// print design
Global Affairs Canada is the government department that manages Canada’s diplomatic and consular relations, promoting the country’s international trade and leading their international development and humanitarian assistance. They aim to effectively communicate that Canada welcomes foreign business investments and offers many competitive advantages.
The Invest in Canada initiative is an integrated marketing communications plan. The plan is designed to help raise awareness, generate visibility, and position Canada as a top foreign direct investment location in the minds of company executives from priority investment markets. The Invest in Canada promotional products are annual publications developed as critical components of this initiative.
Our role was to ensure that the overall design theme was clearly Canadian, and branded appropriately, adhering to the strict governmental guidelines in applying Global Affairs’ corporate look and feel, the Federal Identity Program Policy, and the Official Languages Act. The documents needed to appeal to a large international audience, while nourishing a strong brand recognition for the campaign.
We designed and developed a comprehensive series of targeted fold-out documents showcasing over a dozen key Canadian industry sectors. We sourced a range of stock imagery to accurately reflect each sector, creating target maps and implementing unique information into each layout. We also designed a variety of roadshow programmes including event information, schedules, and sponsor and key note speaker profiles.
We created many versions of the various documents in multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese) for international use. We were challenged to implement the foreign languages into the layouts while maintaining a consistent format in the overall design across all languages. We needed to ensure that print and digital files were carefully prepared with instructions for use abroad, to minimize complications in foreign reproduction.
We were tasked with developing fully accessible WCAG-compliant PDF reproductions of all of the materials to match the printed documents, for use online. This was a challenge, as there were many versions of the same documents in multiple languages, and we needed to field amendments nationally and internationally as the various versions were in development. We had to be meticulous in tracking the multitude of digital versions in progress; implementing overall changes across many documents in addition to individual version edits.
The range of promotional products we developed are visually cohesive, dynamic designs that showcase Canada as strong, stable and innovative. They communicate Canada’s strong business environment, high quality of life, diversity, and openness to the world with a strong, unified appearance promoting recognition and trust. The documents strengthen public awareness and perception of Canada as an investment destination of choice to an international audience.