hire us!

Email sarah@sarahjackson.ca to receive a PDF with info about services, rates and more general how-we-work type stuff. For a project quote, please include project details, timeline, and contact info. Thanks!

In no particular order, here is a list of some of the services this studio provides, each paired with a brief description rant:

all that print design. 

Why? Because I love the tangible feel and look of a superb design on printed paper. Because I enjoy finding aesthetically pleasing solutions to your tactile and printed problems. Because it lets me rant on to you about all the fantastic 100% post-consumer recycled paper out there these days. Because Oliver Jeffers wrote The Great Paper Caper and it’s been obsessing my life ever since.

branding. 

What, did someone say branding? I know what you’re thinking. This “brand” word that everyone tosses around like a Harry Potter charm – what is all this hocus-pocus? Seriously.

Branding is not just What Your Company is All About (although it’s that too), but it’s who your company is: or, to be more specific, it’s a promise of who your company is, of what people can expect from your company or product. Think of it like an online dating profile: making an appealing promise to your target demographic of what you’re going to look like and be like is how you get that first “date”. Following through on that promise is how you get the second date. People will recognize your brand by how it looks, its tone of voice, the activities it does, how it interacts, and the stories and experiences it shares. Failing to stay true to the honest personality and narrative of your brand makes your company or product either disappear – no one can recognize it because it lacks consistency – or worse, makes it seem false or insincere.

logo / identity design.

And a logo, you ask? Where does that fit into this whole brand-thingy? A brand generally utilizes an exquisite yet simple image (the logo) to act as an immediate identifier. I like to think of your logo as your company’s face: it’s everywhere and on everything, people recognize you by it, and you generally have to keep it for a number of decades before you start thinking about refreshing it. Trust me, you want to have a Really Great Face.

A sidenote rant on logos. Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, “Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” I feel like that should be the Great Commandment for creating logos because they are one of those things where you add even a single tiny flourish – the color pink Just Because You Like Pink, a bit of barbed wire because you have a matching tattoo on your left buttock, little grass stem here, the tiniest unicorn there that doesn’t need to be part of the logo (that is, doesn’t speak directly and specifically to your company’s brand) and you’re just CLUTTERING UP THE PICTURE so that people can’t focus on the actually important parts. It’s like cluttering up your Really Great Face with an ill-thoughtout My Little Pony tattoo or obscuring it with a paper bag. The perfect logo says no more and no less than it needs to say.

Something else that should be obvious by this point, is that your perfect logo will be different from anyone else’s perfect logo. Unless your company or product is exactly the same as an already existing company or product, in which case you might have some important moral questions you should be addressing.

book design.

Books: I like to read them, and I like to design them. I like them so much that I gave them this little separate category all to itself.

advertising campaigns.

Ads! Billboards! Promos! Running around in a hot dog suit!

packaging design.

Presentation is everything to the educated consumer eye, and packaging is the essence of presentation. Don’t fight it, it’s design science.

web.

Interactive projects are collaborative events. Collaborating with a team of talented people (such as strategists, researchers, copywriters and developers) we will work with you to get your information architecture, content and usability just right.

illustration.

Including book covers, web illustrations, children’s books, instructional how-tos, posters, editorial illustrations, portraits, caricatures, fashion, figure-studies, hand-lettering and any other possible creative imaginative scribble you can think of.