Business – Confidant Communications Blog

Celebrating 15 Years: A Retrospective of Confidant Communications

Confidant Communications has been operating for 15 years now, so I compiled some snapshots from each year since 2009. Enjoy!

2009 Hands On Website

Hands On was a place where kids from the streets could find shelter and have fun. Working with the “shipping box” aesthetic for various parts of the design was a lot of fun, and it let us feature images drawn by the kids who went there!

2009 Treacherous Book Design

This was a highlight for Confidant because it won a Saskatchewan Premier’s Award in the graphic design category. Never mind there was just one other competitor in the category. We don’t talk about that.

2010 ThinkSask.com

It was so much fun to do this! The site started as a Flash application (you remember Flash, don’t you?) and then was converted using the Haxe language. At the time Haxe was a new tool in our box but it worked exceedingly well for this project. Animation for HTML5 required exporting individual frames from Flash and then assembling them into sprite sheets with an automated process.

2011 WaposBay.com

A thrilling project both for technical and aesthetic reasons, the Wapos Bay site was its own world of stop-motion characters from the Canadian TV show. It required bringing together many different transparent videos which would play at random and/or interact with the user input. I built an application that managed all the special conditions on what animations were allowed to play and when. Careful attention had to be paid to smart asset loading because bandwidth in 2011 was much more limited than it is today.

2012 Bring Niko Home

This was a personal project for raising funds as our family planned to adopt our son from overseas. Allan recorded a collection of songs and offered them for free download in hopes that people would give money towards our goal. The songs are still available at the time of this writing. Please, only laugh at the funny ones!

2013 Shelterbelt Design Tool

If you ever wondered how many trees you needed to plant in a half mile row, this was the application for you! Once again it was very satisfying to bring together different code toolkits and unite them using the Haxe language. Accessibility was an essential feature and it was necessary to use the Canada government’s WET-BOEW framework, sprinkled with some JQuery and OpenLayers for the maps. The whole tool could be used solely with keyboard entry if the user needed.

2013 Ajax & Me

We did design, editing and layout for this interesting youth-market book. We convinced the publisher that having illustrations for each chapter would make it more appealing, and Allan got his first opportunity to be a professional illustrator!

2014 Lentil Hunter Map

An interactive map that displays videos! We compiled both Flash and HTML5/Javascript from the same Haxe code so that we could have maximum compatibility.

2015 X-110 Protein Snacks

The client needed assistance in both naming their product and creating a branding program to include packaging, display, print, and web. We did product photography and even hand-built display modules as required.

2016 SAS Design Standards Guide

The Saskatchewan Archaeological Society had a new logo they produced, and needed some guidance on how to best use it. We produced this document for their internal use.

2017 Play Poster and Elevators Awards Colouring Book

Pro bono projects are always a fun opportunity to push the creative limits a bit! In other news, I was the villain in the play and got to display my panic attack skills!

The Graphic Designers of Canada put together a colouring book themed awards show that year. This was my contribution.

2018 GDC Christmas Cards

The Saskatchewan North chapter of the Graphic Designers of Canada (now DesCan) and their generous sponsors Novatex produced a series of Christmas cards. I jumped at the chance to do some screen printing design again, since it was a long time since I worked as a screen print designer and printer in 1995 and 1996.

2019 RTA Kitchen Design Tool

This was a fantastic opportunity to expand Confidant services into the realm of 3D visualization and full-stack application development. Using Haxe, OpenFL, FeathersUI, Away3D and our own Glory Framework. Behind the scenes we leverage PHP, Docker, HashLink and Node.js.

2020 Fahselt Overhead Door Logo Clean-up

I did a lot of technical work that year, so it’s always nice to get some design work. Don’t crowd-source your logos, folks! Pain! Suffering!

2021 Amity Trust Website

Amity had an attractive new branding program. After advising on some letter-spacing issues in their logo I designed their new Joomla! website to complement their new design and work tightly with their page builder component.

2022 Prairie Kettle Corn

This was one of those designs where I did something that was sort of good but I revisited it after a couple days and made it way better.

2023 Augmented Reality

This was the year Confidant did our first launch into augmented reality, adding it to the RTA Kitchen Design Tool.

2024 Three.js and a big thing for Joomla!

That brings us to today. My efforts this year have been towards building more 3D graphic technology, this time using Three.js because of its native support for augmented reality. I also started a big top-secret side project for Joomla! Watch this space for more details on that!

Thanks for reading, we look forward to what the future holds!

Evernote vs. ToodleDo: A lesson in user respect

I love my internet bookmarks. My collection started in the Netscape Navigator browser in 1996, migrated to Delicious.com (a.k.a del.icio.us), then SpringPad, then Evernote. Each of those migrations was fairly easy, and each new solution offered a free service which could be upgraded for a modest fee for advanced features.

