 faculty and staff and one of Canada’s Top 5 universities. It has been consistently ranked one of the world’s Top 100 universities since 2003. In 2018, they launched the “Brighter World” marketing and branding campaign and hired me to develop a photographic style and build a massive media library for everyone across the university to use.
Organizational Needs
McMaster University has been consistently ranked one of the Top 100 universities in the world. In 2012, McMaster was ranked #65 in the world but had fallen to #113 in 2017. The academic world is highly competitive, at both the student and faculty levels. McMaster needed to rebuild its brand and re-establish their place on the world rankings in order to continue to attract the best and brightest minds from around the world to study and teach at the university.
While ranking metrics do measure performance outcomes, it is still largely a marketing and branding issue. In 2018, they hired a marketing manager and developed a new brand identity for the university and they needed someone to spearhead the development of the university’s photographic style as part of the Brighter World rebrand.
The Solution
McMaster hired me under contract for six months to help develop, refine, and define the photographic approach to creating image assets for the university. While some criteria had already been established in the brand guidelines as to what should be photographed (active subjects, emphasis on research, etc.) and how it should be displayed from a graphic perspective (on banners, in ads, etc.), there was no approach to how the images should be photographed.
THE IMAGES
There were three main priorities that needed to be balanced: researchers conducting research in the field; headshots for faculty and department members; and architectural and interior images of every single campus building.
Since the focus of the Brighter World campaign was on research, I photographed a lot of researchers in their labs or conducting field research. I established an approach of using a wide-angle lens up close so the viewer feels like part of the action. I developed a look and approach to shooting that best allowed the images to be used with the brand standards, which called for putting headshots into circles (“bubbles”) and applying a duotone to the images. Therefore, the images needed to be clean, easy to convert to black and white, without a distracting background, and allow the duotone image to still look great.
Examples of images are shown below in The Results section.
ASSET MANAGEMENT
Secondly, all of the image assets needed to go into an asset library for all faculties, departments, communications personnel, and media to be able to access and use. A major part of my work was getting the asset library primed and loaded with images. The fastest way to do this was to (a) photograph all building exteriors and (b) start photographing headshots of as many faculty members as possible.
Filling the asset library with images was not enough. Images needed to be easy to find, easy to search, and classified in a logical way. As part of this process, I also:
developed a taxonomical system
developed and implemented keyword hierarchy
managed uploading of all media into the asset library
managed image rights usage settings for various partners
The brand asset library is publically accessible and indexed by search engines. You can find it here.
THE RESULTS
As a result of the Brighter World campaign, McMaster University’s global ranking increased from #113 in 2017 to #77 in 2019 and reached a high of #69 in 2021.
RESEARCHER EXAMPLES
CAMPUS & CAMPUS LIFE EXAMPLES
HEADSHOT EXAMPLES
Standards were set and defined for how to light and photograph each faculty member or employee. I needed to ensure the images would look good once the brand’s graphic style was applied and I also wanted to ensure people’s faces weren’t washed out and retained their dimensionality through the use of shadows, while not being too high contrast as to look too “edgy.”
DUOTONE PROGRESSION
The headshots you see above needed to be photographed in a particular way so that the image still looked great and retained its detail after being cropped in a circle and having a duotone applied. You can see from the image progression below how this was developed and tested for real-world application.
