04StudioNorth Vancouver, British Columbia

Since 2009 we’ve helped the places people gather feel as welcoming online as they do at the door.

The Still is a small design studio in Vancouver, BC. We design identities and websites for cultural organizations, schools, clubs and public institutions, and we capture the photographs and film that bring them to life.

Most people now meet an organization on a screen before they walk through its doors, and we think that first visit deserves the care a good building gives its entrance. The people you meet at the start of a project are the people who do the work. We’ve stayed small on purpose for that reason, and we plan to be around for years after launch, because that’s how long a good website lives.

01Studio2 people

You’ll know everyone on your project by name.

Adam Bognar

Principal and Creative Director

Adam leads design at the studio and looks after its clients. He starts every website with the system of type, colour, spacing and components, and every page grows out of it.

Adam has designed for a wide mix of organizations over the years: private clubs and sports bodies, software companies, schools and heritage groups, along with brands in hospitality and technology. He ran his own practice in Vancouver before he co-founded The Still, and he has led the studio’s creative work ever since, with a particular care for what sits underneath a design: the type scale and the components that let a client’s own staff publish well for years.

He was one of the designers behind the Canadian Olympic Team identity, which gathered a century of maple leaves into one system and won two Brand New Awards. For The Vancouver Club he directed the brand through most of a decade, from a redrawn monogram to two generations of its website. He has designed race dashboards for SAP and McLaren, and he spent three years as Director of Design at the Vancouver software company Klue, where the design team built the Nectar design system under his direction.

Adam holds an MA in Interaction Design from Malmö University and a bachelor’s degree in interaction design from Simon Fraser University. He has taught visual design at Vancouver Film School, and he supervises graduate teams in the Master of Digital Media program at the Centre for Digital Media.

Ben Taft

Project Director

Ben directs delivery on our projects and leads our capture work. When a project calls for capture, he plans it with the client’s team and goes on site with the cameras and the drone himself.

Ben has spent his career behind a camera and in the edit suite, first as head of video production at The Still and then through his own studio, 360° Immersion, where he has worked with hundreds of businesses on photography and 360° tours. His clients range from independent schools and wilderness lodges to galleries and heritage societies.

He filmed and edited the Canadian Olympic Team’s identity film and made its motion graphics. Independent schools in Vancouver, among them St. George’s School and Stratford Hall, show families their campuses on tours he captured and still hosts. He has flown into Knight Inlet Lodge by floatplane to film the grizzly bears, and he captured Orca Camp on Johnstone Strait, which guests can only reach by boat.

Outside the studio Ben was producer and cinematographer on a feature documentary that competed at SXSW, and a short film he co-directed ran in The New York Times’ Op-Docs series. He has also worked as a director of photography and editor for Business Insider, CNBC, Ars Technica and Engadget.

Ben flies drones under an Advanced Operations pilot certificate from Transport Canada and a Part 107 remote pilot certificate from the FAA, and he was a Google Street View Trusted Photographer until Google closed the program. He studied media at Gothenburg University and TV and media production in Malmö.

02Studio

The people who start your project stay with it.

Before a project begins, we give you the name of every person who will work on it, including the developers who build with us. If someone ever has to step away, you hear it from us first, and we agree on the replacement together.

03Studio

We make four promises on every project.

We design for accessibility from the first sketch, because the places our clients run are open to everyone.
When your data needs to stay in Canada, we write that into the agreement and keep to it.
We raise risks early and in writing, while there’s still time to do something about them.
You own the code we write for your site, and we hand all of it over to you.