Our Process
Getting to the Heart of the Matter
The first phase of our process is the unglamorous part: research and planning. There’s nothing Hollywood about this.
The heart of the matter means getting as much information as we can from you about your company, its culture, and your industry and customers. It also means doing some research of our own on your direct and indirect competition and the general marketplace as applicable. It’s about understanding what’s really being requested and ensuring that we are able to propose a solution that will more than meet your needs.
We’ll take the output of the research stage and turn it into a meaningful brief, reviewing it with you to make sure we’re all on the same page before going any further.
Fleshing Out Ideas
The second phase is taking the research brief and the obligatory hot sauce stained napkin doodles (we don’t care for mustard) and distilling everything into a solid creative concept. It also involves parsing through all the newspaper and magazine clippings, colour swatches, visual themes and architecture diagrams we may have collected to that point in order to start to find the thread that ties all the pieces together.
We’ll take the time to discuss our research findings and design concepts with you to get your opinions on the general direction the project is moving towards. Client involvement is critical at this stage in order to make sure the process does not get derailed.
It’s also at this point where the design rubber hits the road and the strongest and most cohesive concept(s) are polished and presented to you for review and refinement. The “s” in “concepts” is optional because there’s a chance we might only present the best solution. That’s what our clients keep us around for — to provide them with the best solution.
A + B + C = Ding, Ding, Ding!
The last stage in our process is quite simply putting the pieces together. It means taking the research, the ideas, the visual concepts and executing the final solution — whether it’s a poster, a web site, an advertisement, business cards, or an identity treatment.
It also means that if the work that we do requires any training or documentation, we’ll show you show it all works and how to get the answers you need if you get stuck.
Our internal QA process ensures that you don’t have to worry about problems related to your project once it goes live on the web or is on press at the printer — we take the best of the ISO standards and make them work for you without all the bureaucracy and paperwork. We all have enough paperwork to deal with, and we try to avoid adding more to the pile.
Quality Assurance
We only ship quality bits and bytes.
During the development stages of any project, whether it is destined for the web, print or even training session content, we check and double-check that absolutely everything is working as expected.
We meticulously test any code that we write and verify that it renders as it should in all the browsers you need to support. We check that all fonts and images get included and verify that the files will output correctly when a job is ready to be sent to the printer.
Of course we can’t possibly catch everything. There are conditions we could never anticipate. If problems are reported we will respond quickly.
