Webstuff – Old School

Back in the days of the agency, I spent a lot of time working on, maintaining, keeping updated some ancient websites built in Microsoft Frontpage at the turn of the millenium. We used Adobe Flash for homepage animations. As you might imagine, I can’t actually display those long-dead websites and their no-longer-supported Flash animations… all I can show you are some screencaps I captured along the way and trust you to use your collective imaginations to imagine how awesome it must have been.

I must be clear… I did not design all these wonderfully colourful graphics. I was the agency’s Graphic Artist and Senior Production Designer at the time. The Design Director did the major design work and would pass on either semi-complete or fully complete files over to me to then break down into a format usable on the website. And it was a process… setting up a full page of tables, determining what needed to be cut out as graphics and what could be actual text.

So much of this process would end up simplified in CRM systems like Hubspot as the years went by, but these weren’t available at the time, so we had to make due with what we had.

For what it’s worth… every one of these had to be done twice. One in English and one in French… both our official languages.

Tony Jurgilas, R.G.D., Design Director, 50 Carleton
“When we consider bringing in team members, certain qualities like creativity, skill and productivity are obligatory. The question is what added value can someone bring to our organization? Geoff’s insatiable curiosity has augmented the intellectual capital of our team with an acute knowledge of just about anything you can imagine. He’s a bright, witty and altruistic person with keenness akin to a razor’s edge. He demonstrates a level of tenacity that has ceaselessly provided us with optimum results. His mentorship within our design department has facilitated the seamless transition of many young designers into our industry. Geoff is both a strong team player, and a vital independent thinker.”