Browsing “We Are VANCVR”

WE ARE VANCVR: Alex Henderson, designer

November 22, 2011

Vancouver is an amazing city, chock full of creative talent. WE ARE VANCVR is a simple, elegant way to showcase all that talent in one place. Every Tuesday we profile one individual from the VANCVR community.VANCVR.com is a Domain7 Labs project.

A perfect champion for her own brand (Henderson Dry Goods), Alex Henderson is a woman of style and substance. Her handmade wood products are “works of art, disguised as objects of design.” They evoke a sense of nostalgia, with a modern twist. Her line of jewelry, home decor and (in time for the holidays) Christmas ornaments are available at retailers around the city, but this Emily Carr grad makes more than just consumer goods. You may recognize her name from the 2010 PNE Container Show where her ridiculously cool exhibit, “Boundless: The Canadian Landscape in Six Parts” featured miniature dioramas depicting Canadian landscapes borrowed from vintage postcards.

[photo: Janis Nicolay Photography]

[photo: Etherhill]
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Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

WE ARE VANCVR: Åsa Cederholm, designer

November 15, 2011

Swedish import, Åsa Cederholm (pronounced “OH-sah”) has more than her fair share of exposure in this city. As the Lead Graphic Designer at Vancouver Film School, her talent is splashed all over Vancouver—from window displays, posters and brochures, to buttons, plush dolls and those ever-changing banners lining the Cambie Bridge.

Okay, so her creative reach is well-earned. This Scandi-gem is a creative force to reckon with. We love her clean aesthetic and irreverent approach. We also love her clever Twitter feed which is an endless source of intrigue and inspiration. Scroll down to find out why she’s made Vancouver her home.

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Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

WE ARE VANCVR: Adam Woodhouse, designer/illustrator

November 8, 2011

Adam Woodhouse is a recent addition to our fair city, but dove in headlong and quickly figured out what we all knew already: that Vancouver is one helluva a place to create stuff. Since his arrival, this native of London, England, has been perplexed by a new discovery: that natural beauty and a world-class city can co-exist in harmony. His bright and colourful graffiti-inspired illustrations should not be missed.

What do you do?

After arriving in Vancouver from London just over four months ago, I was lucky enough to secure a position reevaluating the identity and online presence of a cool downtown company as their in-house graphic designer.

Why do you love being creative in Vancouver?

Coming from London to Vancouver has been a difficult yet fun transition for me. I enjoy working in Vancouver, sharing my ideas and different techniques with the Canadian industry. I think Vancouver is an inspiring place to create and develop my styles commercially; and it’s helped I’m surrounded by so much natural beauty!

How would you love to collaborate with local creatives?

I’m not too involved in the art scene here… yet. I’m still finding my feet in Vancouver, but it would be great to meet like-minded people, illustrators and writers in the future for some collaboration!

How can people reach you?

Either on my website, www.adamwoodhouse.co.uk, or on twitter @adamwoodhouse.

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

An open letter from TEDxVancouver

November 7, 2011

Remember when we asked TEDxVancouver to consider choosing a speaker from our amazing pool of local talent? They listened, and today announced the latest speaker in the TEDxVancouver lineup. Read their response:

Back in September, we at TEDxVancouver HQ received an open letter from Domain7 and VancouverisAwesome.com with an interesting proposition: to make speaker suggestions, hand-picked from the long list of local talent found in the We Are VANCVR community.

The ask: To see some local talent from the VANCVR community on stage at TEDxVancouver 2011. They posted five letters to us via Vancouver is Awesome and each one contained a seriously fresh speaker recommendation. So we read them; it would have been rude not too.

The result: We were so blown away by the sheer ingenuity and creativity amongst all the suggested individuals (Lorne Craig, Kris Krug, Carson Ting & Mike Nowland, Trevor Meier and Kara Pecknold) that we had to choose one of their picks to speak at TEDxVancouver 2011.

And, here we are, happy to announce that our selection is…

Meet Kara Pecknold. She’s a specialist in human-centred design and spends lots of time developing tools for design research in other cultures.

Several years ago, as a Master of Applied Arts and Design student at Emily Carr, Kara was tasked with creating a website for a small business in Rwanda. “My work in Rwanda exposed flaws in how we develop design briefs in a cross-cultural environment – without shared language or assumed technology,” she explains.

Though her job was to create a website for a group of women who create and sell woven goods, her “clients” had no electricity and no distribution model. She partnered with the women to collect data about how they perceive their actual needs.

Because she couldn’t communicate through a common language, she sent the women out with disposable cameras, note pads and pens to gather visual insights that would lead to something adaptable and usable in their context. Smart, right? We thought so, and we can’t wait to hear more from Kara on November 12th.

