Alberta Blue Cross, 2018 Canada's Top 100 Employers Award Application

Every year, the Human Resources department of Alberta Blue Cross sends numerous employer award applications, and Canada's Top 100 Employers is one of them. For them, it is one of the most important awards they wish to achieve so they wanted a different approach rather than a collection of documents in a binder. They had suggested a magazine format. The communications officer assigned to the project and myself devised an idea of creating a narrative approach from the view of the employee. One of the major challenges from this is that we needed to put this together in a relatively short time frame and with a limited budget.

While the communications officer weaves stories reflecting employee work experiences such as day-to-day work environment, benefits and career growth, I took the challenge of designing a magazine as it was something I don't do often. I had explored grids which would work with the content available and utilizing styles to streamline my work flow. The design constraints we have were to use the corporate fonts and primarily use the Pantone Process Blue, the corporate colour. Rather than using stock photography, we hope to add some authenticity of shooting photos of actual employees, who had graciously volunteered their likeness and their stories. I made an effort to learn and took photos of our corporate settings, limited to my photography experience and the equipment available. 

I had a number of learning experiences with this project: magazine layouts, photography and working with models who are not too comfortable in front of a camera. The outcome was positive, as the client was pleased with the results, given the limited resources, and established a standard of expectations in planning for subsequent Human Resources projects similar in scope.