Information Architecture

Plan plan plan. We like to spend a lot of time planning, and we do it because it’s an important step in designing anything, you wouldn’t build a house without blueprints, so similarly you wouldn’t build a website without a plan.

Now there are different kinds of plans for site, site maps, flow diagrams, user flows, use cases and so on, but for any site big or small, they are all essential, and we take special care and pride in the meticulous detail that goes into them.

Large Scale Web Site Development

We have been responsible for some of the most widely seen sites in Canada, exceeding millions of visitors per day in some situations. The sites of the Winter and Summer Olympics in 2006 and 2008 were developed by our teams and the CBC. We understand the intricacies of developing for large audiences, and how simplicity goes a long way and how to optimize the performance of sites for massive spikes in traffic.

We have worked with massive content management systems, integrated several systems together to bring context to disparate content, like the new Much Concerts site we built for Much Music.

Having the experience to build such huge sites has given us the opportunity to see the web from a different perspective, where the smallest changes can completely change the outcome of a program. We take these tactics and learnings and apply them not just to the big sites we work on but even to the little ones.

With such a wide spectrum of technologies in the online world, knowing a little bit of everything is the norm, being excellent at them all is impossible, so we have chosen sides and this is what we offer.

Web Applications

We define “applications” as tools for the web, whether the tools are for business or entertainment doesn’t really matter, (not true we prefer the entertainment ones), but application development requires a bit of a different way of thinking than a website, as there is often much more task oriented user input in an app than on a website.

Let’s clarify that a little with an example - the video mixer application we created for Hockey Night Mashup for CBC is an excellent example of an application, it allows users to remix videos of hockey content and publish them to a site. There is a lot to think about when creating an app, the user interface, the user experience, the user flow. It's something that we are particularly good at and that’s why moving into the iPhone space was a natural fit with the skills of our teams.

Microsites

Our passion for the user experience started us off in the business of experiential websites since Flash was officially called Flash way back with version 4. We have a long history of working with almost every Advertising Agency in Toronto and even a few big ones in the US. We’ve worked on campaign microsites for GM, Kraft, Smirnoff, Bud Light, Canada Dry, Microsoft and a host of others.

We have created mini games, upload-your-face apps, full video sites, choose your own adventure sites, contests - you name it we have done it.

To go along with the fancy microsites, we have also worked on hundreds of banner ads, from Rich Media units to Standard Flash ad units to page takeover’s and others. We have worked with every major ad serving company like DART, Point Roll, Eye Blaster and Eye Return.

We like to push ourselves to make visually stunning things, and although short lived, microsites really do give us that creative fix that we are always jonesing for.

Social Media and UGC Campaigns

With the number of applications available for people to connect with each other, it’s no surprise that Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have become an important tool set of we offer to add that “social” component to the campaigns we create.

Sometimes the social component is core to the campaign itself, such as the Smirnoff Red Nights campaign we built that was run purely on Facebook, and other times the social component is just a part of a bigger campaign or microsite. Regardless, when we think about social media, we think about it from a very strategic point of view.

Online audiences differ so vastly from each other that pre canned social strategies don’t always work from one campaign to another, trust us we have tried and failed, but again a lesson learned.

iPhone Apps

To say we are a progressive company doesn’t really make us a progressive company at all. We have to prove it everyday, and so we decided that when the time was right we would spend a little extra time to invest in the formation of an iPhone development division. And so we have, and boy do we love it. The iPhone offers us the opportunity to take what we know so well about application development and rich user experiences and apply it directly to a platform that has changed the mobile game forever.

Our first iPhone app for MuchMusic was an ambitious one where created a full blown application that is a duplicate of the functionality found on its companion website. Read all about it here.

Our foray into iPhone development has gone much further now with some really interesting applications coming soon. It’s a platform that we have fallen in love with, but there is room for some more, maybe some Android in the near future.

Design

While it’s true that we like our technology we wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t know what we were doing when it comes to design. Web design is unlike traditional design in many ways, its about taking tried and test design principles and putting it into an environment of continuous user interaction. It sounds techie because it is and we embrace it.

Over here design is just as technical as the programming it takes to build it. We use every tool of the trade and then some. We design things to look pretty and function well, we are particular about the things you should expect a design company to be particular about like, spacing, white space, leading, kerning and so on. But we are also particular about some things that you might not have heard about because it’s a “web thing” like anti-aliasing on screen fonts, how an icon looks at 32x32px or 16x6px, the 5 different states of a button to name a few. It’s the little details that we sweat but its what we believe adds our signature on the work that we create.

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