How do you celebrate the humanity imbued in a century of engineering?
The Challenge
APEGA turned 100. A century of professional engineering and geoscience in Alberta is a real milestone, and centennials have a way of turning into self-congratulation that nobody outside the building hears about. This campaign had to reach members, students on their way to becoming members, and a public that has never given the association a thought. It also had to give APEGA's branches something they could run locally.
The Insight
A century of engineering is hiding in plain sight. Albertans pass the work every day, in towers and bridges and water systems, without ever meeting the people who designed them. So the centennial's job was attribution: putting names to what everyone can already see.
The Idea
100 stories for 100 years.
A century told one career at a time, each story anchored somewhere an Albertan has actually stood.
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The Work
The content bank came first. One hundred stories of member contributions to Alberta, with photography recovered from more than a dozen archives around the province and assembled in one place.
The microsite gave that material three ways in. You can walk the century on a timeline, find the work nearest to you on a map, or filter by industry, all across the same hundred stories. Every icon, button, navigation element and graphic was custom. The site was designed and developed in house.
The videos mixed new footage of Alberta with archival material spanning the century. Static images were given depth with parallax, and the construction of the Calgary Tower in 1967 was 3D modelled and rendered as a time lapse, so a building that went up before most members were born could be watched going up again. Every element was produced in house by our animation and video team.
Around all of that sat the rest of the campaign: a centennial logo and tagline, both tested before launch, collateral, branch toolkits and promotional media kits, social content, online ads, digital and out-of-home. We ran the media buying and management ourselves.
The Result
100 stories published as a browsable archive at discoverapega.ca, with a century of photography pulled out of more than a dozen separate collections and into one public place.
Three routes through the same history: by date, by location, by industry.
APEGA's branches ran the centennial in their own communities, on toolkits and media kits built for that purpose.
Likely perceptual shift: members placing their own careers inside a named lineage rather than an institutional timeline. We read it that way because the site lets a member find the story closest to their own city and their own discipline, which is what turns a general history into a personal one.
