We’re going to boast a little here, but we’re very proud. One of our own principals, Tom Auger, is listed in the credits on the popular blogging and content management software WordPress. Tom has been active in the WordPress open source project, and is one of Canada’s leading WordPress resources. In 2011, Tom spoke at WordCamp Montreal, was active on the WordPress official and unofficial support forums, filed bug reports and contributed patches and code to fix bugs and make enhancements. In 2012, Tom intends to futher solidify Zeitguys’ commitment to the WordPress community and will be involved with the WordPress core team in rolling out new features and enhancements in upcoming versions of the software that will be distributed across 14 million sites worldwide.

Needless to say, Zeitguys is heavily invested in WordPress and any new website we build for clients is automatically upgraded to include the powerful content management features of the WordPress platform that allow our clients to manage their own websites with very little technical training required.

We are committed to the WordPress platform and will continue to give back for free to the community in the aim of improving this versatile and powerful platform for all.

Healthydebate.ca is a vibrant, expertly curated, community-driven website aimed at fomenting active discussions by community leaders, activists, healthcare professionals, and engaged members of the Canadian public. The scope is healthcare in Canada, and the topics are broad and varied.

Zeitguys was engaged to bring this social media project from the pages of the research grant to full online reality. Our deliverables included:

• Information architecture and UX design
• Visual design and WordPress theme customization
• Plugin research, implementation and customization
• Custom plugin and widget development
• Project management and testing
• Documentation and end-user training

From Blog to Social Media Platform

The really exciting part of the project was taking the raw materials of the WordPress platform and crafting them into a usable and compelling social media destination that engages the site visitor at every turn. We supplemented WordPress’ already powerful commenting system with approval ratings, and also added rankings, polls, social media controls and popularity filters throughout the site all aimed squarely at getting even the casual visitor involved in the feedback process.

By carefully selecting and leveraging key add-ons, and with a healthy dose of home-grown coding, we adapted WordPress’ blog-based technology into something much more sophisticated and interactive.

Rankings and Ratings

Each article has a visitor-defined ranking score that is generated by allowing any reader of the article to select from a 5-star rating. Each visitor may only rate the same article once. The process is easy and casual (no registration or verification is required) and so user adoption of this behaviour is high.

The user commenting system also benefits from its own “thumbs up / thumbs down” rating system. Coupled with a custom popularity filtering tab, this democratizes the commenting process and ensures that the most useful and well thought-out comments bubble to the top.

Survey Says…

The next tool that encourages user participation is the polling / survey system. Polls can be easily created and added to any article – some articles contain multiple polls. Users select from multiple-choice answers and only see the poll results once they themselves have participated in the poll (or the poll expires).

A site-wide “featured poll” is also available in the ubiquitous sidebar, and is often used by the site curators to solicit feedback about what the next topics or articles should be.

The Social Scene

These days, no website is complete without the standard suite of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking links. In addition to these links, we built in a tight integration with Facebook, leveraging the Facebook API, and added a comprehensive sharing tool that covers nearly every current mode of digital communication from email to digg and beyond.

But wait, there’s more…

We could go on and on about this project, talking about how we implemented an integrated opt-in mailing and newsletter system, user feedback forms, easy flash and media embedding, metrics and analytics and a host of other customizations that make the day-to-day administration of the content straightforward.

But we won’t. Instead, we will just encourage you to jump on over to healthydebate.ca and join the debate!

Along with Demeure Club brand development, Zeitguys Inc. was also given the opportunity to develop for Demeure, this premium photo book highlighting travel destinations around the world. Having worked with Yuri Dojc in the past, we jumped at the opportunity to work with him again on this new collection of his photography. Needless to say, we were thrilled to learn that Applied Arts Magazine has named Live the World as one of its award winning photography books of 2010.

To learn more about Applied Arts Magazine 2010 awards, visit appliedartsmag.com.  To learn more about Demeure Club, visit demeure.com. And to learn more about Yuri Dojc, visit yuridojc.com.

“This is a pretty great moment for Zeitguys,” stated Senior Partner and Creative Director Tom Auger, when he received the long-anticipated award. “It’s fantastic that an app that’s such a good cause for hearing well-being is getting this kind of attention. Hopefully this will just increase the app’s profile and more people will download it and test their hearing.”

uHear is a scientifically accurate hearing testing tool, with three different tests based on standard tests used by audiologists. It delivers accurate results and features a cool touch interface that encourages younger people to try it out and test their hearing.

The app, which can be downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store for free has been ranked consistently high in the Medical Apps category in the North American iTunes store. It is currently climbing in France and Germany since the recent release of translated versions. Unitron Hearing also offers a simplified online version of the uHear self-assessment hearing test, created by Zeitguys in Adobe Flash.

Zeitguys hopes that this recent exposure will encourage more customers looking to create innovative interactive experiences to contact the Zeitguys team and start the dialogue.

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Contact Zeitguys at 416-966-4345, tom[dot]auger[at]zeitguys[dot]com

Headquartered in Waterloo Ontario, the Laurence Group of Companies encompasses 3 lines of business: Financial Services, Merchant Banking, and Real Estate.  This compact Flash website is designed as the jump off site into each of the Laurence Group lines of business.

This compact site window provided instant access to Laurence Group news and media postings; at-a-glance summaries of the Laurence lines of business; and multiple, easy to find jump links to all the Laurence Group sister sites.

