At Quirke, we love what good design can do:

when integrated with smart technology,
customers just smile more. Don't you find?

French Mint: An education in food

French Mint offers hands-on cooking classes in the art of French cooking. Proprietor and chef Denise Marchessault hired Quirke to take over her website maintenance and implement design enhancements. It was easy to say yes, especially when the request was accompanied by delicious gougères.

We began with a website analysis and audited the information architecture, design system, content management system, code and database. And the nearly 1000 images in the archive.

We also presented a series of wireframes and grid-based design suggestions to improve the site’s usability. Many of these changes are now in place, including integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Issuu.

We were fortunate to collaborate with Caroline West Photography. Do check out her work. Her warm and intimate images are featured on the home page and are sprinkled throughout the site.

Website analysis
Information architecture
Wireframe designs
Design compositions
XHTML CSS JavaScript
Website maintenance
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Ansuz Productions – v1.0

Quirke’s new logo and wordmark for Ansuz Productions debuted at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2009. We quickly followed up with business cards and a one-page microsite to highlight the premiere festival screening of Among Friends.

Anyone viewing this short-lived site may 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. It’s actually made the web feel more like the world of print.

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.

After Ansuz moved to Vancouver we worked with them to create a more robust website which we will feature in another case study.

Logo design
Wordmark design
Visual identity design
Wireframe designs
Design compositions
Website design
Favicon
Domain management
XHTML CSS
Visit website 2.0

Caite Dheere is a visual artist painting with encaustic medium – an aromatic fusion of oil pigments, damar resin, and beeswax. Her work is featured in collections in Canada, France, and the US. She is represented by Polychrome Fine Arts in Victoria and Art Interiors in Toronto.

For this full service project, we created a graceful wordmark and identity design system, including business cards and letterhead, that harmonized with Caite's visual style. We supplemented this with customized Microsoft Office templates for artist statements, gallery documents, and proposal submissions.

For the website, we went with a clean and spacious approach that focuses on the work and the photography. After the successful launch we created an ongoing email marketing campaign. We continue to update the site with custom announcements and invites whenever Caite has a new show.

Wordmark design
Identity design
Exhibition poster designs
Email marketing campaigns
Information architecture
Wireframes
Design compositions
Website design
Favicon
Photography
XHTML CSS JavaScript
Visit website