Columbia International College

360° of Total Care Education

Deliverables

Visual Rebrand
Illustration
Copywriting
Animation
Website Design
Development

Re-designing Columbia International College 's (CIC) website was truly a marathon undertaking. From the project brief in February 2025 to the website's launch in April of 2026, the project became a highly iterative journey—one that required ongoing refinement to align evolving messaging with a clear and cohesive digital experience.

CIC is Canada's largest boarding high school, bringing students together from over 70 countries. The Hamilton-based school was founded in 1979 and over the past 45 years has developed a reputation for academic and personal excellence, graduating students who consistently earn more entrance scholarships than those at any other high school in Canada. Despite this, founder Clement Chan was was aware the school's website didn't express the CIC experience. After visiting CIC guests would invariably comment "Your school is so much better than what your website shows."

CIC partnered with Overdrive to help them create a website that more accurately reflects the energy, care, and quality of its academic environment.

A digital system built around Total Care

CIC's proprietary Total Care Education System® is the philisophical ethos of the school, governing how they teach, care, and support their students-academically, emotionally, socially, and physically. It is also at the centre of their brand. Because of this, we began our design process with refining the visual cues of the system, which is comprised of four "pillars": Learning, Development, Living and Communication. The Total Care Education System is central to CIC, and is also central to the website, so we designed this section almost like a microsite, to provide a clearer visual framework that strengthens recognition, and gives each pillar a more distinct presence online. To further support Total Care, we created a series of line illustrations that layer details that exemplify aspects of the pillar.

Learning: book, protractor and compass.
Development : ship's helm, badminton, butterfly
Living: people, clock, dining plate
Communication: Globe
Total Care Plus and Scholars: a laurel circlet.

The remainder of the site is organized around separate sections for Programs, Admissions, General school info, and CIC's partnerships with Canadian Universities.

Part of the site redesign was to modernize the palette and fonts used on the website. We developed a comprehensive primary and secondary palette to support:
1. The overarching CIC brand (burgundy and dark blue.
2. The four pillars of the Total Care Education System, and the Total Care Plus program for students under 16.
3. Thoughtful repurposing of the palette across the remainder of the site in thematically appropriate applications.

Chosing new fonts and type styles was more complex than usual. In addition to finding fonts that aesthetically reflected the character of the school, we had to take into account fonts and styles that would have optimal legibility for non- English speakers – as well as possess a suite of alternate versions to provide consistency across multiple languages including Russian, Portuguese and Vietnamese.

Type and Palette

Total Care Education System®: The Four Pillars

Built from a shared compass grid, each pillar illustration is part of a unified visual system designed to express care, structure, and student support in a clear and memorable way.

The Compass Grid

To unify the Total Care illustration system, we developed a radial compass grid inspired by navigation tools, gyroscopes, and the idea of continuous support. The circular structure reflects CIC’s around-the-clock care model, turning 24-hour coverage into a single, instantly readable visual language.

Anchored by a central point and surrounded by orbiting elements, the grid symbolizes guidance, stability, and 360° reach. Every ring, line, and dot reinforces the idea that support extends across every department, every hour, and every stage of the student experience.

Application

Once the core system was established, it was applied across the website to create a more cohesive and expressive digital experience. Colour, typography, illustration, and motion work together to guide users through the site while reinforcing the structure of the Total Care model at every step.