Delicious is now a different service, and SpringPad folded. So it wasn’t a surprise when Evernote started pestering me to upgrade every time I logged in. That in itself I didn’t mind so much. However, it began to bother me when the message became “get this LIMITED time offer!” and when I dismissed the message it would ask “Are you sure? You won’t get this offer again!” I did in fact get the offer again, every day for many weeks. I gently pushed back on social media regarding this dark pattern but it didn’t change anything.

So I already had a bad taste in my mouth when I logged in one day and I was notified that the “free” version would no longer support more than 100 notes (I have over 5600). I would lose access to pretty much everything if I didn’t upgrade.

I had already migrated a handful of times before so I explored my options yet again. Microsoft OneNote was a contender but I couldn’t find an easy way of using my Mac to migrate. That left Apple Notes, and I discovered with joy that it could import an Evernote export file easily. It was missing a bit of formatting and data but it otherwise worked well.

That was about when I discovered that Evernote had quietly removed the ability to export more than 100 notes at a time from their desktop application. Coupled with their curtailed features in the free tier, it seemed clear that Evernote intended to use my own data against me to keep me in their system. Thankfully I had an older version of the Evernote desktop application which allowed a full export. I made the switch to Apple Notes and I never looked back.

It should be said that I firmly believe in paying for valuable tools. Price and value was not the issue here.

Contrast my Evernote experience to what happened with ToodleDo, which I also use regularly. ToodleDo was acquired by a new management team a while ago, and right off the bat they communicated frankly with their users telling who they were and what they intended to do with their service. They assured users they would strive to keep the features they knew and loved. It was clear that they were real people who respected their users and their needs. Later on they sent out a message in the same tone, stating the fact that ToodleDo could use the extra funds and would I please consider upgrading to a paid tier of their service. I had paid for their extra features in the past when they were needed, and I valued their service and respect so I upgraded again happily and paid for unnecessary features for a limited time. Some time after that they wanted to get people to try out their new app, and again they made the request politely without coercion. They maintained consistent transparency and respect.

There’s a book by Dr. James Dobson entitled Love Must Be Tough. It is written to married folk suffering from unfaithful partners. His advice to them was, in a nutshell, expel the unfaithful spouse firmly from your household in the hopes that such treatment will shock them to their senses and make them realise the error of their ways. He presented evidence that shows that people who beg, plead, or try to manipulate their unfaithful spouses into staying only drive them further away.

Since I’m comparing myself to the unfaithful spouse here, I will point out that I agreed to starting relationships with Evernote and ToodleDo based on the promise of free service. I was grateful for it while it lasted, since they didn’t “owe” me anything. We all understood that they hoped to earn money from me someday. However maintaining a healthy relationship was still going to require honesty and respect, as it does in any human situation. By being disingenuous, disrespectful, sneaky, and manipulative Evernote eventually drove me away. The good feelings I had for their useful service were wiped away. ToodleDo chose to be vulnerable, respectful and honest and I stayed.

Good job, ToodleDo, I hope you guys stay running and have a successful business for a long time!

Adobe: It’s not too late to learn from Coca-Cola

Edit: this article was written prior to Coca-Cola’s scandal in 2021 and is not an endorsement of everything the company does. Give credit where credit is due, I say.

Another year is gone now, as is “Adobe Flash Support”. People all over Twitter are reflecting on what they miss about Flash and I find it curious because the software still exists as Adobe Animate and it is still able to do everything Flash ever did, and more. Being the year end, I believe it’s time for another exercise in hindsight. I’ll spare you any year-related puns at this point.

As I reflect on all this I have come to an epiphany:

If Flash belonged to the Coca-Cola company it would be going strong today.

Remember New Coke? I would encourage you to review the story if you weren’t around in 1985. I see many parallels between that saga and the one of Adobe and Flash.

Like Coca-Cola experienced, Flash was in a big decline in its own world. Apple had disallowed the Flash plugin from their devices and there were a few “security issues” uncovered. Losing popularity, both companies felt it was time for a drastic change. Coca-Cola famously changed its formula. Adobe’s solution was to change the name of Flash IDE to Animate.

When “new Coke” came out, the brand was on everyone’s lips and they received a lot of negative publicity—just like Flash. What Coca-Cola remembered at that point is that Coke is not just a product. It is a brand which people loved. They wisely back-pedalled, and not only did they restore the old formula but they used it as a springboard for renewed marketing efforts and came roaring back more popular than ever.

Today, Flash is on everybody’s lips (in the web world at least) and Animate is just a verb that people can do with almost any software out there.

So will Adobe learn from its mistakes…

…or will they just let Animate continue as a discoloured droplet in the Creative Cloud?

It’s not too late to rebrand again. Flash was not just a product, it is a brand synonymous with creativity and fun on the web. Whether they call it “Flash Bang” or whatever, Adobe would do well to reconnect with that web nostalgia and bring back the Flash name. If all the old consoles can do it, they can too.