LOG Creative Bureau

What is the story of LOG Creative Bureau ? We met through Pascal's old roommate, Gregg. Four years ago, Isaac met Gregg at a local charity event called the 'Rock Lottery', where you take a group of random musicians and give them twenty-four hours to write an original set. Isaac and Gregg were put in the same group, and Gregg offered to use his house as the rehearsal space. Pascal made breakfast for everyone the next morning, which is probably the best possible way to introduce oneself. We quickly became friends, and realized that we shared a lot of interests and skill sets through designing posters and filming videos for our various musical projects. The next spring we moved into a big house, set up a workspace in the room on top of our garage, and started figuring out how to run a studio together. That was almost three years ago. We've since moved into an actual office, cut our hair, and gotten a bit better at the jobs that we made up.

Have you a special project that you want to talk about ? The first we'd like to mention is a book called 'Transforming Ottawa'. It's the first book we designed, and it was a huge learning experience (because it is a huge book). The author is one of Ottawa's head urban planners, Alain Miguelez. He found a box of unopened negatives in Canada's National Archives which contained hundreds of images of Ottawa before much of it was demolished in the 1920s and 1930s. Finding these views of a not-too-distant, different, beautiful old city inspired him to analyze and comment on a lot of the decisions that were made at the time. It was an interesting design challenge because half of it is formatted as an essay and half of it is formatted as a book of photography, so we had to build a very flexible design system to accommodate the diversity of the content. The second is a theatre project called 'Happiness™'. We worked with a theatre group who had written a show about two salesmen working for a fictitious mega-corporation called HPL® (Happiness, Prosperity, and Luxury). The play is formatted like a self-help seminar: the audience registers to participate in a new product launch event and becomes exposed to the company's corporate culture. We built the corporation's identity through full-scale branding, video commercials, product designs and tons of print collateral.

Do you think your work is connected to your locality ? Yes, but it’s not exclusive to our location. Our environment affects our perspectives, and our perspectives affects our work, but windows into other localities are always present. That said, contributing to the local economy is very important to us: it gives us a sense of belonging and purpose in this city, it grounds our activities outside of the 'digital realm', and it helps us reach into our community. Ottawa isn’t known for its design or aesthetic. While we are here, we might as well try to change that.

Which advice would you give to be a good designer ?  If design is a conversation, you will succeed by being a good conversationalist. Observe the context in which you are trying to communicate. Study the audience that you are trying to reach. Listen to what was said before it was your turn to speak. Understand that there are infinite ways to say something, but what makes it unique is your perspective and your voice. Learn the inner workings of the language, and find out how it can be manipulated to create new meaning. Interview conducted in November 2015 ©ktlg