May8
DESIGN EVERY DAY, a one month design institute at Emily Carr University is an open call for typographers, designers, architects, urbanists and artists to reimagine everyday encounters with letterforms, imagery, objects and spaces, and to reconsider the processes and products of design. Coming in June, a selection of free workshops and fee-based one day courses will be offered through the University’s Continuing Studies Program.
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Feb27
[ION Design's David Coates and Rod Roodenburg]
This three hour design workshop, part of the two day ProfitxDesign Conference at Emily Carr, shared some of ION Branding + Design founders David Coates and Rod Roodenburg’s design processes. The workshop was divided into two parts: listening and doing.
We were able to get a glimpse behind how one of Vancouver’s best-loved design firms takes a project through its paces, including research, methodology, implementation and deployment, finishing off with the critical review phase between ION and their clients.
ION Design has sought to both make the world a better place through design and to see a change in corporate culture. Ethics are a big part of what drives their business model. Both Coates and Roodenburg are ECUAD graduates. Their client base comes from sustainable building products, social projects, retail clients, BC universities and colleges, arts and culture organizations, and local and international businesses.
As a fellow communication designer, I can relate to their enjoying a diverse client base that helps enrich their client experience. From paper company rebranding to apparel, they’ve amassed a great number of successful projects over their 20+ years in business together.
They’ve also tapped into the pro bono space through a consolidation project called One Good Idea. Through this program, they award a company with $25,000 in services, inviting companies to submit proposals; alternatively ION may select a company each year for this valuable service to non profits.
“We really believe that design is a verb.”
For the design process (processing and blending), the District of Sechelt was used as a case study. Sechelt is the oldest community in BC and was in dire need of a refreshed brand. We learned the design process chain starting from needs analysis and discovery, leading through to ideation, refinement, implementation and deployment, down to review (the end result). We learned that it’s often necessary to return back to the needs analysis, even once the client has seen the first round of designs.
Knowing the client’s competition is also key, and serves a vital role in the process stage.
“A company like NIKE does a great job of spreading its internal communication, in order to inspire staff to move the brand.”
Everyone within your organization needs to be a brand champion.
In the second half of the workshop, we filled out our own client questionnaires, learned about our overall brand’s health, and left that morning with several key takeaways:
Be authentic, respectful, and consistent.
Offer something of value to your audience.
If a brand is not believable, it won’t be sustainable in the long term.
Use an iterative and cyclical process.
Encourage risk taking in brand development: Failure leads to innovation, especially in a global marketplace.
I’m so glad to have had the chance to hear both these prominent Vancouver designers speak on brand approach. They are clearly passionate about what they do and continue to do within their six-person organization, while both supporting and embracing the local design community. Friendly competition between firms is one thing, but keeping Vancouver growing as a design city is what they’re really after. Amen.
Sep1
Here’s the concluding chapter in my Design Symposium series. Earlier chapters include Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. While living in The Netherlands, I devised a design symposium that I presented to first-year students at Delft University of Technology’s Media & Knowledge Engineering program.
I rounded out my talk with a history of typography, followed by various design tips.
BC 3,100 Early Sumerian pictographs discovered
2,500 Start of early Cuneiform writing
1,000 Early Greek alphabet
190 Parchment is in use for manuscripts
105 Ts’ai Lun invents paper
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Aug25
Here’s the third in a series about my design symposium presented to first-year students at Delft University of Technology’s Media & Knowledge Engineering program.
Design explains the HOW of things: how to order a gift, how to navigate a web site, how to serve a client’s needs, how to communicate to an audience and how to convey information.
More importantly, design communicates ideas, concepts, and functions to specific audiences, based on age, gender, income, etc.
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Aug22
Get ready for a morning of creativity with your coffee and breakfast. Creative Mornings Vancouver, a free monthly lecture series for creatives, happens on Friday, September 2, at W2′s Media Café.
Creative Mornings began in 2009 in New York City. Since then, it’s since expanded to cities around the world, attracting top creative professionals for free breakfast, coffee, and inspiration from some of the world’s top creative thinkers.
Aug18
To pick up where I’d left off in last week’s article, years ago while living in The Netherlands, I was asked to give a design symposium to first-year students at Delft University of Technology’s Media & Knowledge Engineering program. I dug into the roots of Dutch Constructivism and De Stijl movements as examples to marry form and function of the 1920′s and 30′s.
Artists such as Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema needed to produce catchy advertising material for telephone cable and public utility companies, often not the most captivating industries when thinking of visual aesthetics.
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Aug15
I often get asked about the nature of my website. Thinking back to the conceptual phase, I spent a lot of time pondering whether I’d want to own and maintain three sites, or combine my three passions into a “hybrid site”. The tagline ‘Designing, reviewing, and experiencing Vancouver‘ forms the basis of my site’s content.
Keeping true to my design roots, I launched ariane c design as a blog/business site in March 2010, following a LOT of Olympic event coverage and parties. I knew from my first event (the House of Switzerland opening) that this was something I was cut out to do. I enjoy networking and meeting new people, and so far this platform has given me the ample opportunity to do both. I’m also nearly through a copy editing certificate via Simon Fraser University’s extension program.
Pre-March, my website existed purely as a graphic design site. Connecting with the community near and far became standard issue, hence the move (with the help of WordPress) to my current site’s structure.
Feel free to either comment on this post or to drop me a line.
Aug11
One of the highlights of my career while living in The Netherlands was giving a design symposium at the Delft University of Technology, to Media & Knowledge Engineering first year students. While employed at Atos (formerly Atos Origin), an IT service company, I was approached by the university for my knowledge of print design. Many of the students were focused on the latest design technologies, but also wondered how designers worked pre-computer.
Jan8
Dec22
To all of my readers, clients, and friends: Happy Holidays! Hopefully you’ll be sharing the coming days with those who bring joy to your life. Whatever the remaining days of 2010 mean to you [perhaps a few days of sleeping in or getting some reading, cleaning, or cooking done], I hope it’s an enjoyable time for you all. Cheers!
