About Us
the Sign Guy
Brian, a past director of the Sign Association of Canada and the Exhibit Display Association of Canada, has been involved in the signage industry since 1976.
A graduate from Guelph Univeristy in 1981, Brian has managed complex and diversified sign programs for many of Canada's National Retailers and has been personally involved in over 2,000 retail openings. He brings knowledge and experience in the many aspects of successful retail launches. Brian lives with his two daughters in Schomberg and is an active participant in the equine industry. Brian enjoys cooking, downhill skiing, snowmobiling, hiking, skydiving, and lying around reading with a good glass of wine.
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the Computer Guy
Andrew Burke has been developing custom business software since 1995. He has worked as an independent software developer for numerous clients in Canada, from large government departments to non-profits and startups. He was part of the Groupware Practice at Origin Technology in Business in Columbus Ohio between 1997 and 1999, and provided applications and support for a number of large corporate clients. He has built applications with Lotus Notes/Domino, Visual Basic, Java, and PHP - but almost all of his work is now done with Ruby on Rails. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Toronto, with a Master's Degree in English Literature.
Andrew lives in downtown Toronto with his partner Shannon, two cats, several resilient houseplants, four PowerBooks, a ThinkPad, and an old Dell. He also lives online at www.andrewburke.ca.
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an Artist
Carol began her artistic career with a charcoal stick and a “Learn How to Draw” book at around the age of 8. Over the years, the tools have changed but her first love is still visual arts.
An honours graduate in Technical Illustration, she's moved through a wide variety of related art fields. Complex assembly drawings of electronics in the aircraft industry, offset printing, (before desktop publishing and direct to press), a sign “girl” when CorelDraw was just “hatched” then on to Adobe, large format imaging for exhibits, print management for annual reports, and web design. She's done work for clients like Nike, 3M, Nissan and Kia. She's even managed to win awards for her efforts.
Through all of this she's learned to co-ordinate multiple jobs and deadlines that are just crazy, while keeping an eye on the details.
For Carol, it's about people, understanding what they need and her ability to create approachable, functional art.
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A Sign Guy, born and raised in the sign industry, came to know a Computer Guy
in the mid-1990s. The Sign Guy was building Canada's first signage management
organization and enjoyed telling the Computer Guy of how the signage industry had
transformed into a behemoth of little niche industries. The Computer Guy enjoyed
telling the Sign Guy about the huge programs he wrote for large corporations and
how he could make the programs much better, but no one on the implementation
teams really liked to think outside the box. They would pass afternoons on Bloor
Street talking about processes and methodologies and different ways of achieving
more with less.
Early in the next century, the Sign Guy introduced the Computer Guy to an Artist
who knew everything anyone would ever need to know about artwork and how to
communicate effectively with it.
One Sign Guy and one Computer Guy and an Artist... who would have thought?
They would meet for lunches and chatter the afternoon away about how to create the
perfect web application to manage retail signage programes.
A couple of months later GET was born. Call us; we could all go for lunch.