Category: Projects

Jennifer Simpson paints mostly with oil and cold wax and exhibits in the lively arts scene of Ottawa’s west end. And she needed a website.

She’s fairly technical but mostly wants to be painting, not keyboarding.

So this was a project where I provided more direction than one where there’s a creative brief, a design direction and a branding kit.

I enjoyed putting this site together because her work does most of the design talking. Which, I think is as it should be.

The Pearson Centre is a progressive think tank whose founders had a grand vision for the organization’s areas of endeavour. And they were going to be busy. And they built a site with containers, metadata and gismos for all that content. It was going to be a newspaper. A symposium. An investigation. A campus. A town hall.

Years on, the producers realized that what it really needed to be was a website. That captured what the institute was actually doing. And that helped them get that work done.

So the institute’s leadership contracted me to audit a decade of content, pull together a set of plugins and apps that offered a website that helped get the centre’s business done. A contact database. A cash register. Bulk email. Webinars.

And with the help of Christina Muxlow, who produced an excellent logo for the centre I also redesigned the site to put their current efforts front and centre with a fresh look.

If you’re going to bring the world together to talk about the power of music to heal, bring peace, develop minds and generally solve all the world’s problems, you’re going to need a website.

And if you have a short timeline, you’re going to need it in a hurry. And if you’re still inventing the conference and inviting speakers even as the launch date passes, there’s going to be some improvisation.

I worked with the Glenn Gould Foundation, their designers, their PR consultants, their branding consultants and content creators to get this site together in a hurry.

It’s built around the conference schedule, so a calendar plugin was a pretty important part of the project. But since there’s never been a conference like Promise of Music, there’s no calendar plugin that really fit the bill.

Which meant a lot of custom development to shoehorn the needed functionality into an existing plugin.

An intense effort but a worthy and ultimately satisfactory one.

We don’t have to be afraid of big images any more. There’s all kinds of stuff that can be done to keep your website visually striking while loading quickly.

And while it’s true that heritage planning and digging around in dirt for old things does not generate eye candy like, say a Taylor Swift concert, LHC Heritage does have some pretty compelling visuals.

This website redesign gave them the opportunity make use of them.

The company had a small number of important objectives for their site: generate leads, recruit staff and convey confidence and authority. The redesign accomplishes that but also allows visitors to appreciate and rejoice a bit in built and buried heritage.