Ansuz Productions

Logo & Website Development View Site

Website 1.0 and 2.0 Launched

Logo

Quirke designed a new logo for Ansuz Productions, a screenwriting and film production company based in Montreal. The logo debuted at the Montreal World Film Festival September 2009 in the world premiere screening of Among Friends, written by Barbara Campbell.

Business Cards

After delivering the logo in time for post-production film editing, Quirke created two-sided business cards based on client specs. These deliverables were shipped out in time for the sucessful shmoozefest leading up to the Among Friends debut in August 2009.

Information Architecture

Prior to designing the website - a one page site created specificially for the Montreal World Film Festival weekend showings - Quike created the information architecture, delivered in the form of wireframe blueprints (shown above). These blueprints will become the basis for the website design as well the second, more robust website.

Click to view the full size mockup

Design System 1.0

The first design system featured a paper-based theme suitable for a professional writer. During the client design review, Ansuz made some suggestions regarding font size, colour tone, and logo treatment.

Note: Latin dummy text was used during the design phase.

Website 1.0

Here is version 2. After including client feedback, the font and logo are a little bigger, the theme a little crisper, and the background a little brighter.

The one-page went live right on time for the film festival weekend and is now replaced with the more robust version 2 website. Anyone viewing the one page site when it was live would have noticed we incorporated the @font-face feature of CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheet 3). It's a beautiful little bit of front-end coding that allows designers to include non-standard fonts on the web. Anyone with older browsers (and maybe even those of you with Internet Explorer) would have seen a sans serif font substituted. For the rest of you, it's good-bye Arial, hello open source fonts.

Click to view the website

Website 2.0

Version 2 is now live. This updated, multi-page site has a completely different look and feel and uses a Courier font, the classic choice for all screenwriters. Also, this time around we were asked to constrict each web page to a fairly small screen size. In doing so, we eliminated excessive scrolling and implemented page features in each section to resemble a small booklet. Now that the site is live, Ansuz can maintain the day to day updates using an easy to use content management system. View the site.

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Caite Dheere

Branding & Website Development View Site

Website 2.0 Launched

Branding

Quirke was commissioned to create new marketing material and a website rebrand and redesign for Caite Dheere, a professional encaustic painter based in Victoria, BC.

Phase One, completed just in time for Caite's participation in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's 22nd annual Moss Street Paint-In, included the creation of visual branding and two business card templates.

Click to view the website

Custom Website and Content Management

The second phase, which was scheduled and delivered on time, included a redesign of an interactive website based on the new branding and initial design concepts. We included a customized content management system that allows Caite to update her gallery and monitor her site. Lucky for us, we did all the custom photgraphy for this website project. View Caite Dheere's website.

After the launch, we created a customized e-marketing campaign that Caite can reuse or repurpose to keep fans and followers up to date on upcoming shows.

The final phase for this project involved a customized private area for the exclusive use of gallery curators. Additionaly, Caite extended her brand package to include letterhead and and submissions stationary (shown above) for her professional communications. That's just fine by us: We love print design just as much as the online work.

Design Maintenance

Each time Caite has a new show, we also create mini-posters for each exhibition announcement.

Are you thinking about a rebrand of your image or a redesign of your existing site? Contact us to get your idea moving. Quirke works!

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French Mint

Website Design Enhancements & Support

In Progress

Wireframes

French Mint teaches classical French cooking to enthusiasts of Le Cordon Bleu style culinary techniques. This is also known as the Julia Child style. Their current website was launched a few years ago and they felt it was time for some design enhancments.

They contacted us to update the information architecture and design elements, while staying true and consistent with the existing design system. No small challenge, that! We began by taking over the web maintenance and support duties for this Expression Engine content management system (CMS).

We reveiwed the database, poured through files, and quickly got up to speed on the ins and outs of the CMS.

Then we created a small series of wireframes, which was something French Mint had not encountered before. Version 1 is shown above.

Design Mockups

To accompany the wireframes and to aid the client education process, we also provided an accompanying set of design mockups. These mockups (above) show the relationship between the wireframes and the eventual design system.

Maintenance and Support

We are in the design phase and have not yet overwritten the current designs. In the meantime, we continue to update the site with change requests as needed. If we are lucky, French Mint lets us sample delicious gourgeres, croissants, and other delectables when we visit for meetings!

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Barocca Writers Association

Social Media Website

In progress.

Barocca - a writers association based in Victoria, BC - will undertake a unique literary and social media experiment. Barocca is collecting and writing a series of short poems and haikus. They will tuck these poems into small, hand-made fabric pockets, and then leave them in public places: park benches, on the bus, down by the Inner Harbour....

Everyone who finds a pocket poem will be invited to write one of their own and stash it in another public location. Barocca hopes these anonymous gestures will not only put a smile on someone's face, but perhaps awaken newcomers to writing poetry. The group plans to seed poems in cities such as Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto.

Quirke will create the website wireframes, design compositions, and develop the backend code to enable the necessary Web 2.0 features. Participants will then be able to upload their found poems and track their migration on the site.

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Melvin Inc

Identity Design, Stationary, & Web Design

Live

When Melvin Inc asked us to design their new logo and identity, we jumped at the chance. Melvin Inc specializes in communication, marketing, and technology and they wanted to highlight their association with the geekier aspects of technology as well as their penchant for the stylings of the Mad Men television universe. The creative brief was challenging, but we were given lots of room to play.

