Lisbon, Portugal

The May/June 2010 (#374 Illustration Annual 51) issue of Communication Arts magazine contains a feature article entitled “Visual Communication Design in Portugal: Land of Discovery” written by Circle’s principal, Robert L. Peters. The piece investigates Portugal’s unique attributes, history, culture, and current realities in relation to visual communication—the article is accompanied by a selection of design and illustration by Portuguese designers.

Peters visited Lisbon in 2009 as a speaker at OFFF 2009 Oeiras (International Festival For The Post-Digital Creation Culture), an event attended by nearly 4000 enthusiastic participants. He then drew from dozens of attendees who contacted him following his talk to crowd-source opinions on Portuguese design and related issues, as well as suggestions for representative works.

Peters has been contributing in-depth foreign feature articles to Communication Arts magazine since 1994, including pieces on design and design events in Russia, Portugal (the XVI Icograda General Assembly in 1995), Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Denmark, Cuba, and New Zealand. Copies of CA issue #374 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

Read the full feature article (with full creative credits for works shown) or download the entire CA Portugal design feature here (1.1 MB). Note: this feature article from Communication Arts magazine appears with permission by Communication Arts ©2010 Coyne & Blanchard, Inc. All rights reserved.

A special thanks to the numerous Portuguese designers and design educators who enthusiastically contributed their insights, viewpoints, and suggestions regarding works that appear in the article, in particular; Sarah Chaves Brasseur, Carla Carrão, Aurelindo Ceia, António (Tózé) Coelho, António Costa, Ana Farinha, João Cardoso Fernandes, Antero Ferreira, Afonso Figueiredo, Margarida Fonseca, Bruno Franco, António Silveira Gomes, Carla Ponte Júlio, Ana Lopes, Miguel Macedo, Mário Moura, Fernando Oliveira, João Maio Pinto, Rosa Quitério, Luísa Ribas, Catarina da Silva, Paulo Silva, and Patrícia Sobral.

Winnipeg, Canada

Amdocs Inc. provides primary physician services in remote and Northern Canadian communities. Its community-based approach fulfills the vision of Dr. Anthon Meyer to develop mutually rewarding relationships with First Nations communities by delivering high quality family physician services, chronic disease management, practice consultant support for nurse clinician services, and related continuous medical education services in full compliance with both College of Physicians and Surgeons and Governmental standards.

Over the past month we’ve been delighted to work with Dr. Anthon Meyer and his team at Amdocs (now located in Gibraltar House alongside long-time client The North West Company) on the design of a corporate identity, recruitment ads, print materials, and a website. Learn more about Amdocs and the good work the organization is doing here.

São Paulo, Brazil

Our talented colleagues at Oz Design (one of our co-design worldwide partners) were featured this week in the leading Brazilian weekly magazine Veja by means of a 10-page article introducing them as the graphic design professionals who “Give the city a face.” A piece of well-deserved recognition, we think, regarding the efforts that Oz has invested over the past 30 years to promote the value of design in Brazil. If you understand Portuguese, read more here.

Keep up the good work!

Winnipeg, Canada

We’re excited about a significant product launch happening next week here in Winnipeg. For nearly two years we’ve been working intensely with a visionary client team from Conquest Manufacturing Ltd. and a number of leading architects on the conceptual development, ideation, planning, and design of an exciting new product offer—eco-smart, sensibly-sized, precision-built homes reflecting best practices in sustainable design and offering future-proof comfort and convenience.

We’re currently launching the brand (an initial website went live this week here) and the new line of Challenger homes will kick off in dramatic fashion next Friday at the Autumn Home Show in Winnipeg. The Cube, an innovative, modern, two-story home designed by architect Ed Calnitsky, is being assembled right on the Convention Centre floor (from four precision-built modules delivered to the venue). This leading-edge demo home will act as the event’s feature attraction, and will show off innovative products from many of the show’s other exhibitors.

Find details about show hours, etc. here. If you’re in or near Manitoba, we’d encourage you to drop by Booth #217 (right across from The Cube) and see what the future of smart living will be like.

For more information about this launch, contact Robert L. Peters, FGDC
(Tel. +1 204 943 3693).

São Paulo, Brazil

Our co-design worldwide partners at Oz Design are celebrating their 30th Anniversary, replete with a move into new offices… here’s a congratulatory toast to our talented southern friends from the great white north…

Cheers!

Vancouver, British Columbia

Our good friends (and co-design worldwide partners) at Ion Branding + Design are celebrating their 20th Anniversary today… wish we could be there to raise a glass with you—but we’ll do so from afar… Cheers!

Ion sent out cool ‘20!’ coasters as their party invitations.

