POINTS OF ENTRY


The Payola Chronicles

What do you do when a music marketing company out of Brooklyn asks if they can put you on their promo list and send you music and concert tickets in exchange for you writing reviews on your blog? You start a new series called The Payola Chronicles.

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Redesigning the Towers and Turrets*

For the past few months I have been posting a series called Great Counterculture Logos and getting feedback from the likes of Paul Pascarella of Gonzo lore, PD at Skull Skates and Jordan Cooper at Revelation Records on how their respective marks came to be...

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It's All Around You...

Some of the best artistic inspiration that crosses my path on a daily basis is not in the galleries (although I post on that here as well) but on the walls and back alleys I pass through on my way to work. The best of these pieces are posted in the aptly titled ongoing series Art I Pass By On My Way to Work. Cooler still, they are all geotagged.

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WORK WORTH DOING

An Interview with Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto
as featured on blog.industrialbrand.com and eco.psfk.com

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Greenland is melting!"

This was how Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto introduced themselves at this year's ICOGRADA in Seattle. It was early in the conference and the first statement that truly made us sit up and take notice. We would learn that the pair had worked on Bruce Mau's exhibit Massive Change, a massive undertaking unto itself tackling the world's most critical problems from a designer's perspective. They then went on to create Work Worth Doing, a design studio "working at the intersection of the business, cultural and philanthropy sectors bringing design thinking and design processes to a host of social and environmental challenges".

Yes, Greenland is melting. This can interpreted as a catastrophic event, threatening ocean circulation patterns and Europe's climate. But from a different perspective, it also stands as an untapped economic resource for Greenland and a potential water supply for Africa. From this latter view, the Greenland issue no longer becomes a problem, but a solution. It is all in how you approach the challenge.

We recently interviewed Lorraine and Alex to further discuss the potential of design in creating positive change in the world.

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ICOGRADA 2006

Defining Design on a Changing Planet
(the writer's cut)

I have just returned home and begun an intensive recovery that is befitting of the work hard / play hard ethic with which our team tackled these past four days at ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Seattle. The news has been on the television all evening: looping footage of the escalating tension between Israel and the Hezbollah; of blown out Lebanese neighbourhoods and clips of Anderson Cooper chasing after the next ground zero.

After dinner, we rent Syriana, remembering its scenes of a claustophobic and heavily armed Hezbollah-occupied Beirut; trying to make some sense of it all; but, of course, it only serves to underline the point that there are no simple answers, no defined lines that clearly separate right from wrong, the good guy from the bad guy; and a harsh reminder of what we are up against as we return from this conference back to reality with our heads full of optimism and ideals.

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DESIGN

A Sensitive Dependence: The Search for a Canadian Identity in Graphic Design

This past summer, on the balmy shores of Lake Huron, I took part in a wine tasting where the libations in question were all by the same wine maker, they were all from the same grape and all bottled in the same year. The defining difference between the three bottles was one of a very specific geography. The first bottle had been cultivated from the grapes on the southern hillside of the winery; the second bottle's fruit had matured in the valley while the last bottle had its roots in the acreage just across the highway. Within these controlled settings, the differences in taste seemed ever more apparent and strangely, more relevant. By reducing the variables to a matter of a few square kilometres, we had derived from the wine its true essence.

This experiment came to mind as I listened to the debate at the launch of the GDC's Graphex 2006 National Design Competition. The panel of international and highly qualified judges consisted of Rick Poynor, Min Wang, Debbie Millman, Robert Sarner and Tan Le. The topic was "Is there a definitive Canadian style in our graphic design?"

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IDEAS

Music for the 21st Century

"The most beautiful chord is made from dischord"
-Heraclitus


On May 29, 1913, 'The Rite of Spring', performed by Diaghiler's inimitable Ballet Russes made its world premiere at Paris' Théatre des Champs Elysées. The physically unnatural choreography accompanied by the atonal, rhythmically ambiguous music of Igor Stravinsky was too much for the audience's sensibilities. Hissing and booing grew to such a volume that the dancers were unable to hear their cues and the performance eventually dissolved into a state of chaos and rioting in the theatre. It was in this fashion that Modernism in music was born and in this sense did Stravinsky foreshadow all that would follow in the tumultuous 20th century.