Kara joins an exciting lineup of speakers at this year’s TEDxVancouver event, taking place at the Chan Centre next Saturday from 9am to 5pm.

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

WE ARE VANCVR: Pamela Rounis, Designer

November 1, 2011

Designer Pamela Rounis is an alumna of both Emily Carr AND Capilano University, so we’re pretty sure she’s learned from the best, but if her portfolio is any indication, she’s got a whole lot of innate talent to go with her know-how. Her work is endlessly cute, clever and “aw”-inspiring. On top of her knack for design, she claims to be a “stalwart adversary at the Scrabble table” so, watch out for those triple-word-scores and for her work as it keeps popping up all over our fair city, and beyond.

Scroll down to see her skills and find out why she loves being a creative in Vancouver.

Logo exploration for York & Sons Fine Botanicals

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Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR

Our picks for TEDxVancouver: Lorne Craig, writer & designer

October 27, 2011

Vancouver is an amazing city, chock full of creative talent. WE ARE VANCVR is a simple, elegant way to showcase all that talent in one place. Every week we profile one individual from the VANCVR community.VANCVR.com is a Domain7 Labs project.

Recently, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.

We are huge TEDx fans, and we’re also huge fans of all the bright ideas generated by our city’s creative types. That’s why the team at Domain7 Labs started We Are VANCVR in the first place—to bring all this talent together for good and then see what emerges.

When TEDx returns for its third instalment in Vancouver on November 12, we would love to see some of that talent on stage. This is the last of five letters we’ve posted to TEDx, with speaker recommendations from the We Are VANCVR community.

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Lorne Craig is, admittedly, one of the more “mature” members of the We Are VANCVR community, but we think with maturity comes experience. And Lorne has no shortage of that.

He’s been an art director and strategist longer than some of us have been alive. He started a company with friends from art school, which grew into a 20-person ad agency. He jumped on the web wagon in the ’90s—so pretty much a moment after it was born.

Around that time, he was working with the BC Ministry of Environment, and his interest in sustainability was piqued. “As you begin to turn over rocks you realize you are either part of the problem or part of the solution,” he explains. “I decided to use my evil powers of advertising to be part of the solution.”

Now he operates Unicycle Creative, a sustainable marketing consultancy, where he spreads the eco-gospel to corporate clients like London Drugs, BRODA Coatings and local designer favourite, Hemlock Printers.

His niche is sustainable marketing, but his real passion is bringing sustainability literacy to the wider public. He thinks our ability to read green marketing with a critical eye should be as ingrained in us as our ABCs—and should be taught to kids at around the same time.

His clever and seriously informative blog, Green Briefs, goes to work debunking some of our misperceptions about the so-called green messages we’re fed by corporations. He’s worked on the inside, so he knows terms like “planet-friendly” and “natural” are just too vague to have any real meaning. He encourages consumers not to take these at face value and not to be swayed by empty taglines that make undefined claims.

At the same time he calls out corporations for greenwashing, and challenges them to be specific in their green product claims, and then back them up—to not brag that a product is free of one toxin if it’s just been replaced by another, or not to fall victim to “claim creep”. Green marketing is not as simple as highlighting the number of trees you’ve saved by using post-consumer paper. It’s about taking real action and only then telling the public about it.

But where many enviro-types will point to corporations as nefarious culprits, Lorne makes a convincing case that corporate brands are the ones who can make significant change happen in the long run.

“Government agencies don’t deal in story telling. They aren’t the pros at getting people excited or enthused. Brands are. Brands can make broad sweeping changes that actually have an impact. Only WalMart could, with one swipe of the corporate pen, dictate that ALL laundry detergents must henceforth be supplied ONLY in concentrated form—saving water, packaging and shipping carbon, and effectively changing a whole industry almost overnight.”

Lorne also points to Nike, who, with enough pressure, decided to embed sustainability throughout their company—infusing it with their own style. Actions like this permeate their suppliers, he says, and can have a positive trickle-down effect.

He acknowledges that sustainable marketing is about so much more than soundbite issues—every aspect has a corollary on the other end of it. “For instance, it’s tempting to declare print communications less sustainable than electronic documents,” he says. “But if you take all the manufacturing, energy to run servers and disposing digital devices into account, the case is much less black and white.” The issues are not always easy to grasp. Which is why literacy is so important.

We know Vancouver is a pretty enviro-savvy city. We love nature, we recycle, we donate to our favourite eco-causes…But maybe it’s time we took a closer look at the brands we consume. At the next TEDx, we’d love to hear from Lorne about how to be more critically aware of the so-called green messages we’re fed every day.

Written by: Amanda Smith |
Category: We Are VANCVR