About the Company

Simple Station is a creative, agile and enthusiastic design studio located in the heart of Victoria, British Columbia. Simple Station was founded in 2005 and ever since has been in the business of designing intuitive, elegant, and engaging web sites. We mainly work with non-profit organizations and small to medium sized businesses all over the world.

Core Philosophy

We strongly believe that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. In every website or web application we produce, we look to embrace creative minimalism. While our designs are far from plain, we are constantly striving to introduce elements of simplicity. This process starts at the beginning of every project we undertake through:

1. Discovery & Research

An exploratory approach to learning about the history, brand, strategy and existing marketing presence of the client.

2. Information Architecture

The art and science of organizing and labeling a web project to support findability and usability. Why even bother having a website if nothing on it is findable, or the user-experience makes it impossible to navigate? Our first step towards simplicity is to analyze existing written content and create a detailed plan outlining the structure of the site.

3. Design Process

Creating fresh, elegant and simple interfaces through the utilization of appropriate typography, whitespace, colour, illustration and imagery.

4. Development Process

Handcrafted code that epitomizes simplicity. Our approach to development not only reduces the quantity of code on a given website, but also makes pages load faster. We adhere to W3C standards and support a wide variety of Open Source frameworks in both Python and PHP. We employ agile development methodologies and believe in lean code bases.

The People Who Work Here

Creative Director / Lead Interface Designer, Stuart Bowness is the founder of Simple Station. He has a BSc in Computer Information Systems, and has 7 years of experience in web interface design. Stuart believes that the development of clean, simplistic and easy to use websites is paramount in the modern business world. He is an avid nature lover with a passion for sailing, surfing, diving, climbing, hiking and biking.

Lead Web Engineer, Nathan Wright heads up all our major programming initiatives and has a thorough background in Python, PHP and Javascript, as well as experience in a plethora of frameworks. Over the past year, he has become very active in the Zend Framework Open Source Community and loves all things object oriented. In his spare time, he loves rock climbing and hard rock, preferably together.

Web Engineer, Anthony Theocharis is in his 4th year of Computer Science at the University of Victoria and he specializes in Javascript, Python and PHP. He also created our open source project Simple G which is a Google Calendar display tool.

Interface Designer / Web Engineer, Melanie Wright has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria and has 5 years experience in object oriented programming and design methodologies. She is knowledgeable in Java, PHP, Python and Javascript and also specializes in user-interface design. Outside of work, she enjoys good music, trips to Tofino and rock climbing.

Environmental Responsibility

“Views of the Yukon” ~ Photo by Stuart Bowness

Over the past two years we have had a growing sense of our responsibility for the environment. We started with little things like using recycled paper in the office and turning off all our equipment when we finished work and although those are good things, we have realized it simply is not enough.

We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.

Rachel Carson

Even though our company produces a digital product we are still utilizing electricity, purchasing electronics, using paper and generating a small amount of waste. For years as outdoor enthusiasts we have watched the impact of humanity in places that we treasure and have not done enough. Starting in 2009 Simple Station will donate 5% of profits to support the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) whose vision is to keep at least half of Canada's public land and water wild — forever. CPAWS is Canada’s only national non-profit organization devoted exclusively to protecting Canada’s wilderness heritage. For over 45 years, CPAWS’s 13 chapters across the country have worked successfully to protect nature on land and sea. We encourage all our clients and potential clients to consider contributing to this uniquely Canadian environmental non-profit group.