So it seemed darkly fitting that tonight, nearly a century later, with the world's eyes once again focused on Paris as the major themes of our time play out against the fiery backdrop of its poorest districts, that Stravinsky would feature on the roster as symphony-goers in Vancouver Canada were treated to an evening of new sounds and new ideas which also included Michio Kitazume's Ei-Sho and John Adam's 'The Dharma at Big Sur', a piece that was inspired by Beat writer Jack Kerouac's novel 'Big Sur'.

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OPINION

Build Your Homes in Factories

Two years ago, while in Ontario visiting with friends and family, I was kindly invited to my cousin's new home for Thanksgiving dinner. Getting there required taking the subway out to Kipling, its westernmost stop and then driving another 40 minutes until we arrived literally on the edge of the GTA sprawl. Only a block away lay acres of razed land, once the fertile soil of farms and orchards, now reallocated to the purposes of souless and sterile suburbia. Is this what we were all striving for? I asked myself. Working our lives away for a carving of these spoils?

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JOURNEYS

The Beijing Dispatch

There are people wandering along the side of the freeway. This is my first impression upon our arrival in Beijing. It strikes a deep set horror in me. Caught in the headlights, choked on the edge of the 10 lanes that spew out an air that you wear like another layer of skin, they look displaced, lost, left behind.

My god, I think to myself, 1.3 billion is too many; China's population is supersaturated; the levee has broken; people are spilling out everywhere.

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MARKETING

Digging in the right yard: The viral marketing of It's All Gone Pete Tong
As featured on if.psfk.com, ihaveanidea.org and blog.industrialbrand.com

There was little coverage to be found in the mainstream media upon the release of the independent mockumentary "It's All Gone Pete Tong". Not that it deserved to be overlooked. The movie, about an Ibiza deejay, Frankie Wilde, who has to deal with going deaf, is not your average party flick. Picking up awards at a number of festivals, it is beautifully filmed and touches on a far deeper level than just spinning records and snorting lines. There is redemption in this movie. And everyone likes a little of that in their lives once in a while.

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CATALYSTS

Monday, October 19, 2009

Speaking at Interesting Vancouver
Speaking at Interesting Vancouver
The 2nd installment of Interesting Vancouver is taking place this Friday, October 23rd at The Vancouver Rowing Club. Those of us who attended last year were treated to one of the most refreshing and inspiring gatherings that you could hope to experience. This was ultimately due to the fact that the evening was not centered around any particular industry, nor was it trying to get us to upgrade anything, jump on bandwagons or subscribe to hidden agendas. As Brett McFarlane, the founder of IV, states, it is “a multi-disciplinary conference that seeks to impart new knowledge, things you’ve never known, or thought about. Open up parallel thinking ports. Activate parts of your brain that for even the brainiest person may have been neglected or unexplored.”

This year, I will be one of the speakers. I am currently putting together a presentation titled "Mindful Eating: The Biography of a Single Bite" that I have been touting as a somewhat rambling diatribe on travel, buddhism, eating local, slaughterhouses and Oreo cookies. Or something like that. Also on the bill are fellow Foodists Eagranie Yuh, aka The Well Tempered Chocolatier, who will be speaking about her passion for sweet things and Jer Thorpe who will no doubt be blowing minds with his data visualizations.

Check out the IV site over the course of the week as the list of speakers and eclectic range of topics is revealed. After the buzz of last year’s event I suspect that tickets will be going fast so get them while you can. And we’ll see you on the 23rd!

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Monday, January 05, 2009

Foodists.ca
Foodists.ca
Starting in '09, along with my sporadic duties on this blog posting about design, art and culture, I will also be sporadically contributing to a new site that focusses on another one of my passions: food. The Foodists describes itself as "a collective of like-minded food worshipers. We breathe and sleep in order to eat and drink."

Seeing as I don't get out all that much these days what with the new family and all, I am planning on posting recipes that reflect the type of meals that I make on an average night, when I'm knackkered from work, my daughter needs to go to bed but I am still determined to sit the wife and I down to a damn fine meal. But the site as a whole covers all things gastronomically related and boasts an eclectic list of contributors. So check out foodists.ca and bon appetit.

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Friday, June 20, 2008

The Little Give
cuz you can never give too little
4 teams. 4 charities. 48 hours to make a difference. Karyo Edelman's The Little Give kicks off today. Check back to the site as the event progresses for on location Twitter updates and of-the-moment Flickr coverage.

