the habberjams » design

world playground project opens up

Christina — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:16:41 +0000

For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a website for World Playground Project. I developed the logo for them and then proceeded with the website. The logo is an expression of the playful side of the charity organisation’s goals: to use drama as a method to act out tough situations the target children face, and provide them with real-life solutions to those situations. It’s a great organisation; check them out and consider donating to their cause.

canada day geekout

Christina — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:24:07 +0000

Happy Canada Day! I had loads of fun making the graphic above (click to view the full-size version). I first did a few Google image searches to find photos of land and landmarks from all across Canada. My search took me from Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ottawa, Toronto, and onward to the Prairies, a bit north into the Yukon, and finally over to Vancouver. I just wanted to cover the areas, not necessarily each province. The images I found were all beautiful, inspiring and made me appreciate the land that is my country even more. The little search was a lovely surrogate to the cross-Canada road trip I have yet to take.

Let’s geek out a little more about Canada. The poem featured in the web-postcard above is from the Canadian Poetry Archive over at Library & Archives Canada.

Lastly, celebrate in style with a cute lil Canada Day MSN avatar. This was originally from Andrew Muir’s blog, which for some reason is down right now. I’m posting it here but please give full credit for the graphic to Andrew Muir, who created it.

I’m out!

cha liu dim sum restaurant

Christina — Sat, 12 May 2007 14:36:03 +0000

I redesigned the website for Cha Liu Dim Sum Restaurant, and it’s now up. Screenshot below.

microsite

Christina — Tue, 01 May 2007 01:20:03 +0000

I recently launched a nice little microsite for my dayjob.

tyree capital launch

Christina — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:33:52 +0000

And another website I’ve been working on: Tyree Capital Corp..

mixed company theatre redesign

Christina — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:58:19 +0000

Yup, I haven’t just been hiding in a hole all this time. I’ve been busily designing not one, not two, but three websites. Only one is ready to show right now though, so I present to you: Mixed Company Theatre:

This is the largest project I’ve worked on so far as I also had to design a bunch of print materials for their use. This is a small sampling of some of the pieces I put together:

sbux visa

Christina — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:20:41 +0000

While the Starbucks (yes, yes, Starbucks is evil and no one should go there – sorry. I just like the coffee) card/VISA combo is really awesome – I get free money from Starbucks loaded onto the card regularly, on top of the 1% cashback on my VISA purchases and 3% cashback on the money I load onto it (hmmm… I wonder if that’s considered taxable income? we’ll just say it’s not ) – I do have one qualm with it.

It is notoriously difficult to do the following:

Order a drink
Reload the Starbucks card from the VISA
Pay for the drink with the subsequent newly loaded money on the Starbucks card

So, instead of me putting $20 on my Starbucks card from the VISA and then buying my drink from that $20, I’m paying for my drink on top of that $20 – bringing the purchase to a messy $21.55 (or whatever it happens to be – it’s even worse when I’ve just ordered an iced-double-tall-soy-latte!).

The reason this gets my goat? Because that’s $1.55 (at the very least) I’m only getting 1% cashback on – instead of 3% – whenever I reload my card. Doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up over time. (Thank the Yorkshire in me.)

Plus, it really does just feel messy to get a receipt back like that. Starbucks should have
a) tried harder to train their employees on how to reload the Starbucks card/VISA combo and then charge a drink from the newly reloaded funds, and b) actually spent the time to design their POS system to be easier to do this in the first place.

In this day of constant card transactions and higher awareness of user needs, there is absolutely no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.

Starbucks, you get a slap for this!

don barber sound website launch

Christina — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:33:42 +0000

I recently launched a redesign of the Don Barber Sound website. Focusing on Don’s three main services in the sound production industry, the site also offers archived articles and educational pieces he has written throughout his experiences. Be sure to look him up for all your church and public school sound setup needs.

studio204 redesign launch

Christina — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:01:36 +0000

I’ve just launched a redesign of the studio204 website. The client outlined the sort of layout he was looking for, followed some suggestions I made and gave me some freedom within that to tweak the various elements to make it a comprehensive, clean design.

This is the first website on which I’ve implemented a hybrid of AJAX and PHP templates to deliver content items without refreshing every page. As a bonus, it was remarkably simple to implement.

So there you have it. A fresh design for studio204.

the garbage goblins have landed in toronto

Christina — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:27:00 +0000

Not to steal a topic, but I recently saw a poster for the TTC’s new ad campaign, Put The Garbage Where It Belongs, and it made me laugh out loud. On the subway platform. When I was by myself.

Garbage goblins! I love it! It was so damn cheesey, it really did hit me. Spacing‘s right though, it’s not a good campaign at all. Just funny…

If you go to the TTC’s webpage dedicated to the campaign, they actually have an animation, extending the awfulness of the ad. I thought it would be something funny with little cartoon goblins running all around the subway car, but it’s nothing as interesting as that. Ah well.

I’d really like to know how much of the entire of TTC’s ad campaigns are actually “designed by committee”. They really are incredibly awful. Even my non-designer friends dislike them greatly, and that’s saying a lot for untrained eyes.