Working Design

07/07/2023

Help The Folk Music Festival Survive!

11/03/2016

Greetings everyone. Working Design is changing form. We closed the full service studio at the end of August (2016). It'll continue as a solo act open for consulting, some pro bono work and communications advice with me, Kris Klaasen, as the sole proprietor. In due time, I'll set up a new website.

05/20/2016

What words look like matters — in some cases, a whole lot.

04/28/2016

Today – April 28 – is the International Day of Mourning for Workers killed and injured on the job. At Working Design, we helped one of our clients – Heat and Frost Insulators Local 118 – develop a series of shareable social media graphics targeting asbestos which is the single largest cause of workplace-related death in Canada.

What’s a little different about this message is that mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos, is a slow killer. We often think of workplace injuries and deaths as sudden and violent, like the construction workers who fell from Vancouver’s Bentall Tower in 1981, or the ironworkers who died building the Second Narrows Bridge.

We wanted to challenge this image, showing that toxic exposure in the workplace is just as deadly. It can also be more difficult to identify, challenge and change.

04/21/2016

Working Design's three-part Website Tune-up package will help you reach more people. We look at 60 factors critical to your site’s performance. We give you analysis, a range of tools to make improvements and solid suggestions on how to use them.

Is your website doing its job? Are you getting the inquiries, donations, sales or downloads you want? Are your visitors going to your key pages and taking the actions you intended? Are you using your site's full potential? If the answer to any of these questions is “no” or “we don’t know”, what are…

02/29/2016

The trend in website visual design has been moving to a minimal "flat" look -- away from 3D effects, shadows, glows, and objects that look like their real-world counterparts. But studies are showing that even after a few years of this trend, users are confused by flat design. They are still looking for visual cues, so it's important that even in a minimalist design you create a consistent and clear visual language for your clickable elements.

02/26/2016

Chances are you won't even see this post! Are you feeling like your Facebook Business Page is invisible? Is it worth your time anymore? Does it feel like nobody even sees them? We look at the current state of Business Pages on the world's largest social media platform.

The eighth item in our series about being effective online explores the value of Facebook for business. Is it an effective tool for promoting your work, staying connected with clients and customers, and raising your organization’s online profile? Or has Facebook stifled page reach to the point that…

02/15/2016

02/12/2016

An ode to all you hard working IT guys & girls!

Go on, treat yourself (or the one you love) this Valentine's Day.

01/26/2016

Small businesses are increasingly relying on visual artists to convey that their products aren’t mainstream or mass-produced.

01/12/2016

We’ve made Working Design’s definitive guide on how to start a website project even more useful. Based on client feedback, we’ve updated and improved the guide. Also, the three original blog posts have been assembled into one downloadable booklet.

We’ve made Working Design’s definitive guide on how to start a website project even more useful. Based on client feedback, we’ve updated and improved the guide. Also, the three original blog posts have been assembled into one downloadable booklet. It covers the following fundamentals in starting a w…