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DigiBC

One brand. Several programs. A system that can keep growing.

DigiBC brings together British Columbia’s creative technology sector through several programs, including Signals, its creative tech expo, and DigiBC Careers, its work placement program connecting students and employers.

Forge & Spark brought their content strategy and storytelling expertise to the project, developing the ongoing content that keeps DigiBC and its programs visible.

I developed the strategy and Design Guidelines for DigiBC, then turned that foundation into a flexible digital system for its programs. I carried it through the information architecture, UX, website design and WordPress development, and continue to provide ongoing design and development support as DigiBC evolves.

Strategy → Design Guidelines → Digital system → Website → Ongoing support

The result is a connected system that gives each program room to be itself while keeping the DigiBC brand recognizable, consistent and ready for what comes next.

Challenge

Signals and DigiBC Careers serve completely different audiences, an expo audience and a student and employer audience, and each needed room to look and feel like itself. The risk in a shared brand system is flattening that difference until every program looks the same.

The opposite risk was just as real. Without a strong connective thread, each program could drift far enough from the parent brand that a sponsor working across DigiBC’s initiatives would not immediately recognize them as related, and without a clear split between visual identity and ongoing content, the two workstreams could easily step on each other.

Sponsors also needed a single, current view of what DigiBC offered across its full portfolio of programs, which did not exist as one document or one page before the media kit was built.

DigiBC's core identity was defined clearly enough to extend, rather than repeat, across Signals and DigiBC Careers.

Solution

DigiBC’s core identity was defined clearly enough to extend, rather than repeat, across Signals and DigiBC Careers. The same foundation principle applies to every engagement: build the guidelines solid enough that what comes next, a new program, a new platform, plugs in without starting over.

The online build followed a planning pass built to hold three related but distinct programs at once. A sitemap worked out where Signals and DigiBC Careers each needed their own pages and where those pages needed to connect back to the DigiBC parent site, and wireframes resolved that structure before any of it went into production, on WordPress and Elementor, hosted on Kinsta.

DigiBC

Forge & Spark handled the content side in parallel, building a story pillar framework around DigiBC’s mission and turning it into ongoing blog and social content across the organization’s programs. Keeping design and content as distinct, coordinated workstreams meant each could move at its own pace without waiting on the other.

Curious, thoughtful, and collaborative, Lara asks the right questions to better understand our objectives and audience. Her work is not only elegant and effective – but also consistently delivered on time and on budget.

Rachel Kelly

Program Director, DigiBC

Result

“Lara elevated every aspect of this ambitious expo,” says Loc Dao, CEO at DigiBC. The identity has held up through multiple cycles of Signals and the continued growth of DigiBC Careers, extending to new needs instead of being rebuilt for them.

DigiBC now treats design and build as an on-call day-rate relationship rather than a closed project, calling on it whenever a program changes enough to need it. Sponsors evaluating DigiBC continue to see one coherent organization across every active program, not a brand that was current only at launch.

The partnership with Forge & Spark runs in parallel on the same basis, both practices returning to the same set of programs as they keep changing, rather than treating DigiBC as a finished case study from a single year.

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