Inspiration can come from funny places sometimes and for our Canadian Collection it happened to come from our move across Canada. I had never imagined that one day I’d really be moving away from Hamilton, Ontario – the place my guy and I had lived our whole lives – but there we were, standing in my parents’ driveway one sunny day at the end of September 2014, watching the huge moving company’s truck drive away with all of our belongings in it.
It was a bit of a surreal moment. Standing there, not having fully grasped the fact that things would be different once we moved. We wouldn’t get to see our family as much, or hang out with our friends at the local places we loved, we wouldn’t be able to go our preferred shops to grab exactly what we needed, and we wouldn’t get to experience the familiarity of our hometown every day.
Our car was completely packed to the top for our 3-day road trip. We had our most prized possessions and all of the essentials we’d need once we got to our new apartment before our belongings showed up - including an air mattress for our bed and camping chairs and plastic storage containers for our living/dining room furniture. The bare walls and empty space was an interior designer’s dream I’m sure.
Having only ever visited Winnipeg four weeks prior in order to secure an apartment, moving there really was a significant change. We had to find new places to get the things we needed, new places to hangout, and to rebuild our familiarity with our new city. You know the saying “a tourist in your own town”? Well, that really was us. As someone who loves history, getting to learn about Winnipeg was fun and the Canadian Collection has been a way to continue that interest of learning about new places.
While this may have seemed obvious, our across Canada move taught me that each Canadian location has different things about it that different people hold dear whether they’ve lived there for their whole life or a short period of time.
The Canadian Collection was created in 2016, ultimately as a way to highlight the uniqueness of different parts of Canada and to offer others the familiarity and reminder of home and/or the places they love.
OUR CREATIVE PROCESS
RESEARCHING
Each time we create a new Canadian Collection product, we start off by researching the city, province, or territory we’re working on to find out what it’s all about and how it’s viewed by both locals and tourists. We want to ensure that the things we’re including for each location really do represent them or at least a part of them, as it’s hard to fully encompass what a place is 100% like in 30 icons or less.
During our research stage, we brainstorm a list of different things to include from categories such as:
Popular Spots (i.e. British Columbia’s Stanley Park Seawall)
Previous or Current Places with History (i.e. Hamilton’s Incline Railway)
Common Objects/Things (i.e. Toronto’s Street Meat Cart)
Local Traditions (i.e. Calgary’s White Hat)
Events (i.e. Prince Edward Island’s Home Week)
Sports (i.e. Winnipeg Jets Hockey Team)
Animal Species (i.e. British Columbia’s Pacific Salmon)
Inventions (i.e. Canada’s Paint Roller)
Pop Culture (i.e. Prince Edward Island’s Anne of Green Gables)
Famous Musicians (i.e. Canada’s The Tragically Hip)
Famous Foods (i.e. Toronto’s Peameal Bacon Sandwich)
Top Industries (i.e. Hamilton’s Steel Industry)
Funny Quirks (i.e. Winnipeg’s “Slurpee Capital” Title)
NARROWING DOWN
Once we feel this list has reached its maximum, we narrow down the list to about 20 illustrations that really help to represent the location. Each Canadian location we work on varies in the number of illustrations included due to size, detail, and significance of each illustration.
DRAWING
As soon as we have the finalized list of what icons we want to include, we begin roughly drawing out each of the icons in our sketchbook to get a better idea of how we want the icon to represent each icon.
Our sketchbook is used for only the rough drawings, as all of our Canadian Collection illustrations are created digitally in Adobe Illustrator. Depending on the detailed nature of the icon, some drawings can take us 10 minutes to do (i.e. a curling stone), while others may take us over an hour to complete (i.e. Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum building).
CREATING THE LAYOUT
We usually have an idea of the final layout from the beginning of our creative process, but the sketchbook drawing stage is really when the layout of all of the illustrations starts to come together. The illustration icon size varies, and each of our Canadian locations have icons that are small, medium, and large in order to fit them all in like Tetris pieces.
PREPARING TO SELL
To prepare our new Canadian Collection locations to sell as products, we stock our Design Shop with 8x10, 11x14, and 16x20 art prints and 11oz ceramic mugs and set-up our Shop listings for customers to buy from.
You can shop all of our available Canadian Collection products in the Design Shop!
Comments