WayHome

Naming, branding and launching the Canadian music festival that changed everything.

After branding and launching Boots & Hearts Music Festival, festival producers Republic Live approached Puncture with an ambitious objective. The goal was to launch Canada’s biggest music and arts festival—create the brand, sell the tickets, and deliver a best-in-class experience over multiple days.

Puncture was tasked with selling a brand new event and experience that need to stand out in a saturated marketplace. We did this by creating eye-catching design work backed up by strong a communications platform—all without an existing lineup. We created business development tools to help secure required funding, and honed our marketing and strategic capabilities to give this event a larger-than-life feel. The wildly successful launch campaign, which featured interactive puzzles, social media teasers, and a postering campaign, remains one of our proudest achievements.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingVideo

Puncture was able to create and launch a now iconic brand and on-site experience, which eight years on is still talked about. WayHome sold over 35,000 tickets in its first year, attracting attendees from each province and from 32 states in the U.S.

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Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Yonge-Dundas Square
Choice Properties
Bentway STREET

Designing a visual identity for STREET, inspired by the street itself.

Puncture was engaged in 2022 to help develop the identity and communications for The Bentway’s summer programming season, STREET. STREET was a summer program full of art installations, roaming performances, events and celebrations. The task was to design a striking, bold creative campaign that created excitement around the upcoming season and contributed to building The Bentway brand as one of the top public art producers in North America.

Inspired by the energy of Toronto’s streets and the street signs and symbols we encounter everyday, we created a bold and dynamic season identity. Our work for STREET involved campaign development, creative design, strategy, and execution of all assets needed for media buys and onsite experience.

Industry
Non-Profit

Service
Branding

The Bentway has transformed a vacant and neglected area underneath Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway into a new gathering place and cultural hub for our city’s growing population.

With STREET, we created an identity that stood out from the crowd and helped The Bentway achieve their audience targets of over 100,000 visitors in summer 2022.

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Patel
Shorefast
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Weston Family Foundation

A new visual identity and communications platform for a foundation dedicated to creating a healthier, more resilient Canada.

For three generations, the Weston Family has maintained a strong tradition of giving. After a two-year strategic review, the foundation narrowed their focus to generate impact by advancing the health and landscapes of Canada. This new mission and vision called for a new name, identity and website, as The W. Garfield Weston Foundation became the Weston Family Foundation.

With a new name and a refreshed mission, Puncture was asked to create a new identity to capture this important shift, while also reaffirming the roots of the Weston family legacy. Agriculture has always been at the heart of the Weston story, as well as Canada’s history as a whole. Our team started from the iconic image of a wheat sheaf, integrating a unique Weston “W”, and built a simple but robust visual identity system around it to create a cohesive and confident brand that expresses the Weston Foundation story.

Industry
Non-Profit

Service
Branding

The website reflects the foundation’s innovative spirit and forward-thinking initiatives, and provides an infrastructure for all programs and supports an online hub for posting and applying for grants.

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Shorefast
Choice Eastway and Caledon
Fit4Less
Toronto Biennial of Art

Building a visual identity, communications toolkit and wayfinding strategy for Toronto’s first-ever biennial of contemporary art.

In 2019, prior to launching the inaugural Biennial to the public, TBA came to Puncture to define its visual identity. A key feature of the Biennial is that all of its exhibition sites are located near waterways that are significant to Toronto: Lake Ontario, the Humber River, Don River, and more. We came up with a vibrant brand that is inspired by nautical flags and symbols, these appear in the bold graphic devices we created. 

The system is bolstered by artwork treatments, a celebratory and accessible colour palette, and a custom wordmark to bring the importance of public and free art to the city’s consciousness. In addition to visual identity, we helped simplify the Biennial’s communication platform and got it to its most distilled form, “72 days of Free Art”.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

The Toronto Biennial of Art’s (TBA) mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. For 10 weeks every two years, local, national, and international Biennial artists transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances, and learning opportunities.

Since the inaugural year, we have worked with TBA on all aspects of their marketing materials including communications, digital production, graphic design, video production, motion graphic design, and environmental and experiential design. 

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Shorefast
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
CAMH Campaigns
CAMH Virtual Tour

A virtual tour of CAMH’s new facilities, created to show donors the impact of their donations.

