A Little History

Château des Charmes story began over five generations ago with a family that traces its roots to the Alsace region of France and the vineyards of French Algeria. Thousands of kilometers from its present day vineyards located at Niagara-on-the-Lake.

In these foreign lands, the ancestors of Paul Bosc began a heritage of fine winemaking that would serve the Bosc family for generations to come. This tradition of excellence continues today in the vineyards of Niagara-on-the-Lake where Paul Bosc and his family carry on this rich heritage of meticulous vinification by harmonizing science and art.

A graduate of one of Europe’s finest winemaking schools, the University of Burgundy at Dijon, Paul Bosc came to Canada from France in the 1960′s. He brought the Old World tradition of winemaking to his new home and he grafted that knowledge and tradition to the soils of Niagara.

Renowned British wine writer Hugh Johnson in his book Wine Companion has written:

“Canada was discovered, in fine wine terms, in the 1970′s when old fears and prejudices about which vines could survive were tossed aside. The formidable know-how that had been accumulating in new wine districts around the world provided answers to problems that had seemed insuperable. Paul Bosc became the first to plant a wholly vinifera vineyard. Award winning VQA estate wines include Icewine, late harvest riesling, an impressive range of both white and red varietals as well as méthode traditionnelle sparkling wines.”

We had to try it

Peapod Studios is picky about our clients, we want to work with the best of the best. We seek out companies and projects we can feel good about.

So we headed off to our local LCBO to grab some of the Châteaus offerings. We ended up with the 2005 Old Vine Cabernet- Merlot and the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, St. David’s Bench Vineyard.

Nom nom nom

The Cabernet Merlot was simply exquisite, the more it breathed the more fantastic it became, and the Cabernet Sauvignon reminded us of that summer in Rome.

We were hooked, The wine is fantastic, and the scenery and chance to visit and work with a company that is in arguably in the most gorgeous place in Canada. A family run business that returns its wealth to the community and environment. All the things we love and appreciate and aim for being ourselves.

“In the belief that quality and value go hand-in-hand, we at Château des Charmes have been dedicated to producing world-class wines in Canada by growing only the finest grape varieties.”

-The Bosc Family

Photo credit: whatsonmyplate

There is a great deal of discovery and strategy that goes into creating the final products we deliver. We start with several sessions of discovery, where we set the basic goals and criteria we’d like the clients site to meet.

Then we develop several individualized personas of who the key users and stakeholders of the site will be. Personalizing a users experience dealing with a website is a key part of ensuring success. We develop several pathways throughout the site, for them to easily obtain the information they desire or have come for while navigating the site.

Architecture and Strategy Documentation

We take all of this information and use it to develop our Architecture and Strategy document. This will serve as a resource for both our developers and the client to refer to as we move forward to the point where we can begin the preliminary site mapping and wire-framing of the eventual site build.

WireFrames

Once we have established the web sites core functionality and layout only then can we move into creating the initial rounds of designs, a process we call skinning. Initially we like to provide the client with three distinct rounds of creative, allowing the client to have several choices in the future direction of the design.

Design Begins

Taking the clients feedback from the intial three mockups we can begin to build out more honed designs based on their feedback. This is not a perfect science, sometimes a client will go through more than one round of creative, although sometimes we nail it from the get go.

Design Sign Off

WIth all the elements in place, we finally have the basis for build.

The documentation we have from the preliminary steps allows the developers to work knowing the ins and outs of the final structure, and gives them an extensive library to refer to. Art direction is minimized as most of the design lives within the styles created in the skinning stage.

Asigra.com

What’s Your Kidney Story of Hope?

March is Kidney Health Month across Canada. Kidney Health Month offers a special opportunity to educate all Canadians about potential risk factors for kidney disease and important steps for prevention. It’s also the time of year to encourage financial support to help improve quality of life for current and future patients.

Based on your positive feedback on last year’s Kidney Stories of Hope campaign, the Kidney Foundation and campaign partner Shire Canada are pleased to once again offer you an opportunity to help raise funds and have a chance to receive a cash prize in return!

Here’s what we came up with.

It’s true. We’ve always been a sucker for a great slab.

In this world where everyone always seems to be creating brands and identities using your typical san-serfis, the talented team at Hoefler-Frere Jones has brought back some love to the Slab Serif.

Sentinel: the slab serif that works.

For everyone who’s ever wished Clarendons had italics, everyone whose favorite slab serif is shy a few weights, and everyone who’s ever needed a slab serif to thrive in text: we designed Sentinel for you.

The first slab serifs were designed to be oddities. It was their intention to be eye-catching, to be novelties amidst the world’s conventional book types. Never mind that some of these faces treated different letters inconsistently, or had inherent qualities that limited the size of their families: these were eccentricities, and to a novelty typeface, eccentricity is strength. Two centuries later, their legacy includes three beloved species of typeface that are handsome, popular, and maddeningly difficult to use. Each is marred by a crippling deficiency, a situation inspiring us to create Sentinel.

