Emerald Cultural Institute · Graphic & Communication Design · Dublin, 2025
Emerald Cultural Institute:
When design changed what people decided to do Activity participation increased by +52% month-over-month driven entirely by a visual redesign of the social programme.
Role: Graphic Designer, Visual Identity
Type: Communication Design · Print & Digital
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign
Year: 2025
The problem
Emerald Cultural Institute is one of Ireland's most respected English language schools, founded in 1986 and accredited by Quality English, EAQUALS and IALC. It welcomes students from over 60 countries every year — graduates, professionals and high-achieving young adults who are accustomed to quality in every interaction.
The extracurricular programme was genuinely good: trips to the Cliffs of Moher, Galway, Belfast and Kilkenny, escape rooms, club events, monthly activity calendars. Participation was low. The materials promoting these activities looked improvised — and for this audience, that disconnect was costly. They were reading the visual communication as a signal of organisational standards. A poorly designed flyer didn't just look bad. It made people question whether the experience was worth their time and money.
The audience
Understanding who I was designing for was the starting point. Emerald's students weren't casual tourists. They were international students, many of them graduates and working professionals, from over 60 countries, in Dublin specifically to invest in their language skills and international experience. They had high expectations and a short time window. Every weekend activity was competing with everything else Dublin had to offer.
That context shaped every design decision: the level of finish, the tone of the copy, the information hierarchy. These materials had to work as a convincing argument in under three seconds.
The work that generated the solution
Working independently, I redesigned the full visual system for the social programme. The goal was not to make the materials look expensive — it was to make them look consistent, considered and worthy of the experiences they were selling.
Every piece was built on the same visual foundation: a defined colour palette, editorial typography, a layout grid that communicated organisation and care. Consistency across formats — from digital posts to printed calendars to event invitations — meant that over time, students began to recognise the visual language and associate it with quality.
Key insight
The audience wasn't disinterested. They were waiting to be convinced. Design was the only variable that changed — and it was enough.
Outcome
Participation in extracurricular activities increased by 52% during the period the new visual approach was applied. The programme covered escape rooms, trips to the Cliffs of Moher, Galway, Cork, Belfast and Kilkenny, monthly activity calendars and club events.
The numbers confirmed what the brief had suggested: the audience wasn't disinterested. They were waiting to be convinced. Design was the variable.
What I'd do differently...
With more time on the project, I would have documented the before — photographing or collecting examples of the previous materials to create a clear visual contrast. Without that comparison, the impact of the redesign relies entirely on the participation numbers rather than showing the visual gap that was closed.
I would also have proposed a feedback loop with the student coordinators — a simple weekly check on which events were selling out fastest, to understand whether certain formats or visual approaches were driving more engagement than others. That data would have made the next iteration sharper.