Calgary, Alberta

We’ve recently had the pleasure to work with Gregor Brandt and Janice Liwanag again (they’re old climbing friends of Rob’s) on the updating of corporate identification, stationery, and the design of “look and feel” for a new website for The Marionette Group, a consultancy offering software development, project management, and technical documentation services to technology innovators in the science and engineering industry. Visit their new website (coded by Gregor himself) here.

Winnipeg, Canada

We’ve recently completed the design of a new corporate identity for the Concordia Joint Replacement Group (CJRG), a highly specialized “swat team” of orthopaedic specialists preparing to move into new, purpose-built facilities within the Concordia Hip & Knee Institute. The identity fulfills the criteria of being distinctive within its field, projecting excellence, inspiring confidence, and having good compatibility with other Concordia identities (which Circle has designed and created standards for in recent years). The folks at CJRG have been good to work with… and we’ve learned a lot about the world of orthopaedics in the process.

Toronto, Canada

Circle’s founder/principal Robert L. Peters has accepted an invitation to serve on the Design Advisory Board of Applied Arts magazine. Touted as “Canada’s Visual Communications Magazine,” Applied Arts is published six times a year and goes out to a readership of over 65,000. Since its launch in 1986 the magazine has become this country’s premier publication in our field.

Learn more about Applied Arts here.

Winnipeg, Canada

Yesterday evening we were treated to a lovely “official opening” reception for the new Neon Cone at the Forks (including all the ice cream and gelati we could eat!). Proprietors Dennis and Connie Olivier offered gracious words of thanks to the various parties involved in the ice-cream shop’s expansion over the course of the past year (market administration, planners, the architects, designers, contractors, suppliers, and vendors). In spite of the fact that it was “raining cats and dogs,” a good time was had by all in attendance.

Congratulations and best wishes go out to the whole team at Neon Cone…

Auckland, New Zealand

The September/October 2008 (#363 Interactive Annual) issue of Communication Arts magazine contains a feature article entitled “Living on the Edge: Visual Communication Design in New Zealand” written by Circle’s principal, Robert L. Peters. The in-depth piece investigates New Zealand’s unique attributes, history, culture, and current realities in relation to visual communication—the feature is accompanied by a selection of contemporary works by Kiwi designers drawn in large part from recent winners of DINZ awards shows (Designers Institute of New Zealand).

Peters visited New Zealand in late 2007, touring design offices in Auckland and Wellington (in conjunction with DINZ lectures in both cities) and acting as an external moderator for students graduating from the Wanganui School of Design. He has been contributing foreign feature articles to Communication Arts magazine since 1994, including pieces on design and design events in Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Denmark, and Cuba. Copies of CA issue #363 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

“To foreigners, New Zealand is an exotically bucolic, clean green land of extraordinary natural beauty—a pristine playground-destination for thrill-seekers, and a place apart from the rest of the world—a view effectively reinforced by the tourism slogan “100% Pure New Zealand.”

To the country’s quietly self-reliant inhabitants, New Zealand offers a peaceful, friendly, egalitarian and multi-cultural haven for individualists who find themselves surrounded by a moat known as the Pacific Ocean. Blessed with a temperate climate, the island nation enjoys a relaxed lifestyle imbued with a love of the outdoors and the waters surrounding it, and an enviable quality of life.

Less known abroad (under the radar, some might quip) is the wellspring of talent, innovation and design prowess emerging from the NZ creative community—it’s at the forefront of this wave that the candidly fresh and vibrant vernacular of New Zealand’s visual communication design finds itself…”

Read more of the article (with full creative credits for works shown) or download the entire CA New Zealand design feature here (1.2 MB).

Note: this feature article from the Communication Arts magazine September/October 2008 Interactive Annual appears with permission by Communication Arts ©2008 Coyne & Blanchard, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thunder Bay, Ontario

Congratulations go out to The Honourable Madam Justice Bonnie R. Warkentin (aka ‘Bonnie’) on the ceremonial occasion of the administration of her Oath of Office as a Justice of the Superior Court of Justice in Thunder Bay on Wednesday, 27 August 2008. We’ve enjoyed working with Bonnie (and her former Kingston-based law practice) Willoughby Macleod Warkentin LLP, Barristers & Solicitors in the past, and we wish her every success in her important new role. Cheers!

(from DT&G Magazine)

“Thoughtfully written, concisely edited, beautifully designed…”

There is more to being a designer than using tools to re-form and regurgitate our thoughts. There is more to design than balancing concept with execution. Design is intent: the process of understanding relationships and making choices based on that knowledge. We make our thoughts real when we put them into the world, and they give us back the world we live in. Worldwide Identity, Inspired Design from Forty Countries is thoughtfully written and concisely edited by Robert L. Peters, beautifully designed by his team at Circle (Winnipeg, Canada), and published by Rockport in partnership with Icograda (the International Council of Graphic Design Associations).

