The Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) receives far more applicants every year than it can accept. Around 1 out of every 10 students are allowed to enter the first year.
Also the various courses tend to specialize quite fast. The aspiring students need to be fully informed about the curriculum, rules and regulations and other details. They need to make a fairly educated choice before applying to the school.
And that’s where we stepped in. After researching the field, we quickly realized that most art schools didn’t present themselves as art schools at all. The information that they put out breathes the same happy (but serious), fun (but intelligent), loose (but studious) atmosphere that you would find in a business or tech school. Smiling & happy students on sunny campuses and in clean buildings. Impossible to make a proper decision when you are 17 or 18.
Over the course of several campaigns we showed the HKU as a real art school. At first by proposing an over the top parade of illustrative portraits of students.
Later we focussed on the actual surroundings. We took brutally honest pictures inside the school. The unavoidable mess of the various workshops was accentuated by clean and colorful interventions in the form of typographic installations with inspirational quotes of famous artists. And finally we focussed on the student population. We organized a series of flash mobs of students forming excerpts of quotes
