Portfolio » Culture.ca branding, type design, Web strategy

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The Department of Canadian Heritage contacted us to help with their Culture.ca Web site’s mandate:

“Culture.ca aims to engage Canadians in cultural life, to educate and entertain Web surfers with the stories of many peoples, and to provide access to the best of Canadian culture on-line.”

Culture.ca Web site (English home page)

Branding Culture.ca

We developed a branding strategy which settled on the bilingual name culture.ca for the site. We then facilitated the development of strategic objectives for the project, followed by developing a visual identity for the site.

Culture.ca Visual Identity manual [view English PDF | view French PDF]

The rules of use for the Culture.ca identifier are documented in the identity manual which we wrote and produced. If you’d like to see how the the mark plays out in a variety of situations, please take a look at the manual.

Culture.ca typeface

In developing the identity, we decided we’d prefer to use a Canadian-designed typeface, and yet could not find one we found suitable… so we designed a custom typeface for the project.

The Culture.ca typeface reflects the sophisticated, modern direction of the Web site while being reminiscent of the type forms used only in Canada for writing Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit people. This honours Canadian aboriginal culture by featuring one of only two alphabets nationally in use in the World today that was intentionally designed (as opposed to evolving naturally). The letterforms used in Inuktitut were created in the mid-19th century by James Evans, a Wesleyan missionary (the other intentionally-designed alphabet is Hangul, the native alphabet of the Korean language). See the characters of the Inuktitut alphabet

The client was so enthused with the font, that they contracted us to develop the complete alphabet, including all symbols required for standard international use. The Culture.ca font is thus available in Adobe ISO-compliant format for both Windows and Macintosh computers: and is available at no-charge for non-commercial use: enjoy!.

Culture font [Download the Windows TrueType font | ]

David then directed the design of the Web site itself, using the custom typeface throughout.

The branding was then applied to a national awareness campaign, including a series of billboards with various personalities celebrating a cultural activity and becoming a “dot-ca” as part of the culture.ca message.