We’re a digital agency that specializes in developing high quality websites, mobile applications and social media campaigns.
Contact Us Full siteIn December 1998, Warren Wilansky co-founded Plank and set about making the web a more beautiful, usable, human place. Today, there’s twelve more of us, and while the work we do finds its home on screens both big and small, in browsers and app stores, the same original sentiment is ever present. Let’s make it beautiful.
Founder
Managing Director
Creative Director
Senior Account
Interactive Director
Director of Mobile
Senior Developer
Front-End Developer
Developer
Senior Project
Senior Front-End
Art Director
Office Manager
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In 1998, just three years out of university, Warren co-founded Plank with his personal savings and a dream to make the internet a beautiful place. With no formal business or entrepreneurial experience, he’s graduated from a real world MBA by turning Plank into one of the best-respected boutique digital agencies in Canada. His high standards and ability to create and maintain strong client relationships are the foundation of the company’s success. But enough about him – Warren truly believes a company is not an entity unto itself but a reflection of the people who make it special.
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As Plank’s longest serving employee (over 12 years!) Steve is the embodiment of the company’s evolution. In 1999, he became our first full time lead designer and was responsible for the quality of much of our early work. As the team grew, Steve’s natural leadership ability and attention to detail made him the best person to serve as Managing Director, using his innate ability to find slick, elegant solutions to all our technological challenges, while keeping creativity and usability at the forefront.
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Since 2005, Plank’s creative vision has been placed in GW’s immensely capable hands. A self-taught designer from the age of twelve, some of his previous gigs include Senior Designer at Airborne Entertainment, Art Director for The Montreal Mirror, and Co-Founder of Blue Dot Communications. Asked to sum up his design philosophy, he turns to a Cary Grant quote: “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favourable impression.” Given the quality and creativity of our work, you can only imagine the number of small details worked on each day.
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How do you keep projects on track, understand all a client’s needs, and keep people informed and happy, all in a manner that is equal parts professional and enthusiastic? Actually, it’s a trade secret, but we can tell you that’s what Sarah does, and does unbelievably well. With her previous work at PUMA Canada and Cossette, she brings to Plank a wide range of experience in both public relations and marketing. Content, strategy, branding, design — she gets it, and that’s why for over four years, she’s been building great relationships.
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Jennifer’s days with us are almost as old and numerous as the agency itself. Her early, award-winning Flash work helped put Plank on the map as an agency pushing the limits of online interactive projects. In 2006 she returned from some time living in East Asia, and we jumped at the chance to have her back on the team. Immersing herself in HTML and CSS development, she quickly became our resident browser-bug-busting expert, and still sets the standard for our pixel-pushing production team. Her experience, efficiency and desire for results translate into amazing work, on time and within budget.
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Geoff joined Plank in 2004 and quickly established himself as a core member of our team, with his diverse skill-set and focus on interactivity and motion graphics. Coming from a background in music, photography and film, he brings artistic sensibilities to every project, while his programming and managerial experience mean all those little technical issues are never overlooked. Geoff’s role at Plank is now focused on channeling our well-honed interactive and interface design skills into mobile development, ensuring the quality of all our mobile projects exceed expectations.
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A self-described “anti-stereotypical” programmer, Patrick is a health and fitness nut that comes to Plank with formal training at both Concordia University (BA Computer Science) and Vanier College (DEC, Computer Science). He has a ton of experience, including stints at Motorola, OZ Communications and Airborne Entertainment, and blends his dry wit into his ability to work – and deliver – on multiple projects simultaneously. He has a profound love and respect for several extreme sports; still can't describe what style of music he listens to (metal something?), and can likely bench-press you and your momma.
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Amelia comes to Plank by way of Australia after a tour with the NYC’s Bicycle Film Festival brought her to our fine city. With a diverse background ranging from film production, print design, refrigerator repair and as a ranch-hand (seriously), she’s a remarkable web designer and developer who delivers quality work on each and every project she touches. Her creativity as a professional photographer is amplified when it meets clean code and helps Plank produce exceptional digital experiences.
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An early penchant for gaming soon turned into a love of problem solving, and in no time Emerson’s extensive freelance programming career was off and running — that is until we enticed him to settle down with us at Plank. Our resident WordPress expert, he also likes to work with CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and iOS development in Objective-C (and all because it’s “fun”). His insatiable appetite for programming leads him to spend his spare time on projects like brokenbixi.com, a small, location-based app supporting the city’s public bike system.
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Tanya relentlessly seeks to provide clients with exceptional results. With patience, politeness and productivity at the forefront of her interactions, you could say she’s a creative diplomat — no surprise with a background that includes marketing, strategy and political science. She brings to Plank the ability to get projects done on time and on budget, a deep understanding of social media and community management, and the know-how for effectively bridging technology with community participation. She is also the founder of Montreal Girl Geek Dinners, a group of women who explore and discuss technology in a collaborative and supportive environment.
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JF is an expert in ... a lot. He compliments his HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills with a strong sensibility for user interface and user experience. When he’s not busy squeezing the every last bit of quality from every pixel (in every browser), he’s ensuring sites are perfectly optimized for search engines, or teaching us how to get even more out of Google Analytics. Building web sites is an art and a science, and lucky for us, JF has a gift for both.
