Ocean Frontier Institute – Report showcasing the achievements of the Institute in its first seven years

Contributors: Amberlea Williams, graphic design; Zach Martin, editing; Ken Paul, review.

The Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI) launched in 2015, forming a world-class ocean research partnership between Atlantic Canada’s Dalhousie University, Memorial University and the University of Prince Edward Island, winning a nearly $100 million Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) and transforming multidisciplinary research in the region. OFI wanted to share their successes over their first seven years with their community, potential future partners, and the public, and to showcase their work on Indigenous engagement, innovation and commercialisation, climate change solutions, and outreach and developing the next generation of ocean experts. 

OFI contracted us to create an eye-catching document that highlights the breadth of their accomplishments. Meeting regularly with OFI, we provided advice and helped OFI develop a vision for their report. We collected documents and images, and created a product that is branded to align with OFI’s website, but has its own feel and content. We also wanted this product to be visually engaging, for example by creating a full-page spread, ‘OFI by the numbers’ to summarise the scope of OFI’s research funding, outputs and impacts.  

To bring to the forefront the work they’ve done to create an Indigenous Engagement Guide and to provide Indigenous cultural awareness training to students and staff, we created a full-page spread on the topic, including listing key impacts of OFI’s commitment to meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities; we put the land acknowledgements of the three founding institutions at the start of the report; and we requested that OFI’s Indigenous Advisor review the report (which is what led to the addition of the list of Indigenous engagement impacts).