Holiday cards have become a staple in the legal industry, having evolved into large productions that often feature elaborate designs and even full commercial video production. Blakes, who have over 550 lawyers in cities all over the globe and are frequently recognized as Best Law Firm in Canada, wanted to take the opportunity to communicate their deep gratitude for their clients, partners, friends and family. They turned to Pixelcarve to produce a 1 minute short that showcased “a day in the life of a Blakes lawyer” and all of the things they are thankful for, as well as a compilation of their lawyers giving thanks from around the world.

“Blakes went all out with this video on thankfulness. Extra marks for the heartwarming scene of a lawyer being welcomed home by her pajama-clad children.” says Precedent, after awarding them the Best Law Firm Holiday Card of 2011.

The video was produced in both English & French and was distributed by a large e-mail campaign also created by Pixelcarve.

The following video caught the attention of the entire legal community and ultimately was viewed by over 10,000 people.

Pixelcarve is also pleased to announce the release of the Director’s Cut, which features all new scenes including an introduction not seen in the final video.

Let us know what you think!

“It’s an honour to be recognized with the best in the industry. Although achieving business objectives and results for our clients is our top priority, let’s be honest it never hurts to be recognized by your peers for outstanding contribution to the entire industry. It’s a testament to the incredible creativity, dedication and unique hybrid of talent found within Pixelcarve.” says Curtis Priest, CEO and President of Pixelcarve.

The Communicator Awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), a 550+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media.  Current IAVA membership represents a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms including:  Condè Nast, Coach, Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Estee Lauder, HBO, Keller Crescent, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tribal DDB, Victoria’s Secret, Wired, Yahoo!, and many others.  See www.iavisarts.org for more information.

“As we continue our mission to honor Creative Excellence for Communications Professionals, we were once again amazed at the high level of work we received for this year’s Communicator Awards. With this year’s entries we found an increased awareness and reflection of the digital world in which we live, and our entrants always seem to find new and creative ways to push the envelope of possibilities across all mediums” noted Linda Day, director of the IAVA.  She added, “We are honored to witness the amazing work being done throughout the industry and want to commend and congratulate this year’s Communicator Award Winners and Entrants for their hard work and dedication.  On behalf of the entire Academy – Job well done.”

For more information about the Communicator Awards, please visit www.communicatorawards.com, email the Communicator Awards at info@communicatorawards.com or call us at (212) 675-3555.

About The Communicator Awards:

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals. Founded by communication professionals over a decade ago, The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and
identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. This  year’s  Communicator Awards received  thousands of entries from companies and
agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind in the
world. Please visit www.communicatorawards.com for more information.

The Communicator Awards is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. Please visit www.iavisarts.org for a full member list and more information.

All lawyers are the same, right? Not so. Wolf Kimelman has a unique understanding of the Canadian legal system, and of the challenges and crisis’s that their clients experience. As such, Wolf Kimelman required a website that allowed them to stand out amongst the clutter of law firms in the city, and turned to Pixelcarve to help them meet this challenge. We designed and built a beautiful and experiential website that portrays the power of Wolf Kimelman’s brand, as well as their level of unwavering skill and dedication to their clients.

Here is what senior partner Jason Kimelman had to say about working with Pixelcarve.

“We have just launched our web site which was designed and created by the great people at Pixelcarve. Having never purchased a web site and knowing very little about the intricacies of web sites and marketing, we were quite lost initially. Quickly, however, our nerves were calmed by Curtis, Ryan and Jeremy.

Throughout the process (which was relatively quick), our questions were answered, our requests were satisfied and our deadlines were met. We are thrilled with the finished product. It was a pleasure working with Pixelcarve and selfishly, I hope no one ever retains their web site design services in the future.”

Wolf Kimelman was a fantastic firm to work with, and we’re excited by the great results they are already experiencing from their new website.

You can check it out here: http://www.wolfkimelman.com

Tredd is a unique kind of insurance company. Passionately aggressive in serving the risk management needs of heavy industry, they elected not to have a website at all until they could find an agency able to intimately understand the nature of their brand. It only took 1 meeting with Pixelcarve to seal the deal, and the website and branding that emerged is not just a powerful business tool, but a flawless interpretation of who Tredd is as a company – clearly differentiating them in their industry, and defining what makes them exceptional.

