Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
On the West Coast, nestled between San Francisco and San Jose you will find Stanford University. Dedicated to excellence and research, Stanford welcomes over 150,000 visitors on its campus annually, with multimedia tours available online. With self-guided podcast tours, slideshows, and videos, Stanford wanted a fresh new look for their university’s growing resources.
Los Angeles-based photographer John Davis was hired by an agency in Baltimore called North Charles Street Design Organization (NDSDO) to help give Stanford their new desired look. NDSDO specializes in marketing for Higher Education and is one of John’s oldest clients, he’s been working for them since 2001.
The goal of Stanford’s campaign was to create images for their new Cultural Center. They needed John to photograph a series of images for refreshed brochures, web pages, a new viewbook and to update their overall image library. The agency, NCSDO, coordinated the project during pre-production. Even though John was supposed to have full access to the Stanford campus, it took a few days for the staff to warm up to having a photographer and crew walking around.
The agency worked hard to gain the access we needed, but it wasn’t until we spent a couple days on campus that Stanford’s staff warmed up to us being there and granted us full access to the famous Stanford Quad.
With Stanford’s huge campus, John walked over 10 miles on his first day of shooting, dodging students on bikes along the way. Although he got some great shots of the bike traffic (the best shot he captured was him hanging off the back of a bicycle himself), he knew he needed a more efficient way to travel around the huge campus. John ended up using a golf cart to make things easier, and also allow him to swiftly dodge speeding bikes.
Their campus is full of bikes. It’s the only way students get around. If you’re walking around campus you better keep your head up or you’ll end up on your butt.
John was more than happy to have shot in sunny Palo Alto in January and enjoyed the beauty of the Stanford campus. Stanford and NDSDO were thrilled with John’s photographs, which you can see displayed on the agency’s site in Stanford’s Viewbook. The images won Best in Show 2016 from Viewbook Higher Education Marketing Report’s Advertising Awards and Excellence from Viewbook University & College Designers Association’s 2016 Design Competition.
As for the future, most of John’s Higher Education clients need to update their materials about every three years or so, so he will be happy to come back on board with Stanford when they have another need to refresh and update their images.
See more of John at jdph.com.