PodCamp Toronto

2nd Feb 2010 Clients 0 Comments

After the great experience working with the PodCamp London team, and knocking it out of the park, I thought I’d see if I could hit two for two with PodCamp Toronto and have as much fun. PodCamp Toronto is the premier social & new media event in Toronto, maybe even all of Canada, but they’ve always faltered on the visual composition of the event. The logo was rough, no real central website, and heavily relying on a wiki to keep it all together.

That’s where I come in.

I updated their branding, and designed a new website to be a single point of reference, moving completely away from the wiki model used previously. I didn’t do it alone however; Tommy Vallier & Bill Deys helped on the back end, pulling data from third party sites like Guestlist and Speaker Rate allowing us to use those services yet maintain the information on our own site. Daniele Rossi & Mircea Baldean helped keep things moving smoothly on the administrative end and managed the transition over to a single host and domain. They also provided a good sounding board for ideas I pitched at the committee before they were pitched.

The big event happens this month on the 20th and 21st at Ryerson’s Communications Centre. 600 plus have already signed up and 30 plus sessions lined up, so make sure to get your name in today!

Hello 2010.

26th Jan 2010 Updates 0 Comments

It wouldn’t be a new year if I didn’t push out some new updates for the site and reflect a little on the previous year’s comings and goings.

A Year in Review.

2009 started off rather briskly with the work on CastRoller going public as the service came out of beta. Almost immediately people took notice and it appeared print and numerous design sites online.

Next was PodCamp London, the social media event of the year in London Ontario. It’s possibly the most fun I’ve had to date with a project thanks to the great people organizing it. It also allowed me the opportunity to do a session with Mathew Hoy on brand guides that people loved, and paved the way for me to do a talk latter in the year on email marketing at SMArts London.

Deys Fabrication and Stratford Festival Review came shortly after, followed by a new business card for Titus Ferguson and a new logo for the Punk a Day podcast.

Stamps, stickers and business cards were another milestone of the year, showing off the new branding and new information after my move to Toronto. And finally, CodeCamp Waterloo rounded out the year.

Realign

The previous version of this website was less then eight months old, but before the year was out I was already working on this update to the site. Not just a fresh coat of paint, but a realignment of the goals and …

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CodeCamp Waterloo Identity

28th Oct 2009 Clients 0 Comments

CodeCamp Waterloo is a BarCamp style event for programmers and developers in Waterloo Ontario Canada. Will Spaetzel, lead organizer, approached me to create their events identity and this is an insight into the creation of it.

final

The Better Way-finding

14th Sep 2009 Opinion 3 Comments

The TTC has a long history of abusing users with haphazard signage, but for a second in the early 90’s the TTC seemed to care and wayfinding expert Paul Arthur was hired to make sense of the mess. Arthur’s new signage aimed to be easily understood by everyone including kids, the visually impaired, and the illiterate. It worked rather well in fact, which is probably why the TTC, famous for it’s lack of design sense, functional or otherwise, quietly buried the project.

Today you can see the remnants of Arthur’s system at St. George station decaying and mostly forgotten.

Recently, I’ve wondered what could have been of this system and what each stations pictograph would be. As I understand it only St. George, Spadina, and Bay were designed. Bay being waves, Spadina an Indian Chief, and St. George a dragon. But what would have been used to represent Union Station or Wilson station?

So I thought I’d put it to you, I’ve created a template which you can download and design your own interpretation of each station. Then, upload it to Flickr tag it with “TTCSignage” and post a link to it in the comments here.

The pictographs can be derived from a number of avenues. Arthur suggested using rhyme (Chester = Jester), geographical or nearby attraction (High Park = Tree), historical references (Kipling = Quill), or the origin of the word (Spadina = Aboriginal).

It should be interesting to see what …

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Titus Ferguson

1st Sep 2009 Clients 0 Comments

Titus and I had been going back and forth for a while about ideas for his business cards, trying to pin down a style that somehow captured him in a caricature or focusing on his love of coffee. However I’m not terribly good at faces, and I was never sold on the coffee angle.

In April, I being swamped with work and Titus needing a new card for an upcoming event, he began exploring designs himself. One of the designs he posted to twitter managed to catch my eye and became the launching point for my “suggestions”.
titus-old
As I mentioned I’m a bit of a sucker when it comes to providing suggestions. Often handing finished designs rather then advice on what to improve. Such is the case here as well.

The blue Titus used immediately stuck me as a visual element that would look great in large amounts. I also decided that setting everything in white Helvetica would really pop off the blue. The use of the single typeface also cleaned up a lot of the visual clutter and accented the new arrangement of the information into a grid layout.
titus-new
The final piece of the puzzle was the tag line. Ideally there would be variations of the “…is” theme, or a blank space to write it in, Titus chose “…is still alive” in the end however.

And he is still alive as of this post, so make …

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