For this project Pixelcarve strategized, designed and built a state-of-the-art website, portrait photography, and a full brand identity for both Tredd and TreddWest with business cards and stationary.

Isabel Silveira, Tredd’s Vice President of Operations, has this to say about Pixelcarve:

“Pixelcarve’s product, people amazing!

Here at Tredd Insurance Brokers Ltd., we could not be more impressed with the team at Pixelcarve.

They were a pleasure to work with, from the initial brainstorming meeting, to the photo-shoot to the after launch upkeep. They are timely, professional and patient. Not only are the people great but the product is outstanding. We’ve only been online for a couple of weeks and we are constantly getting compliments about our new website design.

Having an online presence is so important for all businesses but it isn’t always executed to a client’s expectation. Pixelcarve was able to grasp the essence of our corporate personality and translate that into a streamlined, sophisticated website that will help attract more clients and get our message out there. We would highly recommend them to anyone.”

Working with Tredd was incredibly satisfying for us here at Pixelcarve. They exemplify our values and it resulted in a project that we are very proud of. You can check it out here: http://www.tredd.ca

When Gearshift needed to execute a rich-media ad campaign for No Yolks, they turned to Pixelcarve to execute the vision. We created custom 2D animation from scratch, and built them into Flash ads of varying sizes for 4 total executions.

Check them out below:

• Arrow – Big Box
• Arrow – Leaderboard
• Vacuum – Big Box
• Vacuum – Leaderboard
• Facebook Video

When Snow Marketing needed a combination of world-class quality and exceptional delivery time for a large LinkedIn online media campaign, they turned to Pixelcarve.

Building off of Snow’s exacting specifications, we executed 2 campaigns with a number of different units. Feel free to check them out below:

Micro-Targeting

• amsterdam-big_box/
• amsterdam-leaderboard/
• amsterdam-skyscraper/
• amsterdam-wide_box/
• newyork-big_box/
• newyork-leaderboard/
• newyork-skyscraper/
• newyork-wide_box/

Precision Advertising

• financial-big_box/
• financial-leaderboard/
• financial-skyscraper/
• financial-wide_box/
• software-big_box/
• software-leaderboard/
• software-skyscraper/
• software-wide_box/

No matter which side of the Flash vs. HTML debate you find yourself on, there is no denying that both of them possess strengths and weaknesses. For creating immersive, rich, visually impactful experiences, Flash is still the best way to go – and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. And yes, that includes HTML5 and its many accompanying tools (I’m looking at you AJAX).

Flash’s strength is also its weakness; it’s a powerful tool with near limitless possibilities. Far too often it’s used to assault a user’s screen without regard for message, restraint, relevance or style. This leads to poor experiences, and the perpetuating myths about Flash’s usefulness.

There are infinite examples of REALLY BAD Flash websites. You know the ones – they take FOREVER to load, only to make you “skip intro”, and then treating you to a visual assault of every tool, trick and blinking animation effect the “designer” could think of. Google can’t read it (but really, why would it want to), and even if you wanted to send a sub-page to a friend or copy and paste a phone number it just won’t let you. And if this atrocity’s maker had the gall to force open a fullscreen browser window on you… well… hey, we get the hate! It leaves a bad taste and rightfully deserves the bad reputation the likes of Steve Jobs and others have given it.

Or does it?

There IS a better way. Flash is a powerful development platform that, when used correctly, can allow for the creation of the most basic, simple experience, or the most beautifully, richly interactive experience you have ever seen.

Now let’s take it to the next level. When used correctly and with its full feature set, Flash websites can offer superior Search Engine Optimization (SEO), can be Content Managed, and can offer all of the same copy+paste and unique page linking goodness of conventional HTML websites.

Creating these types of highly functional Flash websites does require specialized skills. Think of it as right brain v. left brain if you will. Flash websites have typically been built by artist/designers who have been using the default set of tools available within Flash the best they can for years. But much like the web as a whole has evolved, so has Flash. It is no longer a glorified scripting language, but rather a media-focused, object-oriented development platform. This allows for a blank canvas on which pretty much anything can be built – displayed on any digital medium from web browser to digital signage to kiosks.