Rob is very concerned about how we make our thoughts real in the world—as he should be, with the depth and breadth of his background. Rob is a renaissance designer. Founder of Circle, a former president of Icograda, an internationally respected teacher, juror and speaker; mountain climber and solar home-builder; he has more than smarts and experience—he has passion and he has vision. He ventures into the world and the world sends him back with questions about our future. He entreats, “Aware of the advancing threat of monoculture, can the world’s identity designers help conserve and revive those things that make human culture distinct and unique?”

The opening pages are written with an urgent intelligence, and give an integrated overview at where we now stand as a species from a designer’s point of view. As designers in a globally connected world, it is our responsibility to contribute towards a shift in this place we find ourselves, and Rob drives that point home. As he has said, design is a verb and not a noun—a gestalt, not a thing.

As with most design books the verbal content is brief, but is well written and informative. The first few pages of preface and introduction are worth the price of admission alone. They make you think instead of react: something we all need to do more of. The visual content has a museum quality of wayfinding in 2 dimensions: each country’s opening section is displayed as a keyed demographical brief, describing the conditions through which the designs were conceived and birthed. It is not only a quick reference, it allows cultural comparisons of design produced within various countries in an accessible way, something of interest to all of us in today’s technologically connected world. The identities are collected both as encapsulations with background briefs, and fuller histories as case studies. Many are culturally flavoured, a reminder of how wonderful and necessary distinction is in the face of the “emergence of nonplaces (uniform airports, generic shopping malls), and the advancement of what some theorists are calling ‘serial monotony.’” He also points out that more than half of the world’s top economies are no longer countries, but now belong to the corporations. This explains a lot, doesn’t it?

The book opens with “Identity lies at the very core of culture, and it is the key to our understanding of self.” This is a book to remind you of that and it should be on every thinking designer’s bookshelf. Better design leads to better choices, and better choices lead to better design.

–Maggie Macnab, author of Decoding Design, principal of Macnab Design. Read more reviews of Worldwide Identity here.

Winnipeg, Canada

The recently-founded First Pension Plan & Benefits Co-operative Ltd. today held its first Annual General Meeting in Winnipeg. First Plan Co-operative has been created to provide a single pension and benefits plan for all First Nations and Aboriginal Government employees and businesses. The member-owned co-operative “offers an ideal model for Aboriginal people, reflecting the traditional practices of communal decision-making and sharing.” First Plan Benefits is an exciting initiative that is owned and controlled by the very people using the products and services, a plan free from outside influence, in which the profits generated go back directly to Aboriginal people and their communities.

Over the past months, Circle has been pleased to work closely with the co-op’s founders in a consultative and design capacity—shaping a cohesive identity, developing a key message platform and an initial marketing plan, and designing a trade exhibit, presentations, literature, and promotional tools. We’re particularly chuffed to be able to collaborate with an organization that is truly democratic (member-driven), and is based on ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others. Read more about First Plan Benefits and this visionary co-op here (one-page PDF).

The co-op’s visual identity draws from a traditional Anishinaabe petroform (boulder outline) of a turtle as found in Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park—turtles hold special symbolic significance in First Nation mythology, with the rising of a turtle from the water depicting the formation of the North American continent (i.e. turtle island). Many Native children are taught to examine the segments on a turtle’s back—there are always thirteen large segments (which represent the thirteen moons which make up the lunar year). By counting the smaller segments around the lower edge of the shell, one finds that there are always 28 (which represents the 28 days between new moons).

Steinbach, Manitoba

Over the past few years we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Hermann & Sheryl Grauer of Nature’s Farm™. Our work entailed an update to the firm’s corporate identity (including a cohesive visual vocabulary including icon sets), as well as development of brand assets, innovative packaging, and collateral marketing tools for both ‘classic’ and new organic pasta offerings. An exciting aspect of our relationship has been a shared commitment to ecological sustainability and stewardship—this set the stage for the development of innovative new packaging that minimizes environmental impact. (For example: the minimalist paper neck-tag style of labeling eliminates all glues and lends itself to recycling; use of informative icons reduced the need for long explanatory texts on multi-lingual packaging; the 100% corn-based film pasta-bag is compostable and environmentally benign).

For the Grauers, Nature’s Pasta™ continues a long tradition—based on an old family recipe and using world-famous Canadian durum wheat and farm-fresh free run eggs (from hens fed an all-natural vegetarian diet), the pasta has outstanding flavour. Strict adherence to old-world, small-batch production methods results in gourmet pasta that is setting new standards in taste, texture, and quality. Favoured by chefs and discerning restaurateurs, Nature’s Pasta™ now appears on the menus of some of North America’s best eating establishments. Hermann has also worked with award-winning chefs in producing custom pastas, using specialty grains such as spelt and various natural flavourings. Discriminating pasta connoisseurs can find Nature’s Pasta™ at specialty food wholesalers in the U.S. and select retail food outlets in both Canada and the U.S.—locally, look for Nature’s Pasta™ at Organza, Vic’s (on Pembina), select Sobeys and Safeway locations, and various other fine food stores.

