It’s important to look at the Admin as its own brand, and respect the branding guidelines set out in Polaris. When adding product releases, or additional content, we must preserve the Admin’s brand, and ensure that no additional branding leaks over the UI. For example, if we’re showcasing a new Shop feature, we need to ensure that the Shop brand doesn’t leak over in the Admin UI.

The Nascar Problem

When we think of branding in the Admin, we can think of it as the anti-Nascar. The Admin is the main engine here. Let’s treat it as such. If every field is taken from the product you’re showcasing, the integrity of the balance is lost, and, instead of it being a well-run-nice-to-look-at machine, it’ll be bogged down. 

Branding Guidelines: Do’s & Don’ts

In general, if you’re looking to run a product in the Admin, you can express the product’s branding through text, app icons, and badges.

When using badges, color and type must be inherited from Polaris. Don’t introduce any other colors besides the colors provided in Polaris. And, be mindful of the color roles established in Polaris. Make sure you’re not changing the semantic meaning of the colors. 

For example, if your brand uses red as it’s main color, do not use a red badge to represent your product in the Admin, as this represents critical messaging that implies that an action is impossible, blocked, or has resulted in an error.

Introducing other colors or UI systems will make the Admin crowded and difficult to understand for our merchants. 

You also can’t modify (or take over) any fields or text. For example, if your first party product is branded in yellow, and it changes the price shown on an index page, you can’t add a yellow background behind the price, or change the text color to your brand color. 

The only exception to this rule is Shopify Magic. 

If you’re using app icons, make sure to be mindful of the ‘Mount Royal Rule.’

The Mount Royal Rule 

Similar to the Nascar analogy, we can use the Mount Royal rule when thinking specifically about the logos we use in the Admin.

The Mount Royal rule is set out to protect the picturesque beauty of the Montreal Skyline. This rule forbids any building from exceeding the height of Mount Royal. 

We’ll want to think about logos in the Admin similarly. Shopify is our main product. It should be the main focus of everything we do or express. Ensuring that no additional logo in the Admin is bigger than the Shopify Logo ensures that we are protecting our branding equity, and reminding the user what’s at the forefront of our ‘skyline’– Shopify. 

Logos are designed to attract attention. Make sure that adding logos to the page doesn’t make your design fail thesquint testof what’s most important on the page.

Welcome to a centralized database born out of a Hack-Days project and a need for a compilation of all-things-culture. Think wellness initiatives, favorite merchants, ideas for homesites. And much more!

How to use the Culture Database:

Scroll through the database to view the culture resources, descriptions, costs and location (either digital or IRL) for the resources.

Looking for something specific? 

You can filter the results by Category by clicking on the ‘Filter’ tab on the top of the page.

Note, when viewing categories consider looking at other similar categories to broaden your search e.g. you may find activities for your next homesite in "icebreakers", not just in "homesite activity". We tried to categorize activities into where they fit best, but in some cases there's overlap. 

Contributing to the Culture Database: Did we miss something? Did you just find an awesome culture initiative and want to shout it from the rooftop? Let us know! To contribute to the database, please fill out this form.

* Activities found in the database are not meant as approved recommendations. They are a collection of activities pulled from different sources. If you try an activity and it didn't work out well please send feedback directly to your lead.

November 2019

The white walls that were once blank are filled with a six-foot-tall painting of a white silhouette in a black background, mirroring the other wall with a six-foot-tall painting of a black silhouette against a white background, preparing for performance artist Veronica Spiljak’s show “Session One”.

A poster of a tiny fist with text reading The Tiny Fist Gallery is plastered on the outer wall of the cubicle in the mezzanine of Sheridan College’s Annie Smith Arts Centre.

- 

Before the Tiny Fist Gallery opened, students of Sheridan College and University of Toronto Mississauga’s (UTM) joint Art and Art History program had a lack of space to showcase their work in a professional setting.