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Maria has been cooking up design solutions for almost 15 years, freelancing and working at agencies in Copenhagen, Toronto and Montreal. She understands that truly effective design is not just great typography and colour palettes. It’s about branding exercises that uncover user motivations and connections, it’s about a careful consideration of user experience, and it’s about A/B split testing to see what’s working (and what isn’t). Maria blends this global view with her innate problem solving skills, finding new ways to help us deliver not just great designs, but great experiences.
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As a former label owner, artist manager, tour coordinator and festival organizer, Colin came to bookkeeping by way of indie rock. As our numbers guy he keeps Plank organized so our team can focus on delivering killer projects, but we love that beyond the books he’s a true creative at heart. A BFA in Photography (University of Ottawa), a producer and director of music videos and documentaries, and of course a wicked taste in music — it’s all made him right at home at Plank.
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By far the most photogenic member of the Plank family, Cliffy has licked and drooled his way into all our hearts. He’s our official office greeter and often doubles as a stress-reliever on days that require an added dose of support. He can usually be found under the desk at Emerson’s feet, or learning tricks and stealing treats from Warren. Though relatively new to the industry, his natural talent for creative lounging quickly earned him internet street cred on reddit.
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They're robots. But they're toys. But they're high-tech. But they're fun. Well, WowWee's products are a lot of things, and now they all have a new home on the web, thanks to Plank.
Plank developed the all-new WowWee.com in order to give their products the showcase they deserve. From its opening page, you get an overview of WowWee's exciting products from all of their lines, in a brilliantly laid-out page that somehow manages to not look busy, even though it's packed full of information.
When asked about the design, Plank Creative Director GW Brazier said he was striving "to highlight both the technology and playfulness of WowWee." Mission accomplished!
Designs
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Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, launched a truly unique initiative that Plank is very proud to be a part of – Citizen Voices. With Her Excellency’s blog, forums, and live online chat, Citizen Voices brings the people of Canada together through dialogue and allows Her Excellency to talk directly with Canadians.
Plank designed and built a site that is youth-friendly yet still accessible to all Canadians. Backed by our easy to use content management tools, we have built a robust system of live chat, forums, and blogs with comments that can easily handle the traffic on the site of a head of state.
Her Excellency has used the site as a repository for information and her thoughts about all sorts of topics. From her visit to Africa to special events such as the Festival of the Arts, Her Excellency is able to reach out to Canadians directly.
Plank and the Governor General – working together to break down solitudes.
Designs
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Since its inception in 1996, the Fantasia Film Festival has been hell-bent on showcasing the most exciting, innovative, and individualistic examples of contemporary international genre cinema, with an emphasis on unveiling films rarely seen in North America. Fantasia is seen as one of the most important fantasy, horror & anime festivals in the world, with fans that truly define the word “fanatic.”
When they re-launched in 2003 after a one-year hiatus, their focus was to step up their website and have it exist as the key element of their marketing strategy and the primary tool to provide fans with ever-changing, up to the minute information. Fantasia selected Plank to develop their overall online strategy, website, and content management system.
We delivered a cross-publishing back-end that allowed festival staff to add and update the 300+ films shown each year and have published changes immediately reflected on both the website and the festival program (produced by our print partner, Em Dash Design). We also work with Em Dash to ensure the program, print ads, and posters maintain a consistent look with the site. Fantasia Festival fans are ferocious and come launch day they hit the site with such force that even Godzilla would beg for a bottle of aspirin. We’re happy the site withstands the pressure and stays solid while international eyeballs click through each and every page.
Sure we’ve had many years of seeing some of the most horrifying images known to humanity when we put together the website (and in this case, we’re not insulting the client when we say this), but we recover in time each year ready to take on whatever Fantasia is set to unleash on the world.
Designs
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Alarmed by continuing human rights violations and lack of democratic freedom in Tibet, the Canada Tibet Committee (CTC) was founded in 1987 as an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) of Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in Canada. The CTC offers concerned Canadians an opportunity to work with their Tibetan friends to promote public awareness.
In 2007, the CTC decided that their existing website was inadequate to meet their goals and needs. They needed a modern website and turned to Plank to get it done.
Plank Creative Director GW Brazier designed a site that is simple yet stylish, and really brings forth the feeling and culture of the Tibetan people. The site's design is understated to reflect His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whose wisdom is interspersed throughout the site. The site focuses on Tibet news from around the world, but also the specifics of the Tibetan community in Canada. The site is clean and easy to navigate, and new features are already in the works.
The CTC and Plank - delivering important messages via the Web.
Designs
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Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free. The Sun's tag line describes a unique magazine that needed a unique website. That's why they turned to Plank.
Lead designer GW Brazier used that tag line as the basis for a stimulating yet clean design. One of the unique aspects of The Sun is the actual magazine changes its front cover color for every issue. Plank has taken this concept to the website - while the main colour this month is purple like the cover logo, next month it may be indigo blue, or whatever The Sun's creative staff decides. And if you browse the back issues online, you'll discover that each issue of the magazine retains it's individual color, as set by The Sun staff each month with the simple click of a mouse using our easy to use Content Management System.
The new site had an immediate impact. After only a few weeks of launch, traffic statistics climbed daily and through Plank's custom cart full integrated in the site, online sales of back issues increased. At Plank, it's never just about the look, it's about the results.
Designs
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Whether you’re starting a new project, looking to collaborate or just want to say hello, we’d love to hear from you.
Plank Multimedia Inc.
372 Ste-Catherine W., Suite 101
Montréal, Québec, Canada H3B 1A2
T: (514) 875-0003 F: (514) 875-7611