Sentinel was designed to address the many shortcomings of the classical slab serif. Unbound by traditions that deny italics, by technologies that limit its design, or by ornamental details that restrict its range of weights, Sentinel is a fresh take on this useful and lovely style, offering for the first time a complete family that’s serviceable for both text and display. From the Antique style it borrows a program of contrasting thicks and thins, but trades that style’s frumpier mannerisms for more attractive contemporary details. It improves on both Clarendons and Geometrics by including a complete range of styles, six weights from Light to Black that are consistent in both style and quality. Planned from the outset to flourish in small sizes as well as large, Sentinel contains features like short-ranging figures that make it a dependable choice for text. And most mercifully, it includes thoughtfully designed italics across its entire range of weights.

Call to Action

So we ask you, please take another look at the fonts you use for your new projects, the world needs a little more excitement and colour in its designs. A return to the slabs would be an excellent start.

Peapod Studios is pleased to announce that we have been selected to create a vibrant new web presence for Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup and recovery software provider.

The Asigra project includes a new strategy, architecture, design and development of asigra.com.

Stay tuned for a Spring relaunch of asigra.com.

About Asigra:

Asigra brings Cloud Computing to backup and recovery. Traditional approaches to backup have not kept up with the exponential growth and value of data – and the complexity of the IT environment. This means IT organizations are wasting brainpower and precious resources on what should be a routine task in today’s Cloud Computing era.

For more than 20 years Asigra has stayed ahead of the market with an efficient, cost-effective and transformational cloud backup and recovery solution that aligns the value of data with its storage costs.

More about Asigra online via www.Asigra.com

So What’s New?

We had the opportunity to develop the website, branding and identity for ChangeCamp

You can read about The Impact of ChangeCamp over at Remarkk’s site.

ChangeCamp describes itself as, a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?

I Tell Stories

We were lucky enough to be asked to work on Sameer Vasta’s full redesign for his infamous blog, I Tell Stories

Sameer had only a few thoughts, Simple, simple, simple and easily readable. To a designer, a creative brief like this is a gift, we hope he’s happy with the final result, personally we love it.

East End Nerds

Let’s face it, we’re all nerds, and lot’s of us here in Toronto live in the east end, so through the power of twitter we managed to finagle a nice little drink up in November, which we deemed “East End Nerds” There is a small flickr gallery here.

BrundleCamp

Alistair ( Peapod Designer ) turned 40 on January 10th, 2009. Again through the power of the internet, his friends hosted a little bash for him at the Spice Route. It was deemed ( as so much in our little geek community ) as a camp… Brundlecamp. Many thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate with this quadro-generian. some photos

Favourite Fonts

We created a list of our favourite fonts… just because.

There is so much more, but due to client NDA’s and assorted conflicts, we can only present the more personal things. we hope 2009 is as good for you as it already has been for us.

Azule Fuel came to Peapod Studios looking for a brand that was reminiscent of the past era of fuel companies, while having a dab of that modern day slickness.

Now, as proud members of the planet, Peapod Studios loves the fact we get to work with some of the new companies that are standing up to the status quo with some actual forward thinking. Azule Fuel is developing viable energy options smart enough to create self sufficient fuels for the completely sustainable communities of the future. As well as a future plan to developing biodiesel hubs, utilizing seed oil, livestock and poultry processors, renderers and waste cooking oil to create networks large enough for even the biggest national trucking companies.

I usually try to avoid designing for people I am close to or work with, I find I can end up spending hours on end focusing on the tiniest little things. Remarkk was no exception. I went through five revisions before coming up with what you see here.

The challenge was to create an attractive site, that didn’t distract you, or drive you away from the content. As always the solution was to go as simple as possible, as it usually always ends up being.

So, I hope you like it, Remarkk

Peapod has been asked to help spread the word that the Little Geeks Foundation is giving away 100 free computers to kids who might otherwise not have the opportunity to receive access to such a machine.

Thanks to the generous donations of the Foundation’s individual and corporate sponsors, I am very excited to announce that on June 12th at 3PM, The Little Geeks Foundation will hold an event and give refurbished computers, complete with Windows XP and Microsoft Office to 100 families of underprivileged children, free of charge. This event, the first of many to come, is one way the Foundation is reaching toward its 2008 goal of 1,000 PCs delivered to the homes of the families that need them.

you can read more about it at Ben Lucier’s Blog or go directly to the source
Little Geeks Foundation

The Mission of Little Geeks is to provide free computing technology and education to children and families who cannot afford this resource on their own, so if you can make sure to donate something.

Peapod Studios is now the proud owners of a brand new red (corporate colour) MazdaSpeed 3. We’ll be booking around Toronto collecting all our invoices via this car, so watch out! You wont see us coming.

UPDATE: It is amazing.