New identity for tourism-based organization Gardens British Columbia. In addition to their new identity, I also designed a brand standards guide, brochures/rack cards and a robust new website that focuses on the diversity and beauty across British Columbia’s gardens with tourists as the primary audience and locals as a secondary audience. You can see more of the Gardens BC website here.

Working with Destination BC, the group completed an internal brand strategy to guide the rebranding process. Gardens BC’s marketing committee members include marketing and communications people from the world-famous The Butchart Gardens, Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, and UBC Botanical Garden, so it was great to be working with such a diverse mix of people who really know their market.

Gardens BC was looking to launch a robust website featuring their new look. The site’s primary objective is to showcase the diversity and beauty of the province’s gardens, the primary audience is tourists with a secondary audience of local residents.

The fully-responsive website incorporates a province-wide garden directory with planned trips with their Member Gardens at the forefront. The website brings together top-tier tourism destinations such as The Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, as well as featured partners including Communities in Bloom; which work with communities beautifying public spaces in cities and towns across Canada.

Each member and partner garden has a feature page that provides general information, photos, video, contact info, and social channels. The site also features Events and News sections to showcase seasonal highlights, awards, breaking news and upcoming events.

The Tugboat Group website is a fully re-imagined website, replacing an aging website with one that has all the bells and whistles we would showcase on client’s websites. Built on the Drupal platform, the website goes deep on the back-end, including a robust email newsletter that keeps visitors coming back to see all the latest projects and news.

A major upgrade to a website with lofty goals is no easy task, and this one was no different. The website had been through many iterations of concepts, but kept getting pushed to the back-burner, as these things will at a studio that’s too busy with client work to find time for it’s own needs. The site had been roughed into place by a few junior designers, but I was put to task to take the website to the finish line.

Reviewing the site statistics from the last couple of years, we were able to understand what people came to the website to see. It was clear from reviewing the statistics that visitors wanted to (a) see the work in the portfolio section, and (b) learn more about the company. A conscious effort was made to put our energy into these sections, particularly to showcase the portfolio success stories. Tugboat is a full-service agency, so the work goes beyond just the creative department. With a fully integrated brand development, strategic marketing and in-house Drupal web development team, there’s a lot of different work to highlight across the years.

I’ve broken down some of the more interesting parts of the website design in the sections below. If you visit the live website, you may see some discrepancies from what I have here; I’ve chose to show the site as I originally designed it. As websites are living and breathing entities, the site may have changed, or lost out to A/B split testing post-launch.

Creative Direction/Design: Tugboat Group Art Direction/Design/UX/UI: Chris Young The What’s at the Market (WATM) website connects shoppers to farmers markets in their area, making busy people’s life easier by removing the guesswork of which vendors will be at which markets, and what products they’ll be selling. With the rising popularity of farmers markets across the Lower Mainland, […]

I soft-launched my new website a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve kept it pretty quiet while I touched up the last few things. It’s been a long time coming, and it feels really good to get to this point. I’ve wanted to replace my old site for a while, but time is never easy […]

Things have been pretty quiet over the last few weeks… Which is a good thing. I’m making really good headway on my design portfolio website, which is both tedious, and a joy. It’s been fun pulling a few of my older projects from the hundreds of CD’s and DVD’s boxed up in storage, cracking open […]