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Friday, June 13, 2008

Field Tested Books 2008
HST's Proud Highway in Bangkok
The team over at Coudal.com are back at it with the launch of the 2008 edition of Field Tested Books, a collection of book reviews by a variety writers, each with an interesting twist. As Jim explains:

"We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it."

This year, the ever-experimental crew are trying their hand at book publishing by offering the Field-Tested Books collection (including all three years of FTB reviews) "in a handsome trade paperback". I was quite honored to be asked back as a contributor, and in return submitted a gonzo-inspired review of "The Proud Highway" by Hunter S. Thompson as read in Bangkok. (My 2006 submission, "Siddhartha, on a train between Madrid and Barcelona, Spain" can be found here.)

A perfect way to blow a Friday morning: peruse the website, buy the book and be sure to throw it in your backpack this summer when you light out on your own great literary adventure.

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Friday, November 03, 2006

"In this light...whisper, 24"


On June 13th, 2006, artist Jeroen Witvliet bought a number of newspapers and proceeded to cut out images from their pages. From this collection, he would select those which he responded to most and paint them. In doing so, they became something new; stripped of its context and caption, the painting forced you to confront the image for what it was.

As Jeroen writes:

"I come across images of people described as insurgents and a mention of their nationality, no other description given. Persons are being categorized and abstracted by the caption, and the language used. A number gives the score of the dead, even further abstracted. A system of classification starts to take place. A value is attached to the words describing an event. Described one way a life has value, classified another way it loses value and this way of description can be used for many, including political, reasons."

Jeroen's exhibition, "In this light...whisper, 24", opens tonight at the Cristall Gallery from 6 - 9pm and runs until the 22nd.

Read my interview from last year with Jeroen here.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

It is not only fine feathers...
plumage
"I've been somewhat disappointed with my creative output as of late. So, with a day off of client work, I set out this morning to make something interesting before the end of the day."


So begins Jer Thorp's entry over at blprnt introducing his latest personal Flash project, Plumage which takes a Flickr tag and creates a set of feathers from the colour data in the image. Very cool.

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Monday, July 31, 2006

Untitled Days: New Work from Jeroen Witvliet
witvliet
Jeroen dropped me a line today to let me know that he has a new series posted on his site called Untitled Days. As timely and thought provoking as ever.

More info on Jeroen can be found here.

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Thursday, June 29, 2006

News from the Industrial Brand Frontlines

• As a follow-up to my review of Vidfest, I met up with Ben Burden Smith, the producer of Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Sabotage after its world premiere screening and got his take on what is was like working with the Hawk, the local pros, and the challenges of capturing all of the action for 3D. The interview has been posted on the Industrial Brand Blog.

• Also, it seems that the Industrial Brand Blog has won another award. Well, two in fact from Portfolios.com. We received a Bronze for Best Corporate Blog and a Merit for Best Self Promotional Blog.

• Finally, I just learned that I am going to be going down to Seattle, once again as a correspondent for TAXI Design to cover the ICOGRADA convention from the 9 - 15 July 2006. My attourney has advised me to rent a very fast car with no top...

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

Vidfest in Vancouver
vidfest
For the next couple of days (June 15 - 16), Ben and I are covering Vidfest for the TAXI Design Network out of Singapore. Our review will be posted on their site later next week but in the meantime, for images and a few infrequent postings check us out at Industrial Brand Creative.

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Thursday, June 08, 2006

Coudal returns for another summer of Field Tested Books
Field Tested Books
The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person's experience with both. The writing you'll find here is grounded in that idea. You won't find any book reviews here. You'll find reviews of experience.

My experience: Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha on a train between Madrid and Barcelona. Check it out here.

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Monday, May 08, 2006

More New Work by Jeroen Witvliet
Jeroen Witvliet
It seems Jeroen Witvliet has been busy with a new series called Text and more panels added to his Pan-orama series. Enjoy.

For more info, check out my interview with Jeroen here.

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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The Return of Fotologue.jp
Los Angeles
Just over a year ago I posted an entry about my experience acquiring a fotologue.jp account for Industrial Brand Creative. As I reported, at that time there was no English whatsoever on the site and one required an invitation in order to join. Almost immediately after our success with acquiring an account, I began receiving emails from people from all over the world asking me how I had done it and could I help them in securing one of their own. Unfortunately, I could not offer them an easy answer.