Inspired as an act of resistance, trying to build against what the school didn’t want to give them— the Tiny Fist was born, says Sarah Pereux, a member of the Tiny Fist Collective. The Tiny Fist is a new artist collective that consists of five artists— Angela Clarkson, Mackenzie Boyd, Nada Hafez, Sabrina Bilic and Pereux; all current students in the Art and Art History joint program at UTM and Sheridan College Trafalgar Campus.

Pereux and Hafez attended an end of the year program advisory meeting for the Art and Art History Program at Sheridan College last year, where they met with outside contemporary arts professionals, professors and program coordinators to review and discuss the program.

The voting members of the committee agreed that there should be an independent gallery space available to students that they would manage themselves and that was more formal than the spaces previously available, adding elements of traditional gallery spaces like openings, exhibition statements and artist talks, says John Armstrong, Program Coordinator of Art and Art History at Sheridan College.

 

“We didn’t have the space for it, but we've been asking for it for a long time. It's wonderful having the Art and Art History program between two institutions, but in some ways, we can fall through the crack,” says Armstrong.

With the permission of John McCartney, the technologist of the Art and Art History Program, Pereux gave up her cubicle space—a space that upper year Art and Art History students are given to create and store their artwork.

With the repurposed space, the Tiny Fist Gallery was constructed. The collective transformed the cubicle into a gallery by adding walls, covering the window on the existing wall, and making it a space to showcase art works of all mediums.

The Art History side of the program is at UTM and the studio practices are at Sheridan College. The atrium of the Annie Smith Arts Centre at Sheridan College has walls for students to showcase their work and there is an end of the year exhibition called Project, but nothing like the Tiny Fist Gallery existed before the collective launched the gallery, explains Armstrong.

 

This is because of the lack of space available at Sheridan College, due to the volume of studio practices offered. There is one gallery at UTM –– the Blackwood Gallery, but there are limitations with this gallery for students, as it is exclusive for established artists and not open for submissions from students, besides for the end of the year graduation shows, says Armstrong.

The Tiny Fist Gallery is “a little bit more organic in the sense that it's tailored more towards finding emerging artists and building artist community instead of catering specific to the public,” says Pereux.

"With the stresses of being an emerging artist comes this feeling of being cut off from the gallery world filled with established artists. Finding opportunities to get into galleries becomes an adversity,” says Jessica Velasco, an artist who showcased her work in The Tiny Fist Gallery in the fall. “The [gallery] is a space [that] breaks the narrative [by] giving young artists the chance to showcase and curate within a space of comfort—art school. It has become a space that is curated by and for emerging artists, allowing for the building of their CVs (curriculum vitae).”

As well as the benefits of building students’ and recent graduates’ credentials on CVs, having a space like the Tiny Fist also promotes networking among students and helps teach the steps needed to have a successful show— something that cannot be done in class, and is easier to learn with hands on experience, says Hafez.

Armstrong explains that an important part of the Art and Art History program is to help students understand how their work might be read. Having a space like the Tiny Fist allows for students to produce introductory panel text for their exhibitions and communicate their artwork in a concise way, says Armstrong.

“Ideally, we would [have a space] like the Tiny Fist always,” says Armstrong.

It is not certain that the gallery will continue after the collective graduates in the summer, says Armstrong. It is dependent on student initiative, as well as the logistics of the space of the cubicle still being available. Pereux says that there have been students who have shown interest in wanting to be involved with running and taking over the gallery space once the collective graduates.

Logistics need to be figured out in terms of the name, the Tiny Fist, says Boyd. The collective would like to keep their name after graduating.

“It’s more of the space that we want to pass on,” says Boyd. “We might have to do some renaming or revamping.”

There is hope from students and faculty that the space continues to operate after the collective graduates, and there is hope from the collective that the collective stays together after they graduate.

“I love these four girls to death and hope to continue working with them and we hope to continue to find other curating opportunities or create our own, like we have with the Tiny Fist,” says Boyd.

Information on submitting to the gallery, as well as upcoming shows can be found on the Tiny Fist’s Instagram (@thetinyfist)

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