As such, proper and effective Flash development has evolved to require a diverse, skilled team of strategists, designers and developers. And it makes sense; major companies wouldn’t dream of building their entire brand messaging and marketing campaigns using only one type of skillset. Technology has evolved to allow for fully interactive brand experiences that can fill a screen, powerfully blending images, video, audio, vector graphics, fonts and motion into something that can also be indexed, managed and optimized. That begins and ends with Flash.

If you agree that a strong web is an open web, you love the Flash platform because it benefits from both the resources of the open source community, as well as the visionary driving force of a single company (much like Java by Sun Microsystems); a company that works intimately with its community to implement new features and guide development. Because it’s simply a language, it can be built in anything – we ourselves don’t even develop in Adobe’s Flash, and we compile with the open source Flex SDK. This lends itself well to the massive community contributing to the codebase. Adobe has even made available the full player specifications should someone feel inclined to make their own.

So forget everything you thought you knew about Flash, and let me welcome you to the new generation of the web’s best rich-media development platform. Learn how.

Until next time,

Curtis Priest
Pixelcarve Inc.
Partner/President & CEO

New York, NY (October 31, 2010) - The winners of The 2010 Davey Awards have been announced by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), and Pixelcarve is proud to be only 1 of 3 Canadian companies to be honoured with gold. Scoring 2 gold statues, one for the Rhombus Media website and another for their own Pixelcarve.com website, Pixelcarve also picked up another silver award for Conte & Associates, which was honoured last week by the W3 Awards as well.

“It is humbling to be included amongst such inspiring and cutting-edge work by some of the world’s most passionate boutique agencies.” says Curtis Priest, President & CEO of Pixelcarve. “We are inspired by this community and delight in the challenge to continually evolve our work to ensure our clients stand-out in a progressive webscape.”

To see more winners, check out the Davey Awards:
http://www.daveyawards.com/winners/list/?l=P&event=6&category=4&award=G

About The Davey’s

The Davey Awards exclusively honor the “Davids” of creativity, the finest small firms, agencies and companies in the world.  David defeated the giant Goliath with a big idea and a little rock – the sort of thing small firms do each year. The annual International Davey Awards honors the achievements of the “Creative Davids” who derive their strength from big ideas, rather than big budgets.  The Davey Awards is the leading awards competition specifically for smaller firms, where firms compete with their peers to win the recognition they deserve. Please visit www.daveyawards.com for more information.

The Davey Awards is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. Please visit www.iavisarts.org for a full member list and more information.

Pixelcarve Inc. was selected as a Silver Winner in 2 categories this year for 2 websites: Conte & Associates for Law & Legal Services, and Pixelcarve.com for Self Promotion.

“We were once again amazed by the high standard of excellence represented throughout the entries we received this year. W3 winners continue to embody what the internet is all about and continue to raise the bar in Web development and design. We are honored to have reviewed such a diverse and remarkable pool of work this year” said Linda Day, the executive director of the IAVA. “On behalf of the entire Academy, congratulations to this year’s W³ Award entrants and winners as they continue to push the limits of Web Creativity.”

W³ Awards Info:

The W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning Websites, Web Video and Online Marketing programs. Simply put, the W³ is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.

The W³ is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, and is sponsored by AdvertisingAge, the Media Partner of the W³ Awards.  The International Academy of the Visual Arts is an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, interactive, advertising, and marketing firms. IAVA members include executives from organizations such as Alloy, Brandweek, Coach, Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Estee Lauder, Fry Hammond Barr, HBO, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Victoria’s Secret, Wired, and Yahoo!. For more information, and a full member roster, please visit www.iavisarts.org.

If you would like to know how we can help you win an award, talk to us.

Highlighting their innovative use of technology to merge beauty with function, Chronicle follows Pixelcarve’s growth from a 2 man freelance shop into one of Toronto’s most innovative digital agencies, getting candid, and setting the record straight on the more prevalent myths about Flash.

You may download the full article here.