Interac is one of the most trusted and innovative financial brands in Canada. Until recently the Interac masterbrand comprised two powerful offerings: Interac® Debit and Interac e-Transfer®.

Naming a new, third pillar of the brand architecture – Interac’s first foray beyond payments – required a name that was on-strategy, ownable across North America, easily used in both English and French, and that harmonized with the existing masterbrand name style.

We applied a disciplined process of strategic name creation – including rigorous linguistic and legal pre-screening – to ensure our proposed selection of name candidates offered the best chance of successful adoption.

The result: Interac Verified™ – the new name for Interac’s user-centric digital identity offering for consumers and businesses.

The North West Company asked us to work with them on the launch of their WeGo™ mobile app, designed to give We Visa customers on-the-go access to their We Financial Visa Prepaid account. We undertook the graphic branding of the app (and some UI consultation) and created a three-stage, multi-platform, multi-language campaign to promote the app launch as well as the new mobile wallet compatibility of their popular We Visa prepaid card.

To support the launch and branding of the WeGo™ app, we also created all the requisite artwork elements for the app itself, the Apple App Store, and Google Play.

As with previous We Visa campaigns, the media were very direct and shopper-focused: cash register screens, ATM screens, PIN pad dangler, Facebook ads, website carousel and sidebar ads, direct mail, handbill, and POS posters and TV monitors. The ad strategy was to be very bold, simple, direct, and visually focused, given the very brief exposure offered by the mostly out-of-home digital media and the fact the creative was to be published in various combinations of English, French, Inuktitut, and Inuinnaqtun.

Permian Industries is a family-run Canadian investment holding and management company with a four-decade track record of acquiring and growing businesses.

As they looked to expand their footprint to embrace new opportunities, we worked with them to create their first-ever website. The objective was to help tell the story of the enterprise in a simple, direct way that captures and conveys the personality of the brand and uses a more deliberately designed presence to position them clearly and compellingly against their competitive set.

The new owner of Select Food Products wanted to modify the labels for their range of sauces and condiments to reflect new packaging regulations. Rather than simply update the tired legacy labels that came along with the business, they engaged us to explore how they could be updated and improved.

We conducted an extensive design exploration informed by a competitive audit, discussions with the internal team, and their print suppliers. The outcome was a recommendation that Select adopt a completely new, more efficient and differentiated design system, one that would better reflect how the needs of foodservice customers differ from retail consumers, be easier for their customers to use in a fast-paced working environment, and speed time-to-market for new and updated products.

Our design strategy shifted away from an unproductive retail-style approach. The new system emphasizes the product name through strong, characterful typography to distinguish offerings within product lines. We reduced the focus on ambiguous, repetitive, colour illustrations and instead enlisted monochromatic photographic images to act as category “icons”. The revised colour palette is now more powerful and coordinated.

The successful result is an attractive, distinctive, and highly practical label design system that is more appropriate to the customers and simpler and faster to produce.

We were engaged by The North West Company to create excitement around a new version of their We Financial Visa Prepaid Card that their existing customer base would receive and be asked to activate within a set time period.

We began with the redesign of the card to make it more dynamic and contemporary, and to better leverage the visual language of their branding.

The new look, feel, and personality were applied not only to the typical card collateral (brochure, card carriers, envelopes, statement inserts, etc.) but also to a multimedia activation launch campaign encompassing a broad range of social media and screen applications (e.g., Facebook, website ads, in-store digital displays, a variety of formats for ATM and cash register screens) as well as printed in-store posters and display panels.

The successful launch was supported with an internal tradeshow display and followed up with a second external marketing campaign, all executed in English, French, Inuktitut, and Inuinnaqtun.