See some of our work here. Visit the Nature’s Farm™ website here.

Winnipeg, Canada

We’ve recently designed a series of highly targeted marketing pieces for SMARTBOX Solutions that demonstrate the specialty finishing and old-school craftsmanship of this specialty printer. SMARTBOX (for whom we earlier provided naming and brand services—see here) provides high-end packaging solutions to manufacturers of specialty foods and confections. These initial postcards (which demonstrate tactile finishing techniques such as high-quality embossing, foil stamping, and die-cutting) are phase one of a sequenced direct-marketing campaign.

Kingston, Ontario

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a new website for Willoughby MacLeod Warkentin LLP, Barristers and Solicitors (WMW), a Kingston-based law firm. Several years after creating a distinctive visual identity and stationery system for WMW, Circle was engaged to create a credible online presence for the practice. The simple-to-navigate website features a series of rotating banner graphics in the header section, conveying key messages and the firm’s professional specialties. View the website at www.macleodlaw.net.

Portage la Prairie, Manitoba

Circle recently designed a Tetra Pak for Gaya,™ brand organic Noni juice (for our client, PROVALT Life Sciences in Montreal), the first of a line of nutraceutical beverages promoting a healthy and holistic lifestyle. Tetra Paks comprise unique aseptic paper-board packaging that consists of 3 separate recyclable layers—an inner plastic layer, a foil layer, and the outer paper-board layer. Canadians have been familiar with their use for years as juice boxes, but more recently the Tetra Pak is being applied to a diverse selection of food products, from soups to fine wine. Our resident digital production specialist took a trip out to GPAP (Great Plains Aseptic Packaging), in Portage La Prairie for the inaugural run of Gaya™ Noni juice and to witness how the Tetra Pak filling and packaging lines work. GPAP is Manitoba’s only facility equipped to fill the highly sought-after Tetra Paks.

The reason for the recent upswing in the use of boxed liquids can be attributed to several unique features of the Tetra Pak, most of which translate into savings in shipping and storage. Their compact design allows for a more effective use of space, as does their light weight when compared to glass. Furthermore, the aseptic package allows the product to ship without refrigeration which provides for a significant energy savings. This also allows the product to sit on the shelf beside other dry goods without concern of the product going bad—this particular feature transfers energy savings on to the retailer as well.

However, is that where the environmental and cost benefits of the Tetra Pak end? A quick call to Winnipeg Water and Waste confirmed that this city is currently not equipped to recycle Tetra Paks. Though these unique packages do have great potential to pass along their “green” attributes to the end-user, there are currently not a lot of recycling facilities in Canada (with the exception of Ontario) that are equipped to recycle Tetra Paks. As a result, the actual recycling record to date is somewhat discouraging.

We’re committed to helping our clients find more sustainable solutions on a day-to-day basis, and are still optimistic that in time—with public demand—the recycling situation will continue to improve. It is interesting to consider how Tetra Pak’s existing “green benefits” hold significant potential to contribute to a reduction in greenhouse gases… particularly with effective implementation of more comprehensive recycling programs.

Toronto, Canada

The latest issue of Applied Arts magazine (#114, September/October 2007) includes a feature by Kevin Brooker entitled “Rise of the West.” The piece starts with an interview with Circle’s Robert L. Peters and includes recent samples of the firm’s communication design work alongside that of a dozen or so other design offices. Applied Arts is Canada’s premiere magazine of visual communications. More information about the issue here or visit the Applied Arts website here.

Menlo Park, California

The September/October 2007 (#355) issue of Communication Arts magazine contains a feature article entitled “Design down under: graphic design in the Land of Oz” written by Circle’s principal, Robert L. Peters. The in-depth piece explores Australia’s unique attributes, history, culture, and current realities in relation to visual communication. The feature is accompanied by a selection of historical brands and contemporary works compiled by Peters and drawn from recent winners of AGDA competitions (Australian Graphic Design Association).

Peters has visited Australia several times in recent years—in 2006 he spent a month as designer in residence with the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Melbourne. He has been contributing foreign feature articles to Communication Arts magazine for over a decade, including pieces on design and design events in Russia, Portugal, Uruguay, Australia, Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Denmark, and Cuba. Copies of CA issue #355 are available at book stores and major news outlets around the world and may be purchased online from the Communication Arts website.

Read or download the feature article here (2.5 MB).