Plank has been helping Montreal philanthropic organization the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation craft their online identity since 2009. Our most recent project was to build an easy to use, modern site to support an important new initiative - Innoweave.ca.

Innoweave.ca is designed to give community organisations a central place to visit to learn about the latest developments in social innovation, and how to implement them. The site is intended for organisations big and small, so creating a straightforward site structure and using clear, confident graphics were essential in presenting the information in a simple way. Learning modules introduce new topics, while a resources section houses relevant links and case studies.

We developed a custom-built tool that allows the Innoweave team to create self-assessment questionnaires tailored to the different modules. Completing these evaluations empowers users to determine the current status of the organisation, and how they might benefit from using new approaches to achieve their development goals. A downloadable report means the results can be shared across the organisation, while a calendar of upcoming events makes it easy for users to find face-to-face workshops in their area.

We hope the site will inspire social innovation in community and charitable organisations across the country.

Homegrown Quebec agency Zoom Media Inc is one of North America’s largest display advertising companies. So it goes without saying that we were delighted when they asked us to help refresh their online presence. Working closely with the team at Zoom, we took the initial design ideas and fine honed them to create a site that is sleek, modern and fully responsive, making sure that visitors to the site are getting the best of Zoom no matter what device they are using.

Zoom are in the business of creating striking, visually impactful experiences, so it was essential that the new site reflect this with bold images and a clean user interface. Social sharing icons are front and centre to reflect the company’s strong engagement with customers through social media.

With offices across Canada, the US and the UK, and different business propositions for each, a multi-region, multi-lingual site was a must. We harnessed the power of Joomla to create an easy switch between languages that won’t boot you back to the homepage when you flip between regions.

What’s more, a straightforward admin area ensures that the Zoomers can take ownership of their content and continue to grow the site along with their growing business. As for us, we’re glowing with pride that we were able to help some local heros along the road to even greater success.

WowWee, the brains behind the hottest consumer robotic and children’s toys, turned to Plank to help them find a new home on the web for their fun and educational product lines, and we were happier than a kid in a toy store to collaborate with them.

We developed the flagship WowWee.com website to give their products the showcase they deserve, and added a whole host of extra features. E-commerce, community forums, fun downloads and games, product and developer support – WowWee.com brings together all their digital output under one roof.

On top of developing a robust site with more content than fits in a New York phonebook, we also created standalone microsites and in-site personalization for specific product lines. To help WowWee grow their business, we created two e-commerce stores using Shopify, allowing them to reap the benefits of both an online Toy Shop and a Tech Store.

We also developed a desktop application for Paper Jamz Pro (the second series of products in the extremely successful Paper Jamz line), allowing users to manage and upload songs to their PJP guitars, mics, and drum kits. Using modern HTML standards, web fonts, robust server infrastructure, and seamless integration with our WowWee CMS platform, we spared nothing in creating a playful and user-friendly website and application in multiple languages – even Japanese.

Since its inception in 1996, the Fantasia Film Festival has been hell-bent on showcasing the most exciting, innovative, and individualistic examples of contemporary international genre cinema, with an emphasis on unveiling films rarely seen in North America. Fantasia is seen as one of the most important fantasy, horror, & anime festivals in the world, with fans that truly define the word “fanatic.”

When they re-launched in 2003 after a one-year hiatus, their focus was to step up their website and have it exist as the key element of their marketing strategy and the primary tool to provide fans with ever-changing, up-to-the-minute information. Fantasia selected Plank to develop their overall online strategy, website, and content management system.

We delivered a cross-publishing back-end that allowed festival staff to add and update the 300+ films shown each year and have published changes immediately reflected on both the website and the festival program (produced by our print partner, Em Dash Design). We also work with Em Dash to ensure the program, print ads, and posters maintain a consistent look with the site. Fantasia Festival fans are ferocious and come launch day they hit the site with such force that even Godzilla would beg for a bottle of aspirin. We’re happy the site withstands the pressure and stays solid while international eyeballs click through each and every page.

Sure, we’ve had many years of seeing some of the most horrifying images known to humanity when we put together the website (and in this case, we’re not insulting the client when we say this), but we recover in time, each year ready to take on whatever Fantasia is set to unleash on the world.

As Québecers already familiar with Journées de la culture, we were excited when selected to help lead the digital strategy and develop the online presence for a similar national movement, Culture Days.

