Yonge-Dundas Square

Celebrating 20 years of connection, community, culture, and diversity in a prominent Toronto public space.

Yonge-Dundas Square is a unique focal point of the downtown Toronto community. The square is designated for use as a public open space and as a unique event location. The square has a rich history and is a meeting point for the arts, community and culture.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

In celebration of it’s 20th year, the team at Yonge-Dundas Square worked with Puncture to create a brand campaign to celebrate this anniversary. The campaign was inspired by five important themes: connection, community, culture, together, and diversity. The foundation of the system uses bright colours, historical photos and text, all on a square grid — inspired by the concrete squares at Yonge-Dundas Square.

The design highlighted the Square’s diverse history and also helped advertise events over the 2023 summer period. The on-site work helped add to the vibrancy and excitement of events at the Square. Our team is looking forward to seeing what will happen next at Yonge-Dundas Square!

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Choice Properties
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
TAS
Robert McLaughlin Gallery

A brand refresh and new website design for the largest public art gallery in the Durham Region.

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (The RMG) engaged Puncture in 2021 at a time when they were establishing a new strategic plan with a fresh mission and vision. Puncture took on both a visual identity refresh and a complete website redesign with the goal of better reflecting the RMG’s updated mission, collection, and cultural presence in the region. 

Emphasizing the RMG’s artist-centered and community-focused approach was a significant goal for the project. We achieved that by opening up the RMG’s logo, and creating a playful colour palette and inviting layouts for the website

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingDigital

Website Development
Helios Design Lab

Gallery Photography
Darren Rigo

rmg.on.ca

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is the largest public art gallery in the Durham Region of Ontario, Canada. It houses a compelling collection of modern and contemporary Canadian art numbering over 4500 works. They are an artist-centered and community-oriented public art gallery that brings people from diverse backgrounds together to engage with art that inspires new perspectives, generates meaningful conversations, and creates a sense of belonging.

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Weston Family Foundation
Sidewalk Labs
Tracks on Tracks
Choice Eastway and Caledon

Introducing two state-of-the-art industrial spaces with a bold identity and website.

Industry
Corporate

Service
BrandingDigital

choicecaledon.ca

In a move to broaden their industrial portfolio, Choice Properties partnered with Rice Group, leading to the acquisition of two new properties located in East Gwillimbury and Tullamore.

After renaming the projects to Choice Eastway Industrial Centre and Choice Caledon Business Park, we held a collaborative workshop to gain deeper insights into their objectives and to envision their goals. Building upon the established Choice brand, we developed two visual identities that reflect the properties’ clean and modern facilities. Additionally, we created a responsive website and informative brochure aimed at attracting prospective tenants.

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Dream in High Park
CAMH Campaigns
Toronto Biennial of Art
Tafelmusik

Helping a world-renowned Baroque orchestra invite new audiences in, with a simple and bold brand identity.

Tafelmusik, a world-renowned Baroque orchestra and choir, tasked Puncture with refreshing their visual identity and communication platform. Their main goals were to increase and diversify their audience and donor base. It was very important that the new brand honored the past while embracing the present—they needed to show they were moving forward without alienating their current audience.

We built a new brand strategy, positioning and communication toolkit. The entire brand is rooted in the idea of sharing beauty, which foregrounds all of Tafelmusik’s performances and is the reason why so many people have dedicated their lives to this music. We landed on “Tafelmusik invites audiences to engage with beauty through evocative live music experiences” as the brand position.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

Taking the cue of “sharing beauty,” we developed a succinct visual identity that’s equipped to handle new and changing sub-brands, a rich colour palette and elegant imagery. The identity is informed by the beauty, symmetry and colour found in baroque art and architecture, which is emblematized in the signature diamond wordmark we created. The masterbrand was built with flexibility in mind, it expands to create unique season identities that incorporate new imagery and colours that are inspired by the season’s performances.

We continue to work with Tafelmusik on their marketing and content creation on an ongoing basis. This includes creative direction of season identities, signage, print and digital pieces, email and digital marketing, video series, and a seasonal magazine.

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WayHome
Fit4Less
Yonge-Dundas Square
Dream in High Park

For Canadian Stage’s summer performance series, a visual identity that dreams.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingMotion

A return to the company’s original summer moniker, Dream in High Park is Canadian Stage’s transformed summer programming series. Dream in High Park is one of Canada’s largest and longest running outdoor professional theatre events, taking place at the High Park Amphitheatre, and welcoming over 30,000 audience members to the park each year. The transformed program features a shift from the usual summer Shakespeare fare to a diverse array of events including theatre, dance, comedy, contemporary and baroque music, and so much more. 

Canadian Stage engaged Puncture to design a new visual identity to express this exciting vision, featuring a logo with a dynamic voice and a colour palette that dreams.

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Choice Eastway and Caledon
Tracks on Tracks
Mabelle Arts
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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SingularityU
Scarborough Proud
Bentway STREET
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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Fit4Less
SingularityU
plazaPOPS
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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SingularityU
WayHome
CAMH Campaigns
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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Mabelle Arts
CAMH Virtual Tour
Tracks on Tracks
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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CBC Exhibitionists
Yonge-Dundas Square
Mabelle Arts