Industry
Non-Profit

Service
DigitalVideo

explore.camh.ca

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital and one of the world’s leading research centres in its field. A large part of their strategic plan includes rebuilding their campus to become one of North America’s leading mental health research hospitals.

CAMH engaged us to create a website and interactive tool to showcase two newly constructed buildings to their existing donors. As COVID-19 hit and restrictions were enforced, donors who would likely donate again, could not physically come into the buildings to see the impact of their donations. We designed and built an interactive virtual tour experience of the newly completed buildings that houses over 40 videos that we scripted, shot and produced. The experience is designed in a way that donors can explore it based on their own interests, or it can be tailored for personalized guided virtual tours.

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Patel
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Tafelmusik
TAS

Developing a bold and personal visual identity system for an unconventional impact company.

Industry
Corporate

Service
BrandingDigital

tasimpact.ca

TAS is an unconventional impact company. Their mission has always focused on impact-driven development, but as they honed and refined their process, they needed a refreshed brand that better captured their bold and personal approach. 

Puncture first tightened up TAS’s logo to have more visual presence at smaller scales and to enhance flexibility across digital applications. We then developed a whole new visual identity system that connects more cohesively with the geometry of their logo, and that better integrates and celebrates imagery, video, and messaging.

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The Filmmakers
Brodflour
plazaPOPS
Tracks on Tracks

The identity and execution for Apple Music’s first playlist targeted directly at TTC riders.

Industry
Corporate

Service
BrandingDigitalMotion

Apple Music, along with Universal Music Group (UMG) and the TTC, asked Puncture to develop the creative and marketing roll-out for a new playlist targeting everyday commuters.

Leveraging the social influence of Universal Music’s artist roster, as well as media spaces from the TTC, a 12-month campaign was launched across station posters, platform video screens, streetcar banners and full-wraps, and TTC and UMG social media platforms.

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Brodflour
SingularityU
Yonge-Dundas Square
CBC Exhibitionists

Crafting an unignorable motion identity for CBC Arts.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingMotion

Exhibitionists is young, daring and born of a passionate and personal connection with innovating artists across genres from diverse communities across Canada. It features provocative artists working in all mediums who are disrupting the status quo whilst celebrating their cultures. Exhibitionists is the go-to destination to discover Canada’s fresh and diverse talents, and to get up close and personal with established icons.

Working with the CBC, we were tasked with crafting a striking and memorable visual identity for the program. Additionally, we designed a dynamic motion graphics kit for broadcast. We also had the honor of conceptualizing and editing the show’s captivating introduction, making Exhibitionists the ultimate destination for exploring Canada’s vibrant and diverse artistic talents.

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TAS
Herb
CAMH Campaigns
ORXSTRA

Creating a distinct wordmark and graphic identity for a company exploring the intersections of art & fashion.

Industry
Design & Architecture

Service
Branding

ORXSTRA is an emerging art & fashion design company founded by Alex McLeod and Tala Kamea, focusing on jewelry, textiles, and art. Puncture developed the wordmark and icons for their brand with the goal of reflecting their bold and innovative designs. The structure of the wordmark, combined with the icons derived from traditional musical notation, is indicative of ORXSTRA’s expressive & stylish approach to design.

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Sidewalk Labs
Fit4Less
Shorefast
6 Degrees

Building an identity that is both urgent and optimistic.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingVideo

For its 10th anniversary, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC) launched its most ambitious initiative to date—6 Degrees: Citizen Space, a three-day event that gathers international cultural influencers in a dynamic environment for discussion on the world’s pressing issues.

The ICC and its founders knew they needed a partner with experience branding, selling, and producing an event of this scale. Puncture developed a thoughtful visual identity to reflect the tone and content of the conference, while drawing in new audiences. We then rolled out the identity across a number of marketing, on-site, fundraising, and internal assets, both digital and print, to help facilitate the event’s growth.

Puncture continues to provide year-round strategic design support. We helped develop the strategic launch campaign using digital media as well as impeccably-executed marketing materials and out-of-home advertising to draw attention and increase attendance to the event. This past year, we launched new pod events in Den Haag and Berlin and elevated the existing brand to make it bolder and more urgent for the annual Toronto conference.

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Choice Eastway and Caledon
The Filmmakers
CBC Exhibitionists