The Laurence Group parent website also features a collected news posting are with quick highlights of company-wide information and continued quick jump-off links to specific areas of interest.

When Zeitguys teamed up with Isocell North America to create the identity and product packaging design for GliSODin Skin Nutrients, Professional Nutricosmetics,  our main objective was to convey to consumers that this product was indeed a premium one.

GliSODin Skin Nutrients packaging is printed on  Ice Silver, Curious Metallic stock.

1. Original Cucumbers
2. Savory Garlic Cucumbers
3. Hot & Savory Cucumbers
4. Hot & Savory Mixed Vegetable
5. Savory Mixed Vegetables
6. Tangy Turnips

As each product was to be placed in a clear round jar the form of the packaging would come as labels to be placed on the upper top portion of the jar. Each label could be similar in its overall look but needed to contain slight variations in colour (to compliment the specific vegetable being featured) and visual reference (in our case this visual reference ended up being variations in the illustrations).

However, like every design project in the real world there were restrictions.

1. The label needed to be large enough to display all the info but small enough to allow the actual product to be visible through the jar.
2. The labels needed to have a home made feel to them without actually being home made, in order to blend in with there surroundings as they were to be sold at local farmers markets throughout Ontario.
3. The colours chosen needed to be complimentary to the actual products within the jars

Besides the above Hratch was up for anything! So, where to start….after doing some research on food labels we noticed that in order to give this product that true homemade, natural feel we would need to incorporate illustrations. Which fortunately turned out to be a double great idea as it made the actual vegetables that were cut up and placed in the jars more easily identifiable.

After a few rounds of sketches and numerous colour combinations we were able to decide on a final series of labels that we felt were straight forward, had a natural, homemade feel and complimented the actual product. We also found that our design also permitted us some space to add in a small blurb about the Middle Eastern treats and what makes them so unique.

Overall this project from start to finish was great and tasty! No really I mean tasty…we were eating Toorshi treats throughout the entire process! Enjoy!

This project (or rather, series of related projects) snuck up on us: what started as the design and layout for the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning primary recruitment marketing tool became a complete style and branding program for the entire 2008-2009 recruitment marketing communications: bookmarks, posters, postcards, even a 30-second digital ad for movie theatres! Once we established the overall aesthetic and the visual idioms that defined the 2008-2009 “look” in the initial Viewbook design, the fun was in figuring out how to create “consistent” variations within those parameters.

A View to a Book

A college or university Viewbook is the primary recruitment tool that gets sent out to any student (or parent, or guidance counsellor) making an inquiry at that school. As such, the primary audience (as with most of the Recruitment marketing materials) are college-age students. However, to discount parents and influencers (such as teachers and guidance counsellors) would be a grave oversight, so in designing the book we had to find a balance between youthful innovation and mature practicality.

We realized that the text in this book was written at times for different audiences. This gave us the opportunity to play with different “voices” – a practical, conservative voice that was expressed in the main information copy, and a freestyle, first-person voice that comes out in the student testimonials and “Profiles of Success”. Bridging the gap between the two, the “flavour text” for each main section mashes-up both typographic styles.

Mixing it up

We looked at a number of local and national competing institutions’ marketing materials from precedent years and decided that we needed a fresh approach. Photography of students was (and still is) the norm, and indeed our client also wanted to focus on imagery of real students through their “Portraits of Success” series. However, we wanted viewers to have a more personal relationship with the content, so we devised a mixed-media treatment both for the portraits, and more generally, for the entire page layout.

Mixed-media is a very potent metaphor not only for the diversity of the programs offered at Humber but for the diversity of its student body, and for creativity and exploration in general. In each custom-designed spread we feature hand-drawn vector graphics, auto-traced vector silhouettes, greyscale and colour photography, painted natural-media backgrounds and digital brush elements created from photographic sources. Each Portrait of Success image background is actually a complex hand-drawn collage featuring subtle digital brushes created from elements that are relevant to that student’s story. (In the example above, the background behind Virginia consists of children’s handprints and reversed-out alphabet-block silhouettes, which are appropriate to someone in the Early Childhood Education program).

The grid lines and washes behind the main copy are a whimsical way of deconstructing the page layout build process itself and serves to create informality in the context of fairly dry informational material. All the background washes were hand-drawn with digital natural-media techniques. Each page is completely unique, with many points of interest and graphical “easter eggs” throughout all the while remaining structurally consistent and easy to navigate.

A complete campaign

Over the course of the Recruitment campaign and into the 2008-2009 academic year we produced a number of ancillary marketing materials that all carried the overall design aesthetic across a variety of formats and media. The challenge was to be able to create a visual shorthand that referenced the original detailed Viewbook designs without requiring the same degree of page-level detail. We were able to distill the stylistic guidelines down to:

• a mixed-media “chalk outline” treatment around a perfectly clean close-crop of the main subject, with an additional “gouache” darker halo or shadow behind that
• a vectorized silhouette of a relevant architectural or outdoor shot
• strict adherence to the Corporate style guide including colours and fonts
• sparing use of vector-based ornaments
• the hand-drawn gridlines with their light background watercolour wash for pull-out text areas

With these guidelines in place, each subsequent piece of collateral felt like it was part of a year-round theme or campaign and created a unified brand identity for the Humber Recruitment drive.