University of Bristol

'Bristol Ready' - Helping new students prepare for university life in Bristol

Eight films, seven infographics and one app that helps a new student find their feet

Arriving at university for the first time is a lot to hold in your head at once. Where do you go when you're struggling. Who your tutor actually is and what they're for. Whether you can take a job alongside your degree. What to pack. How to get across a city you've never lived in.

The University of Bristol had built an app to answer all of that - Bristol Ready, issued to every incoming first year before they set foot on campus. What the app needed was content with enough warmth and clarity to make students want to open it. They came to us to make it.

The Brief

Bristol Ready covered subjects that are genuinely important - Support services, tutor support, academic support, working while you study, travelling in Bristol, what to bring and more.

Read as text on a phone screen at eleven at night in a new bedroom, that information is easy to skip. The University wanted it brought to life - and they wanted it to reach every student, not just the ones who could watch a video with sound on.

Two things shaped everything we made:

It had to sound like students, not like the University. Advice about halls and money and asking for help lands differently depending on who's giving it.

It had to work for everyone. Accessibility wasn't a box ticked at the end of the edit. It was designed into the shoot.

The films

We produced nine films for the app. Three were shot on location across the University's campus - the buildings, walkways and study spaces students would be moving through within weeks. Five were made in our Bristol studio on bespoke sets built for the project, giving us complete control of look, sound and turnaround across a large slate.

Every film was presented by current University of Bristol students and every film was delivered in multiple versions so that no student was handed a lesser experience:

Subtitled versions for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and for anyone watching without sound
Audio described versions carrying the visual information for students with sight loss
Voiced titles, so on-screen text is spoken rather than assumed

Seven infographics, two outputs for each.

Alongside the films we designed seven complex infographics, condensing detailed practical information into something a student can absorb at a glance.

Each was built to live in two places at once: optimised for phone display inside the app, and produced as a print-ready poster version for halls, departments and student spaces. Those are different design problems — vertical scroll and thumb-sized detail on one hand, wall-scale hierarchy readable from across a corridor on the other — so each infographic was properly resolved for both rather than scaled and hoped for.

We used AI-assisted design tools as part of this process, giving us the range to explore and iterate visual approaches at a speed that would otherwise have been out of reach on a set of this size and complexity, with every output art-directed and finished by our design team.