Denim & Steel
Elevating online experiences for cultural and mission-driven organizations.
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Snapshots
Memorable bits and moments from previous and upcoming work
When PuSh Festival asked us to create a post-show survey, we came back with a way for audience members to speak their thoughts right in the browser with no app required. Reviews are automatically transcribed and given a sentiment analysis score in the backend. More expressive than a star rating, more fun than a form!
Set against the iconic Squamish Chief, the sky in this mountain town ranges from deep blues to majestic twilight hues. We created a day-night cycle (sped up many times here) in an illustrated motif in the Squamish Library website that incorporates weather conditions and time of year.
Rewarding curiosity for the RBCM website starts on the homepage with a playful interaction that reveals more photos of what’s happening inside the Museum. Read the RBCM case study.
The City of Calgary commissioned a wintery version of the sorting game that we built and maintain for Routeware. Holiday touches run throughout the game from button colours to snowscapes and festive lights.
The team got the last pumpkins in the box at the grocery store and made an enjoyable hour of listening to music, chatting, and carving some fun jack-o-lanterns for our window.
Exploring the Enemy Aliens site (launching soon) is an experience of uncovering the past. First encounters with groups of photos presents them in a collage that expands and reveals into a more traditional viewer for a sense of discovery.
SALA website visitors jump between different pages a lot, so we added these colourful chicklets to hold their recent history for a way to jump back to another page. We internally named this feature the worm due to its playful movement. Read the SALA case study.
First United’s Buy a Brick campaign will decorate their new building with colourful bricks. Buyers can choose the building face their brick adds to with a fun flyaround animation on a 3D model. Read the case study.
Denim & Steel Interactive
Est. 2011
4643 Main Street
Vancouver, BC V5V 3R6
About This Land
Even work that happens in the nowhere/everywhere of the Internet comes from a physical place. The place where we work and live is the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
We live and work on stolen land.
There are many ways to word a land acknowledgement. Why did we choose these words, exactly?
Once arresting, land acknowledgements are now familiar in many public spaces and gatherings. The repetition works, but the paradox is that it can dull the poignancy of these important statements. Online we often see land acknowledgements shuffled into footers and About pages, more of a checkbox than a felt statement.
Stolen land isn’t a phrase we came up with, and it is strong wording. We invoke it here to keep our own awareness of Reconciliation sharp. In our design work we take conscious steps to ensure land acknowledgements are more than easily overlooked boilerplate. These are small steps in a long process; they’re made to remind us and others of the work ahead.
What makes this place special to us
The area now called Metro Vancouver is a study of dramatic contrasts: sea level breaks to the sharp rise of mountains, wealth and hardship abut and overlap, and a gentle climate belies a fitfully slumbering tectonic monster.
Everywhere we look here we find life and change at different scales. Living here means being alert to confluences and conflicts, and being careful not to fall into anxiety or whatever-ism. It’s a place that challenges and inspires, and makes evident the many types of edges that we live along. That awareness is infused in our way of working, and makes our work something that couldn’t be the same were it from anywhere else.
To us, this is an inspiring place in many ways. But those inspirations come with a responsibility to recognize the historical wrongs that led to our presence here.