The Uppercut website recently graduated from splash page to web spectacle, and is easily my favorite thing I've written (so far) at the new company. It's a scrolling, parallax-rich manifesto that speaks to our studio's attitude towards creative work now that we've gone independent. 

Uppercut's client and full-of-old-Veer-pals-company-across-the-hall, Minigroup, hired us to help out with their latest campaign. The result was Super Groups, a game where you reassemble 50 famous pop culture teams and find out how they'd use Minigroup's online workspaces to take care of business.

In December I was contacted by my friend Darren Harkness, who manages projects in Athabasca University's E-Lab. They needed some words and editing for Canadian Film Online, a website dedicated to the past fifty years of Canadian films, with tools to explore how/why/when/where those films were made and paid for. 

The site launched in April, and is prime for someone to add a very, very detailed plot summary of Strange Brew.

Veer's original home office (in the wintry foothills of Calgary, Alberta) closed its doors at the end January, for good. The next day, those doors reopened, with the office transformed into a coworking space for half a dozen startups (and counting). Among them, Uppercut — a new business I'm very proud to be a part of as an employee and co-founder, along with 17 people I worked with at Veer. Expect big things.  

I've been working on a trilogy of animated shorts for Veer, and we just posted the second instalment, Ready, Typeset, Go!. You'll learn about things like kerning and font families, while lulled by the friendly drone of our narrator (who we sourced through VOX Talent). If you missed the first film, check out Our Fonts, Our Friends. The third is on its way!

Veer's creative team is closing up shop at year-end, but not before a few last feats of strength. The slideshow we made to showcase Ale Paul's Poem Script is headed for Typography Annual 2 — the January/February 2012 issue of Communication Arts. Behold terrible things set in lovely type, featuring my writing, design by Drew Ng, and the mechanical stylings of Mr. Stephen Peasley.

The ladies of Edmonton studio Woodward Design — Amanda Woodward and Kristin Gibson — launched their side project The Hee Haw Collective a couple months ago, and yesterday they decorated Edmonton with the first batch of posters created by local designers.

I'm not local or a designer, but I did get to participate from the comfort of my living room. Two of my Twitter outbursts were included in the mix, beautified by Amanda and Kristin themselves. See those below, then head over to the Hee Haw site to see all the posters.

You can put a lot of things on the internet before something goes viral. So here's the best thing until the next thing. Clockbusters is a game that Dan Parry and I created for Veer to showcase royalty-free stock photos.  With 3 photo clues and 60 seconds on the clock, the goal is name the movie before time runs out. As of today, over 1.1 million people have played the game and its sequel.

A few hundred of those have commented online about there being no answer key provided — that was my call, folks. Answer keys are for babies and quitters, and you are neither! You are a champion! Pep talk over.

See some more of the game in my portfolio, or better, go play.

A little something I wrote to promote Laura Varsky's Lade Rene typeface.

Beneath the glossy, time-worn veneer of these 1950s book covers is a wealth of absolutely nothing. The books exist only as covers that designer Dan Parry and I put together for a slideshow promoting the FilmoType font collection. Choosing books as the medium let us steer clear of diner culture, greasers, and rock & roll, and delve a little deeper into the era. An homage to The Hardy Boys made the cut, and my visit to the Atomic Testing Museum turned up as a fallout shelter manual for “living forever and ever with your nuclear family”.