Early Childhood Education Austria
Partners: the Ministry, DMB, Digit-One
User journeys for entering the profession and further training
Location pages, bundled into one interactive search
Austria's Federal Ministry of Education uses the nationwide campaign 'elementarwichtig' to strengthen the profession of early childhood educators: the country's kindergartens need qualified professionals, and the campaign makes the profession's social importance visible while highlighting new paths into training and career change. It was developed together with Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann, one of the country's most renowned advertising agencies. At the centre of the campaign: the website elementarwichtig.at.
With the 'elementarwichtig' website, we're creating a central point of contact for every path into early childhood education
Early childhood educators make an indispensable contribution to our children's development every single day. That's why it matters so much to us to make access to this profession as simple and transparent as possible. With the ‘elementarwichtig’ website, we're creating a central point of contact that offers a clear overview of every training path and helps people find the route into early childhood education that suits them. In doing so, we're strengthening not only orientation, but also the appeal of this vitally important profession.
Christoph Wiederkehr
Minister of Education @ Austrian Federal Ministry of Education
The starting point: a campaign needs a home
Print, digital, social: the campaign reaches people everywhere, but everyone has to arrive somewhere. Anyone who became curious through a campaign visual should, from now on, land on their answer within a few clicks: what kind of profession is this, which path fits me, where can I start the training?
Three partners, clear roles
This project thrived on a clean division of labour. DMB developed the campaign and the visual concept, from the visuals to the imagery. The Ministry brought its own development team, which builds and runs the website in-house. And we took on the part in between, where web campaigns often fail: translating a campaign idea into a working website. Information architecture, user journeys, wireframes, the complete web design system, and the specification that lets an outside development team build with confidence.
The concept: from 'What do you want to know?' to 'Who are you?'
The primary conceptual question was: who are you, and what's your goal? Two entry points have carried the whole website ever since: 'You want to become an early childhood educator' guides school leavers and career changers to the right training path, from the BAfEP college through part-time courses and teacher training colleges to university programmes. 'You're already an early childhood educator' bundles further training, requirements and career perspectives for professionals. New training paths got the most prominent spot on the page, permanently visible instead of hidden away in accordions.
The centrepiece for orientation: more than 30 individual location pages were merged into one interactive location search where visitors filter by state and programme. Every journey takes just three to four clicks from question to action, cleanly supported by a redirect concept that carries the visibility built up by the old pages over to the new hubs.
The design: a campaign look that actually works on the web
A campaign design is made for posters and ads, not for screen readers and search engines. Our job was to translate DMB's look into a consistent web UI system: colours, typography and imagery became a documented design system with grids, spacing and every state, from default to disabled. We built the campaign’s characteristic tilted headlines and graphic buttons so they keep their impact and still stay clean: real text headings for screen readers and search engines, the graphic effects layered on top as SVG and CSS, buttons with real labels instead of images. Accessibility wasn’t an afterthought here but a design requirement from the very first sketch, right down to campaign colours checked for contrast under WCAG 2.1 AA. On a website that explicitly wants to reach everyone, that’s not a formality, it’s the point.
The handover: specification as blueprint
Because a different team builds what we design, the handover was part of the product, not an appendix. Every module got a detailed description of its logic, its responsive behaviour and its interactions: what happens on click, on hover, in an error state, on a phone. Add to that the complete web style guide as a reference, all design assets in the formats needed, and a joint kickoff with the Ministry’s developers. That way, design doesn’t become a matter of interpretation but a guide that a team who never knew us before can build from with confidence.
The result
With elementarwichtig.at, the campaign now has the website that every channel can point to: clear paths, the new training routes prominent at a glance, a location search, and a design that carries the campaign without sacrificing visibility. And for us, the project remains a great example of what collaboration looks like at its best: a strong campaign by DMB, a Ministry with its own development team, and in between, a concept and design system that connects both sides.
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