Brand New BLACKS.CA

Today is launch day for the brand new BLACKS website by Forge Media + Design working with Environics PR! The new beta site is a work in progress featuring multitudinous solutions for making tangible art out of photos. As they say on their Facebook page:

"BLACKS is your Playground for Photography, an inspiring one-stop shop to express yourself with your pictures. Explore, experiment, learn & create!" So many cool ways for people with a passion for recording and interpreting their worlds through photography to actually get their images out of storage and onto walls and into their decor.

Ever since digital capture effectively took over from film it has been my concern that a huge number of family (visual) records are at risk of being lost forever as technology makes it easier and easier to shoot tons of images and just leave them in your camera, phone, iPad, or whatever capture device you're using, any of which could be lost, or damaged in a heartbeat. So I love the idea of making various forms of output more and more accessible and affordable. And I hope people use them! (At least, as a start, please, please backup, backup, backup!)

My team and I had the chance to create eight of the new web banners, with the rest of the site imagery coming from various sources. We were lucky to get Bridget Sargeant, prop stylist, in between interior decorating, staging and propping gigs. Bridget brought the perfect mix of talent, knowledge, experience, style, vision and hard work to the project. She had the challenge, as always with a well considered branding exercise, of sourcing props that fit within the guidelines, in this case developed by Taxi (lead agency for BLACKS). The BLACKS team from Taxi dropped by on the first shoot day to offer some additional art directorial input which was great. Thanks Dave Watson! 

Bridget and I also had a chance to look at one of the newly renovated stores at Yonge and Eglinton ~ great looking store ~ so different from the old Black's stores we've all known for so long! I didn't take any pictures but, as someone who rarely uses Facebook, I am, yup, going to reference the BLACKS Facebook page again if you want to see pics of their new store look. Honestly, I wanted to order something myself! I wish I had space on a wall somewhere.