Three years later, we’re as thrilled as ever to be helping bring to life this volunteer-based initiative that seeks to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation, and engagement of all Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities. For three days each fall, publicly-organized events take place across the country featuring free, hands-on, interactive activities that invite the public to discover the world of artists, creators, historians, architects, curators, and designers in their community.

The site launched almost a year ahead of the first Culture Days weekend, acting as the main resource to get the word out. It encouraged regular folks to create activities and to have others get involved. Considering this was an artistic – and, at times, less tech-savvy – group of users, we made sure to design a clean and friendly interface that made it easy to collect and showcase thousands of events across Canada.

Building on the success of the inaugural site, in 2011 Plank and the Culture Days team made a series of enhancements, offering more tools and options for both event organizers and the public. The spring re-launch featured new creative, a robust personalized schedule tool, and provincial mini-sites. To give people the info they needed on the go, we also introduced a customized mobile site, allowing them to quickly browse activities by province, category, or even keyword search.

Every day should be Culture Days, but like New Year, the main event only happens once a year. But don’t let this stop you from checking out the site to learn about some creative new ways to enrich your cultural life 365 days a year.

Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free. The Sun’s tagline describes a unique magazine that needed a unique online presence.

Creative Director GW Brazier delivered a beautiful, clean design with a focus on pixel-perfect layout and typography. A unique aspect of The Sun is that the magazine changes its front cover colour each month, and the concept was elegantly adopted for the website. Each month’s colour is set in the content management system and used throughout the issue as the only colour in an otherwise black and white design. Browsing through back issues on the site, each edition’s custom colour is maintained, mirroring its printed counterpart.

The re-design was praised by The Sun’s passionate and fiercely loyal readership, and we won their hearts by archiving over 30 years of magazine content (content so good, more than one Plank staffer was caught reading when they should have been working!).

To help people bring all that great writing home, we developed a store front and cart system, letting users browse and order any of the magazine’s back issues, magazine samplers, and books, to name a few. Checkout was smoothly connected to PayPal, making payment fast, easy, and secure for anyone.

McGill University and the Student Society of McGill University (SSMU) relied upon Plank’s experience with large-scale foundations and organizations to help them with several projects — projects requiring feedback from multiple stakeholders. We’re old pros at collaborating with many members of organizations: from the IT department to internal affairs to the communication team, we streamline multiple channels and get everyone on the same page.

For McGill University, Plank did a design refresh of a set of base designs and templates with a geeky, pixel-pushing focus on web typography that brings a clean, modern visual identity for the university. To ensure consistency, we created a style guide so each of the numerous department’s webmasters could reference a common guide.

The SSMU is a passionate advocate for all students on campus and lobbies on a broad range of interests for the student population.

The primary goal of the redesign was to ensure that all of the content on the site be easy for staff and student executives to update. We chose WordPress as a back-end, extending the platform with the powerful 'Classipress' theme, which we customized to create a ‘Marketplace’ section on the site where students can sell their textbooks within the McGill University community.

With students always on the go, we employed responsive web design in our development process so that content is always optimally formatted, regardless of screen size. Sorry profs – those laptops and smart phones are being used to check out the SSMU site and not for notetaking!

Plank loves loves loves events, so when the chance to work with both the biggest concert promoter in Northeastern Canada and the beloved Bell Centre came about, we put on our giant foam fingers and team jerseys, and collectively did the wave.

Evenko (formerly the Gillett Entertainment Group) promotes over 600 shows and events a year throughout Quebec, the Maritimes, and the U.S. Northeast, featuring acts from Madonna to Mixed Martial Arts and everything in between (including our beloved Habs). In conjunction with the launch of the new branding for Evenko’s website, Plank also unveiled an updated site for the Bell Centre to provide better information on events, restaurants, and services within the facility to the 1.5 million+ spectators that walk through the doors every year.

These two sites play well together, with show and event information on the Bell Centre site drawn from the same back-end as the Evenko site. On top of providing staff with the ability to manage and publish a large volume of event info, the custom CMS also allows Evenko to control ad placements and create customized email lists — features that work together towards a common goal of selling more tickets.

Cue standing ovation — take a bow, Plank!

In early 2002, we connected with Academy Award-winning filmmaker, best-selling author, and political rabble-rouser Michael Moore. Over the course of our eight years with right-wing America’s most hated man, we were honoured to work on a number of projects with him. In addition to MichaelMoore.com, we produced websites for the films Bowling for Columbine, Farenheit 9/11, and Sicko, and developed a custom election platform for the 2004 US Presidential election.

