Zeitguys Design Blog

Romeo Salon Spa is a full service Aveda Concept Salon that is soon to move into a new location in the trendy Bauer Buildings located in downtown Waterloo. To accompany all these great changes, Romeo Salon & Spa decided the timing was right for a full redesign of their website. With Zeitguys already involved in all the Bauer Buildings and Bauer Lofts marketing, our 411 found its way into the hand of the Romeo team and the new site design was soon underway.

At the top of the list for the new site objectives was to be fresh and innovative. A cool approach that struck a cord with everyone was to build the site around horizontal scrolling in lieu of page-by-page navigation. The navigation cues work the same as a traditional site, but the mechanic for viewing new pages is refreshingly unusual. This approach was not without its technical and usability challenges, but careful planning, a simple, linear site architecture and some technical wizardry won the day.

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Hello everyone, with Earth Day around the corner I thought it would be appropriate to share with you one of our recent projects just completed that we feel is our little way of helping make the world a better and cleaner place for future generations. For this project we were approached by the “Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA)” and asked to develop a logo to help visually display their most current project to the public. Though TEA has worked on various local environmental issues in the greater Toronto area such as education and action on Smog and Climate Change, Public Transit, Toxics and Urban Pesticides, Waste Reduction and Greenbelting Toronto, this particular project has taken more of a direct approach and is aimed at reducing energy consumption in privately-owned low income multi-residential buildings in Ontario.

Appropriately titled “Low Income Tenant Energy Savers”, (aka LITES), kicks off its campaign mid-April and starts with two particular apartment buildings in Ontario, one in Lawrence Avenue in Toronto and another in Ottawa. With partners ACORN, Ministry of Environment’s Community Green Fund and sponsorship from Enbridge Gas, TEA plans on educating tenants and landlords alike on the costs of energy and potential bills they may face in the future.

Whether or not tenants currently pay directly for their energy, they definitely pay the price either way. “When landlords pay expensive utility bills, they pass on those costs to tenants through rent increases. It also means there is less money in the capital budget to make improvements to the building, or make much needed repairs.” (TEA)

To help educate these tenants TEA has chosen to put together free energy kits and distribute them to the residents of the buildings. These kits will be a reusable bag filled with compact fluorescent bulbs, a timed power bar, window film for draft proofing, tip sheets and more, thus putting necessary saving tips right into their hands. Tagging all these items will be a specific logo developed for each of the two locations.

This is where Zeitguys came into the mix.

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