“ICI. TP1.” is the second part of our 2011 agency calendar project. It all started with a brainstorm on the St. Valentine’s Day theme and a lively discussion about the rising popularity of online dating.
Everyone at TP1 knows that if you’re looking for someone to crack up at your jokes, you come see us—the women in the design department. So when the idea was floated to lift the spirits of lonely hearts on the 14th, we were all over it. At first, the goal was simple: to take a (retro) poke at this chocolate-covered day for lovers. After all, humans have been searching for a soulmate since… well, forever.
Step 1 of the project: visit the national archives in the Grande Bibliothèque. Those of you who know us can imagine the ruckus we caused and the sideways looks we got from the librarians and serious student types who spend their Sundays going through back issues of Le Devoir from 1927-1932 with a fine-toothed comb.
After countless laughing fits (some better stifled than others), hundreds of scandalous headlines, excessive punctuation abuse and too many typographical errors to count, we finally amassed enough content for Step 2. We were now ready to begin the monster task of triaging the information, analyzing the texts and compiling enough material to create an advertisement for each and every one of you.
The idea came shortly afterwards to create a scandalous tearsheet inspired by 80’s-style tabloids. But even that wasn’t quite enough. Inspired by Jojo Savard and her tender words of encouragement, compelled by the articles in Allô Police (some more refined than others), we decided that we needed to push our concept ever further.
The project thus became an interactive newspaper featuring ads for useless products, shocking (but 100% true) headlines and fun spaces where users could kill time on the web. We even sparked the interest of Jacob, our Chief Geek, who was delighted (you know you were!) to take care of the form, HTML5, database and JavaScript.
And so now it’s up to you to discover the ticklish content that tickled our fancies all of last week. We hope that you will laugh as much as we did (and justify the mayhem we caused in the agency during a whole work week).
— Élisa-Maude & Pascale
NOTE: Last year, we gave ourselves the fun task of creating a 2011 poster calendar that could be gifted to guests at the 5th anniversary party of our web agency. Part print, part interactive, the poster features a QR code in the centre that enables you to access fresh digital content every month. In January, we created an HTML5 audio player with a specially-blended musical mix.
