Vector Institute

The Vector Institute is Canada’s leading non-profit AI research hub, attracting the next generation of researchers, advancing healthcare innovation, and driving collaborative projects across the enterprise landscape. It’s a big story to tell, with a diverse audience spanning varying levels of AI literacy, from sponsoring partners to graduate students to policymakers and the general public. When we first partnered with Vector in 2022, the organization was growing fast and carrying the technical debt that comes with it. The challenge was fragmentation — an experience that didn’t yet reflect the scale or ambition of the organization behind it.

The first engagement

We worked closely with Vector’s team to turn that fragmented experience into something unified, scalable, and genuinely their own. This meant redesigning the content architecture, building a flexible WordPress CMS, establishing a robust design system, launching a dedicated partner portal, and optimizing for performance and accessibility. Every detail, from visual presentation to editorial voice, was refined to reflect Vector’s leadership in AI while remaining accessible to all audience types.

The result was a platform Vector could confidently scale. And they did.

Returning to go further

Three years later, Vector had grown, their brand had evolved, and new audiences had emerged. The organization had expanded its mandate and the stories it needed to tell were more refined. A new brand promise, Where AI’s possibilities come to life, needed to come through in every digital touchpoint, and navigation structure built for 2022 needed to update to reflect the many changes in how Vector now operated.

The mandate this time was precise: enhance, not replace. Preserve the strong foundation while refining to meet the demands of a significantly evolved organization.

Our approach

We began with a thorough discovery: a technical assessment of the existing platform, stakeholder interviews with content creators and administrators, a content audit mapped against Vector’s evolved brand positioning, and a full information architecture review aligned with their new audience framework.

From there, we substantially expanded the design system and content framework, giving Vector’s team far greater flexibility to tell complex stories with consistency and confidence. We restructured navigation to intuitively guide Vector’s five distinct audience segments, integrated the new brand direction across every layer of the platform, and built the technical foundation for future marketing automation integration.

The outcome

The project landed on time against a tight, defined timeline, delivering discovery through design, build, training, and launch. The enhanced platform gives Vector’s team a more robust and focused design system that reflects how they work and how they prefer to communicate, with significantly less friction in day-to-day content management. Vector is well set to continue to scale their offerings and deliver on its promise of improving the lives of Canadians through advances in AI.