In the spring of 2003, a 20-year-old Media Arts and Animation major at The Art Institutes of Pittsburgh, Brian Hagan, had been thinking quite a bit about penguins, rabid penguins, in fact, with an insatiable lust for ice cream. At about the same time, Art Institutes of Philadelphia instructor Karen Girton-Snyder was deciding on a class project for her Multimedia & Web Design students, and turned her attention to the fire fighters memorial, and its need for a website. Both Hagan and Girton-Snyder created state-of-the art multimedia projects that would not have been possible without HP workstations.

The Art Institutes are scattered across North America, offering degrees in media arts, design, fashion, and culinary arts. The Art Institutes are owned and operated by parent company Education Management Corporation, which ranks amongst the largest providers of private post-secondary education in the world. In the fall of 2002, roughly 36,000 students were enrolled and attended classes at 30 Art Institutes in 16 states and 2 Canadian provinces. The student body has an average age of 25, is evenly split between male and female, and comes from all 50 states and 115 foreign countries. Just over 2,600 faculty members guide students through the two to three year curriculum, terminating in ether an associate's or a bachelor's degree.