Colchester Active Transportation Week street banner

This is a twenty foot long street banner for Move On Colchester Active Transportation Week. They wanted something they could reuse every year, without specific dates. We settled on sort of a variation or expansion of the Move On Colchester logo, which I designed in September 2009.

Timeline of events and lighthouse keepers

Historic photos of the Souris Port

Life Cycle of Sea Glass

Visitors to the lighthouse can take tours to the top and to the outer platform, and learn—in sort of a mini-museum—about the history of the light and surrounding area. The lighthouse also includes a local craft shop and interpretation of the history and formation of sea glass. Funds from the tours will go towards maintenance of the building.

This is particularly timely since the Federal Government has recently declared almost 1000 Canadian lighthhouses as “surplus“. Basically, it is now going to be up to communities to manage & maintain the surplus lighthouses. Which is exactly what Souris is doing.

Since I’ve been responsible for designing such a range of the communications material, we’ve been able to maintain a consistent look & feel throughout the experience. Hopefully the lighthouse will bring new visitors to the area!

They are a heritage breed called Rhode Island Reds. They’re about a month old and they’ve spent the last few weeks in our house in a plastic bin. Yesterday I had a great time building them a coop and we moved them outside.

We want the chickens primarily for egg laying—though we are planning to eat the Roosters. We didn’t know what sex they were when we got them.. We have five and we’re fairly convinced now (unfortunately) that four of them are roosters.

It was a rude awakening to the outside world, as they spent last night in a thunderstorm! But as of this morning, they’re doing great.

the run

the coop

the ladies

the chicks

Here is a recent logo design for Halifax Headshots. This is a new company from Halifax photographer Kate MacLeod focusing on—you guessed it—portraits. We wanted the logo to be clean, professional, timeless and with a corporate appeal. The font used is Perpetua.

Business card & letterhead coming soon!

Halifax 2011 Canada Games torch

I’m really proud of this.

I’ve had the opportunity through my employment with the Halifax 2011 Canada Games Host Society to design the 2011 games torch. I’m excited to see the impact and exposure that the torch is going to have over the next year and it’s just a great legacy to have my name attached to.

The major challenge of this design was to represent the four founding cultures of Nova Scotia: Acadian, Gaelic, African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaq, while maintaining consistency with the 2011 brand. Also, with the recent mass exposure, I have to contend with everyone comparing it to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic torch!

We decided to go with a nautically inspired form, winter colours, and decorative elements of the 2011 Games. You can read a more extensive explanation of the design here.

It’s been really interesting to follow a concept from my head, through into engineering and production.

For fabrication, we worked with a local company, Yachtsmith International who normally build custom Yachts. I’m really pleased with the job they’ve done, both in working out the functional logistics, and in the construction and attention to detail. It’s built of fiberglass, with a repurposed/modified martini shaker(!) to contain the fuel and wick for the flame.

There were four torches built, and they will be appearing at community events across Nova Scotia from now until Games-time.

While designing this torch, I made a number of models out of paper and a few people had the same idea that we should encourage people to make their own paper torches. So I developed with a template and we made an instructional video and put it the website.

At least once, I want to see a mass of school kids waving their paper torches and cheering while the torch gets run past them. That would make me really happy.