It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new website for us! It’s an all singing, all dancing website. And now, it’s  live.

Over the past 6 months we’ve been working alongside a talented, multi-disciplined group of creative people, technical people, creatively technical people, and technically creative people! People from countries all around the globe have contributed to the development of what we are now proud to announce as our new website and brand identity.

Our new logo was designed and conceptualized by Emy Storey. Emy is a Montreal-based illustrator, with a depth of experience in music related illustration. Her style is perhaps most recognizable to music fans through the album and merchandise artwork she did for Death Cab For Cutie’s last record, and for her ongoing work as Tegan and Sara‘s lead Art Director. We are huge fans of her work, and so we felt really lucky when she agreed to lend her talents, and volunteer her time to YBP.

Here she is, our new logo in all its glory:

From beginning to end we worked very closely with an agency called Dynamo. They’re a creative communications design studio based in Old Montreal. Lovely people, a real pleasure to work with. Once we decided on a logo route they helped us refine the logo, and establish a colour pallet. From that, the website followed…

The ‘crown’ developed as a sort of motif, which appears on our website and the rest of our brand elements. It’s one of Emy’s creations, which we’re really quite fond of. It was inspired by our desire to convey the Yellow Bird as a proud, almost heroic symbol. A bird which symbolizes  hope and freedom,  embody the cause. There is also that quirkiness to it, and that subtle hint of irony with a bird wearing a human accessory!

Our website was then re-built, and re-designed by Dynamo from the ground up. They transformed our vision into something real, and surpassed our expectations competely. You can read more about the design, development, and evolution of this new website on Dynamo’s blog, in an entry (aptly) titled ‘E-Commerce done right – The Yellow Bird Project Has Launched!‘

Apart from good clean usability, this new website also provides features such as:

• A user profile system. Creating your own profile page allows you manage and track your orders, and upload photos to our new user submitted photo gallery. Photos also appear on product pages!
•  A new theme song page, with a downloadable widget. You can now share our theme song on your own blog or website.
• A new Street Team page, with newly branded embeddable banners.
• a new press page, with all of our recent clippings.

The third part of this dream team was a group of our favourite photographers who we rounded together to take photos of men and women wearing our shirts. Some of these photographers included the likes of Megan McIsaac, Alicia Vega, Mads Perch, and Joseph Yarmush. This was the only way that we felt we could do our t-shirts justice. And it gave us the opportunity to inspire some super talented people, and then showcase their work for a good cause.

Megan McIsaac: photographing our Au Revoir Simone tee

Alicia Vega – photographing our Broken Social Scene tee

Mads Perch – photographing our Stars tee

Joseph Yarmush: photographing our New Pornographers/Immaculate Machine tee

We all learned a lot together during this process. Each of the creative challenges we faced enabled us to discover more about ourselves, and our own inward abilites. As the ‘Project’ in our name insinuates - this work is ongoing. In the true DYI spirit which we champion, we will continue to treat this project as a ’work in progress’.  We will always be looking for creative ways to innovate and collborate with talented likeminded people, just like the group above.