Recently however, fotologue has launched a new site that is open to the public and has been translated (with typical Japanese accuracy) into English. There are still a few bugs but it also has a number of new features that should make it even more user friendly. At the very least, it offers an aesthetically pleasing alternative to flickr.com of which I have never really been a fan.

And so to commemorate my own new fotologue account, I have posted a few photos from my recent trip to Los Angeles. Enjoy.

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Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Art by Number
Generative Art
SIGGRAPH hosted a talk this evening called Art by Number:Generating Dynamic Art with Flash with presenters Jeremy Thorp of Blprnt.com and Gary Stasiuk of Liquidjourney.com. I am a hack coder at best so I should let the work speak for itself, although I do suggest checking out Jer's DarwInstrument which essentially applies a combination of genetic theory, selection of the fittest and mutant variables to the evolution of a more pleasing musical sound -- yeah, exactly.

I won't pretend that I know what I'm talking about here but I do love the art and the philosophy behind it. Anyone who has read "Chaos" by James Gleik will have an understanding of how complexity is responsible for the patterns of nature; and anyone who is an artist will know what I mean when I refer to the "happy accident". Both of these ideas play a role in Generative Art. It is a matter of setting initial conditions without a predetermined outcome and then observing what becomes of the end result.

There are a great number of artists that are practicing similar forms of generative art. I have been a fan of Joshua Davis' algorithmic creations for years and his recent collaboration with BMW is pretty damn cool. As is the work of Jared Tarbell of which I blogged about a few months back.

But what caught my attention the most this evening was a reference by Jer to the artist Manfred Mohr, who was creating beautiful and minimalistic computer-generated algorithmic art as early as 1969. Considering the direction that we have since taken in our culture and techonology, it is amazing that Mohr has not earned a more recognized place amongst the great artists of the 20th Century.

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Wednesday, March 15, 2006

New work by Jeroen Witvliet
New work by Jeroen Witvliet
Jeroen Witvliet sent me a link to his latest project entitled Pan-orama, a collection of paintings that are intended to wrap the viewer in the pop culture imagery and those similar themes that Jeroen has explored separately in his previous work.

No show dates as of yet. For now we must be content with the online version.

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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The Tilt-Shift Phenomenon
tilt shift images
Okay, so "phenomenon" might be a little overstated, but there has been a pronounced trend online lately towards using or replicating a to make a normal photograph look like a miniature. Sam Javanrouh over at has produced some really interesting results with it here, here and, with a slight twist, here. So has his friend Shahin. And this morning, PingMag featured images of a inspired by the work of .

Very cool effect. You can learn how to do this to your own photos from this tutorial over at Receding Hairline. Here are a few of my initial attempts.

Check out the submissions that we received over at the Industrial Brand Blog for more examples and links.

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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Getting On Board with Coudal.com
Guest Editor at Coudal
Just got word this morning that I will be taking the wheel of the guest editor bus over at for the month of February. Those of you who have been visiting this site for some time will certainly recognize their name as having topped my list of the Top Ten Most Important Websites from a year ago (and again this year on the IBC "Top Ten Blogs of 2005"). Coudal.com is one of the major influencing factors as to why we got messed up in this blogging racket in the first place so this invitation is a true honour. Thanks to Jim and the entire team. I am looking forward to it.

For those of you who have just found this site via coudal.com, this is more of a hobby / portfolio site than my day gig over at but it does get updated on a weekly basis at the very least and you are more than welcome to hang out and explore. Thanks for coming.

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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Industrial Brand on
How Magazine's Top Ten
HOW Top Ten
The Adventures in the Blogosphere continue over at Industrial Brand Creative as our blog gets named one of How Magazine's Top Ten Websites.

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Colours of Cuba
Colours of Cuba
These past couple of weeks over at Industrial Brand Creative have seen us scrambling to put together the creative for the GDC's holiday event titled "The Colours of Cuba" this Wednesday night. Along with invitations and posters, we have designed a cool little website to promote the event. Considering the weather that we've been stuck with lately in Vancouver, this event is sure to be the hottest ticket in town.

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Monday, November 07, 2005

Adventures in the Industrial Brand Blogosphere
Industrial Brand Blog
The Industrial Brand Blog has been getting quite a lot of attention as of late. In less than a year, the number of visitors has risen steadily to about 30,000 per month. We suddenly find ourselves using terms like "blogroll" and "trackback" a lot. We've made contact with other bloggers and web pioneers from around the world. We've sat on blog panels. And just this past month, we have been recognized by Applied Arts for Best Blog and on Wednesday with a Lotus Award of Merit for Best Interactive Miscellaneous. It has been quite the exciting ride so far. Can't wait to see what lies around the next cyber corner.