We began by researching mid-century modern typography and we came up with something both retro and contemporary.

We matched this with solid, dark-wood panelling seen in offices in the 1950s.

To cap it off, we incorporated a little Lego-style mannequin to represent the geeky, hard-hat wearing engineering type of the 1960s.

After the identity designs were approved, we created and managed the print production of double-sided cards with an eco-friendly UV coating. We launched a one-page introductory website about one week later.

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District of Saanich

Professional Development Workshop for Artists

Sold Out!

Quirke presented a workshop on Marketing For The Arts at the Cedar Hill Golf Club. This career development session was given to a group of 50 professional or semi-professional artists who were seeking "practical, inspiring and career-buildinng ideas" relating to traditional and online marketing. The workshop covered audiences, online tactics, and other self-promotion methods.

All particpants recieved a free copy of the slide deck presentation (examples below). The afternoon workshop was led by Chris Tyrell, author of Artist Survival Skills.

Special Mystery Bonus

To close the presentation, we gave each artist an envelope and a sheet of paper. After recording their marketing goals for the year, they stuffed, sealed, and returned the envelope, along with their address, and handed back their submissions.

In exactly one year from the presentation date - long after they have forgotten all about this little excerize - they will receive their goals in the mail. If all goes well, they each be suprised and pleased with their successes.

Stay tuned for the results!

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The Scoop

Online Magazine

158 Issues Published from November 2006 through June 2009

The Scoop is an intranet-based, employee-driven magazine that was conceived, produced, and managed while working at Number 41 Media. This corporate communications initiative - delivered each Friday with a unique weekly theme for 158 weeks and counting - combines project news, billable efficiency reports, employee recognition, and scandalous office rumours. Employees are encouraged to submit and rate articles, film reviews, products, videos, and music. To encourage professional development The Scoop also includes best practice web research, as well as a section for tech tips, tricks, and hacks.

The magazine's artistic direction leans heavily upon a Cold War cliché borrowed from the Communist Manifesto, George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The magazine's masthead is "Weekly News for Those Who Need to Know." The editorial persona, a thinly disguised, mysterious cabal of editors known only as the Internal Department of The Scoop, addresses all readers by the generic name of Comrade.

To deepen the user experience, all hyperlinked text is crossed out with digital black tape. The name of each link only appears when comrades, er, readers point their mouse at the rollover image. Apparently, this was the best method to ensure employees read every word of company news. On special occasions, such as birthdays, The Scoop honours employees by playing the Soviet anthem (mp3) from 1944.

Our role included art direction and production management, analysis and reporting, content writing, editing, and quality assurance. We also provided written documentation for the editorial user guide to ensure The Scoop keeps going indefinitely.

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Red Cross - Island Aquathon

Interactive Website

This site is no longer live.

Splash Page

In the summer of 2005, Rob Dyke became the first person to swim around Vancouver Island. All 1400 chilly kilometres. It took three whole months.

Our job, while working at Number 41 Media, was to create an emmersive and interactive website that could track Rob's progress around the island and provide him with the necessary tools to tell his story in near real time.

As the project manager, we worked with a team composed of three in-house web designers, a logo designer and brand planner from Tribal DDB's Malahat Group (now Palmer Jarvis DDB), a PHP developer, a content writer, and the Red Cross communications and marketing group.

Interactive Map

The result? A unique design theme from a swimmer's perspective. Using custom developed content management tools, Rob was able to input his total daily kilometres into an interactive map. He later said the ability to push that little yellow line around the island each day gave him an immediate sense of accomplishment.

Meanwhile, back at home base in Victoria, the Red Cross web team could update the site with news from press conferences or TV clips, upload videos of Rob swimming with dolphins, and even accept and publish comments from well wishers as far away as South America and the UK.

SXSW Finalist

Better yet, we submitted the site to the prestigious South by Southwest Interactive Web Awards (SXSW Interactive 2006) and made the top five shortlist in the Green/Not-For-Profit category. Even though GE won award with their fabulous Geoterra website, we all know it was Rob and everyone who followed his journey who really won.

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Fraser Valley Regional District - Parks Department

Website & Microsoft Content Management System

This site is no longer live.

Design System

While working at Number 41 Media, we had the opportunity to present website designs to the Fraser Valley Regional District's Parks Department. The trick was that the new site had to use a Microsoft Content Management System so that it could merge seamlessly into the Regional District's larger site (which we had also built).

On top of that, the design still had to retain a unique look and feel. In short, the design had to bridge two distinct political cultures: the urban-based corporate structure of the Regional District on the one hand and the organic, trail-blazing structure of the Parks Department on the other.

Internal Page

As the account manager and project manager, our role was to balance client requirements with best practice web design and the needs of the web audience (that is, those who would visit the site to learn more about park trails).

We presented the District with the two designs you see here. Each park was given its own home page (top) as well as specific information regarding each trail within the park (above). Our goal was to create a website that felt like an actual trail guide, complete with information on the flora and fauna of each unique trail. When all was said and done, the client chose a much more corporate look than these examples. Too bad.

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