We had to figure out what to actually show. Our main space is still in the basement of Brent’s house, where it’s been for years. Since the pandemic, the way we’ve used that space has changed. The team works remotely most of the time and we come together about once a week at Brent’s. We converted the space that used to have a bunch of desks, to a lounge area. It’s a great place to hang out and collaborate. We concentrated our tour there, showing people what it’s like when we DO work in person.
Since we do the remote thing too, we wanted to share some of our at-home set-ups. Ok, but how? was the big question. This was tricky. Everyone’s work spaces are different, and it’s not like we have our own production crew who could film it. So what should we do? Is there a voice over? Or footage with music? What would people even want to know about this aspect of how we work? Ultimately we decided to make it easy. Everyone filmed selfie-style with their phones. This is a personal space after all, so this style of footage made a lot of sense! Each of us shared our desks, and a favourite part of our workspace.
While preparing to film our studio tour, we thought about how the office has evolved. The funny thing is—Fusion has been “underground” for many of our 28 years! The first office was in Norm’s (original co-founder with Brent) parent’s basement. Even our “grown up” office downtown in Liberty Village was technically in the basement!
In 2008, we realized our Liberty Village office just didn’t make sense anymore, so we packed it up and set up in—you guessed it—another basement. This time in Brent’s first home in Markham.
We worried that clients would think our basement office wasn’t “professional”, but soon realized that they really didn’t notice or care WHERE or WHAT our office was. We kept producing awesome work, and were great to work with, so the office didn’t matter. As long as it was a great space to work from, it worked for our team.
Since the office was set up in a portion of Brent’s home, when he moved, the office moved—to another basement in Markham. This was great, as our team was growing. We used the larger basement space to set up a “real” office space, with a bunch of workstations and a conference table.
We know that as the world, team and our business evolve so will our spaces and we cant wait to see where it all takes us next—hopefully somewhere with windows.
Check out our segment from the RGD Studio Crawl and see our space(s)! You can also watch Brent chat about working in Graphic Design in the GTA.