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Friday, November 04, 2005

Classified Materials
Hadley + Maxwell
Always experimenting with new ways to present art to the public, the Vancouver Art Gallery's current exhibit, Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists is at times overwhelming in how it conveys the chaos of information that swarms today's artists and the subsequent order that they make of it.

Walking through the two floor exhibit, it was a fitting and pleasant surprise to find Hadley + Maxwell's "The Decor Project" amidst the filing cabinets and alphabetized lists. Beautifully documented by my friend and photographer, Sven Boecker, the artistic team visited curators' homes and "redecorated" a room based on the personality traits and fantasies of the curator as revealed in a provided questionnaire. The results are nothing short of poetic.

Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists runs until January 2nd, 2006.

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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Portfolio Update — svenboecker.com


Industrial Brand Creative just launched our friend and photographer Sven Boecker's website. It is ultra clean and simple with a slick Flash engine underneath. Not to mention of course: beautiful photography.

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Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Canstruction Vancouver - Juror's Choice Award
canstructionThis past weekend, Industrial Brand Creative along with Legends Memorabilia teamed up once again to participate in Canstruction Vancouver, a charity event in which teams build large sculptures out of non-perishable goods that are judged, exhibited and then later disassembled and donated to the Food Bank. Our sculpture this year, Snoopy on his doghouse took top prize of Juror’s Choice and all signs point to it going on to win the People’s Choice award as well.

We just launched the site for it this afternoon. Check out the time lapse video of the build. For anyone in Vancouver, the exhibit is running until the 12th of March at Canada Place so be sure to drop if you have a chance.

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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Big in Japan
fotologueA couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a photoblog website out of Japan called fotologue.jp. Its clean and dynamic interface far surpassed anything that we had seen in the North American market. It seemed like an excellent B-side for the Industrial Brand Creative website at the very least; a third cornerstone (along with the blog) for our online community at best. So after a number of false starts and emails lost in translation, we were finally invited to register for our own page.

The idea was to create a dynamic online billboard - posting a new photo everyday - that reinforces the IBC brand by using the images that we have made an integral part of the new IBC look but presenting them in a purely aesthetic form. It is soft marketing to be sure, but it introduces us to a new market while at the same time providing an outlet for the artistic side of the company that so often gets lost amidst the case studies and mission statements.

Much thanks to Reiko Nakatsukasa as well as Jennifer Bukloh and Kinya Horikoshi at Photonica and everyone at Amana for getting this launched. Domo arigatou gozaimashita!

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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

keepin' up..
It's been awhile since I've posted here. This should not be taken as a sign that I'm drifting from my blogging duties in any way. They have simply been relocated for the time being. We have been hard at work revising and relaunching the IBC blog, now with topical right hand column. This is going to be an area that will contain articles that focus on IBC and current goings on around the office. I love the new look and have already started planning how I might adapt the same format on this site.

Other IBC blog news of interest. Just over a month ago, we posted a link to a video of some kid lip synching to this half yodel/half euro house tune. Since that time, this video has been dubbed "the new Star Wars kid" and until recently if you googled "maya hee maya hoo", our link was the first on the list. Have we inadvertantly become the goto source for a viral video of a fat yodelling teenager? Go figure.

Finally, I have become obsessed with a website called fotologue.jp which, in my opinion, offers the best format for sharing photos on the internet (they were just days off of making it into my Top Ten List). I am working on setting up a project with them. Language barriers pending. Hopefully I will have more info on this soon.

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Saturday, January 22, 2005

#10 - industrial brand creative


www.industrialbrand.com
The first offering in the "Top Ten Most Important Websites (to me) of 2004" is a sentimental one. The Dec. 23 entry on the homepage says it best: "After 13 months, 6 designers, 25,000 different concepts and a "Battle Royale" our site has been given a major facelift". It is always hardest to design for yourself and this new look for IBC did not come easy. But we think we got it right. Complete with a blog, online store and a recipe section, the new design presents a more realized and mature look than what we had before which seems appropriate considering how much the agency has grown in the past three and a half years. Kudos to all involved.

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