World Challenge

When our colleagues and friends at Headland Brands were presented with the opportunity to revitalize the international brand of World Challenge – A Student Travel Service, that’s been in operation since 1987 – they came to us to connect the technical dots between brand message, design, and functionality to their multisite platform!

Headland Brands provided us with an exciting new colour palette, photo story, and bold new visual identity for Cameron, our Head of Design, to translate into a dimensional and engaging site flow for parents, teachers, and students to navigate with curiosity and clarity.

Aesthetically, the website pulls from a few different tactile memories. The layering of photography, with the organic cut-out shapes reminds you of the photo collages you make in an album after a holiday. The ‘handwritten’ elements provide that spontaneous and youthful invocation of journaling and quickly jotting down that place name or memory that you might do when you’re traveling and living in the moment. The dashed line that carries smoothly downward and across is a call out to the treasure maps we would see and draw as little kids when our imagination ran wild and the world felt big and open.

All of this is paired with the copywriting and photography carefully prepared between the World Challenge and Headland Brands – that elevate the brand to be something that teachers and parents can respect and understand – conveying the stability and reliability that World Challenge centers in their service for the past 34 years.

Being a complex and multi-layered business, this digital HQ needed to be able to house two sister sites (Australasia and UK) and be easy for the company employees to self-manage. This includes an intuitive employee portal that allows them to add important documents, conditional fields, new trip options, and of course inbound inquiries!

Both Advantage and Headland Brands had a series of healthy and inquisitive functionality discussions with World Challenge so this multi-site solution didn’t just talk the talk, it could walk the walk.

Having the opportunity to flex his coding muscles, Cameron relished the chance to create a dynamic AND responsive site, especially on the home page. It might not look like much more than a pretty groovy parallax effect, but for the code geeks in the room, if they peek under the hood, they’ll see a smart, efficient and ‘lightweight’ engine that allows this site to load fast, load correctly – every time.

The final result of this awesome teamwork with Headland Brands and Advantage was a multisite, photographic, multitextured resplendence – that carries the finesse, technology, and reliability that such a well-respected company and service deserves.