All these sites saw tremendous traffic growth. MichaelMoore.com experienced an increase from around 100,000 unique visitors per month to a peak of over six million. During the initial run of the film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael's sites saw over 500 million hits per month, with a peak of over 250 million hits on a single day: the U.S. presidential election held November 2nd, 2004.

Michael's mailing list grew from 30,000 to over 400,000 subscribers during our involvement, and our design and programming teams were able to create sites that looked sharp and smoothly handled this kind of volume. At the core was a workhorse of a custom client-side system that helped administer the site content and allowed Michael and staff to post news and blog entries reaching over 100,000+ people daily (and all this before WordPress was running 20% of the internet).

We couldn’t be prouder of the time we spent helping Michael Moore fight the good fight.

As a cause that we strongly believe in, Plank redesigned the website for The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation which funds programs that support Canadians building a more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient society.

Our design approach respected their rich past — the Foundation was established in 1937 — yet moved towards the future, maintaining a balance of the important and essential work they do while still being approachable, friendly, and welcoming. The quality of the images selected is key to the sophisticated look and feel of the site and ensures that the Foundation is viewed as having an influence on other groups within their sector.

The website is backed by a custom content management system that enables the Foundation to curate materials and create articles based on themes they control, allowing them to highlight different topics as the need arises.

This collaboration allowed us to flex both our creative and tech muscles, but also demonstrated our capacity to listen to multiple stakeholders, respect the needs of the audience, and deliver a solution that represents a middle ground approach without compromising on design integrity or user experience.

Have a look, and help contribute to the well-being of all Canadians.

With their sites reaching over 9 million unique visitors a month and their mobile apps boasting over two million downloads, Yellow Pages Group (YPG) is an ever-evolving company now well integrated into the digital age.

YPG came to Plank seeking help in developing their corporate blog, so that they could engage with Canadians and spread the word about their products and services. Faster than letting your fingers do the walking, we set them up on the flexible, developer-friendly, multi-author blogging platform of choice: WordPress. Since YPG’s products are useful anywhere and anytime, we also made sure to create a mobile-friendly version, so readers can get the latest from the YPG crew on the go.

The result? A satisfied client avidly blogging and connecting with their shareholders, clients, and Canadian business owners.

In 2006, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, launched a truly unique initiative that Plank is very proud to have been a part of – Citizen Voices. With the blog, forums, and live online chat, Citizen Voices helped bring the people of Canada together through dialogue and allowed Her Excellency to talk directly with Canadians.

We designed and built a youth-friendly site with robust, custom-built back-end tools to manage live chat, forums, and blogs, all capable of handling the traffic on the site of a head of state. Her Excellency used the site as a repository for information and to chronicle her musings on all sorts of topics. From her visit to Africa to special events, such as the Festival of the Arts, she was able to directly reach out to Canadians.

Plank and the Governor General – working together to break down solitudes.

When local non-profit Head & Hands applied to be Plank’s Pro-Bono Project in 2010, we knew we could make magic happen for them.

For the past 40 years, Head & Hands has been a force within the Montreal community, providing programs, resources, and support to youth and other groups. Over time and with limited resources, their website had become dated and impossible to manage even the smallest updates. Even though so much of their work is about physically being in the community, their online presence was an area where they knew they needed some help to communicate their message and encourage involvement.

In addition to taking on their website, we couldn’t pass up first giving the Head & Hands logo some proper TLC! After pouring over brands, colours, shapes & many other logo options, Plank developed the most fitting logo of all for this group – The Hand. Their new logo speaks to strength, power, support, and best of all it’s comprised of words — both French and English — that truly define what Head & Hands stands for.

The logo set the tone for the website redesign — which is youthful and edgy — establishing their site as unique, progressive, and accessible within the broader non-profit web landscape. Built using WordPress, their site now provides their staff & program directors the flexibility to manage their own content, update the site with their latest news and information, and manage their own program-specific blogs. It allows them to keep in touch with the community, providing them instant access to shared calendars and general announcements.

With just over a year of working together, we can attest that Head & Hands is a group of amazing and incredibly dedicated individuals. Organizations like theirs are key to a happy & healthy community and we are thrilled that Plank was able to lend a hand.