Hiring a designer can be a heck of a process. You have to know what to look for, take months to find the right person, and then you can expect to pay $50k/year or more for a Junior Designer, and over $100k for a Senior Designer or Art Director.

Then, once you’ve hired, you have to cross your fingers they can deliver good work quickly, and that you don’t run out of things for them to do.

With us, you get access to Senior Designers and Art Directors who deliver great work. And if you use our Design Subscription or Retainer models, you’ll get access to us whenever you need.

The designers on our team have 10-25 years of experience in everything from web, to print to motion. You never have to worry about whether or not your designer knows how to produce what you need because we’ve done it all.

We’re a pretty well-rounded bunch. With a team with design careers spanning 10, 15 and 20 years (some even longer), we’ve done just about everything when it comes to graphic design. From illustration, to branding, web design, packaging, social media, animation, presentations and beyond, there’s very little we can’t do. Check out our delivery times to get a more complete sense of what we do. If you’ve got something else in mind, reach out!

Whether we’re working with you on a project, on retainer, or under our Design Subscription service, we go through a rigorous discovery process. The difference between the three models? The time we spend up front.

On large projects and retainer-based work, we will conduct independent research and discovery sessions with your project team, and then facilitate collaborative design sessions with your senior stakeholders to make sure we’re all aligned on the final product.

When it comes to our Design Subscription model, things tend to move a bit more quickly, so we’ll have you provide us with briefs and samples of existing work so we know the direction to head in. Tied with independent research, this is usually plenty to get us off the ground while we get to know you better over time.

Our core design team currently consists of four Senior Designers, two Art Directors, one Creative Director, and one Project Manager, each with 10-25 years of experience in branding, print design, web design, motion and more.

When we need additional support, we call on trusted senior designers and developers—and ONLY trusted senior designers and developers—to help us out.

We typically try to match your needs with the strengths of our designers, and their availability. For instance, while our team members have all done a little of everything, some are more skilled in storyboarding, others focus on brand, and others still are wizards when it comes to web. For that reason, we’ll often shift around from one project or request to the next, with one Art Director assigned to keep everyone briefed for continuity.

That said, we’ll introduce you to the team and provide you with options for moving forward so you know who does what.

Our subscriptions go month-to-month, but you can pause it on any day in the month without wasting any remaining days, and then come back to it when you have more work.

So, let’s say you sign up, but then discover that you only need a designer for two weeks. You can pause your subscription and then fire it up once you need design help again. Your remaining two weeks will be there waiting.

Not only does this keep things flexible for your own needs, but it helps our clients with sole-source purchase caps pick up fantastic contingent design labour easily.

We LOVE these, so we try to use them as much as possible.

You know when you just can’t seem to get everyone in the room for a design feedback? Or maybe you don’t feel comfortable speaking for the designer?

We record our presentations using screen-and-camera-recording software called Loom to explain our deliverables to you and your team. You can share them with whoever you need to so they can review on their own time, and leave feedback directly on the video timeline.

It’s a huge time-saver and greatly reduces meeting fatigue.

That said, we’re also always open for scheduled meetings, if you prefer. We’re here to make life easier for you.

We’ll provide you with access to our request management platform, AD Studio, where you can submit and prioritize your requests, upload and manage your briefs and assets, or upload Loom videos explaining what you’re after.

What’s more, you can view the status of your requests, review proofs, share feedback, check on the status of bugs, and communicate directly with your designer(s) via our platform. And we’ll provide you with as many user accounts as you need for your team.

As a team focused on quality and speed, we almost never work on nights and weekends. We just don’t have to. And that goes for holidays, too.

If you change your mind about the service before we’ve done our initial discovery call, then we’ll gladly provide a refund. After that, we won’t provide a refund, but you can pause your subscription until you need us.

Our main office is in Ottawa, but our team is spread out from Ottawa, to Montreal, Toronto, Maine… even Wales in the UK.

When it comes to big web projects, our focus is on two things: collaboration, and communication.

We know, that sounds like something any agency would say. But in our case, we approach things a bit differently.

For one, we use collaboration quickly, and HEAVILY at the outset of a project. Should you be scared? No. We have devised a process called Adept in which we’ll facilitate short working sessions with your senior stakeholders to make sure everyone is aligned on what we’re designing. We’ve done them in-person with up to 100 people, though they tend to work best with about a dozen, online or off.

As for communication, we lean on our Production Management platform and Project Manager to keep you in the loop and get feedback twice per week. We know it sounds like a lot, but since both our platform and our meetings are largely asynchronous, you’ll see that it’s smooth like butter.

We sure do.

Yes, we’re excited about our Design Subscription service, but we’re well aware that working with social and cultural organizations requires a hard list of deliverables and line items. And we’re happy to work that way.

Websites, like any design work, can be broken into phases of work. If you’d like to request a website as part of our Design subscription service, we’ll break it down into chunks that we can deliver inside of 48 hours.

We do. Or some of us do.

More often than not we’ll make recommendations for how to write, with some examples, rather than tackle your content ourselves. But, you can certainly ask. Time-permitting we may be able to help you out.

Marketing strategy? Yes. Marketing? No.

That said, we will work with your chosen marketing agency to get to know your strategy, and help design for growth.

If you’re in need of someone who understands the social and cultural spaces, we recommend KRC Digital. Led by Kelly Rusk, they’re about the most knowledgeable bunch around.