&friends
Specialists build towers, generalists build bridges. Welcome to the era of bridges.
Their colleagues wanted innovation, on paper at least, and challenged them to spark less conventional projects without scaring everyone. They read a lot, tested dozens of approaches, failed often and made new friends along the way. That became &friends, the strategic co-creation studio I run with Éric Letarte. The studio then needed a website and an identity as sharp and collaborative as the work: clear enough to sell complex services, warm enough to feel human. I built the brand and the site, top to bottom.
Longer than it looks on paper
Consider yourselves warned
- Comfortable with uncertainty. Because we know the methods to navigate it safely.
- Radical collaboration. No one is left behind.
- Boldly realistic. For corporate doublespeak, there's already enough competition.
- No white label. You have to be proud of what you do.
- Break down silos, not people. People first, always.
- There is no tiger. We'll have to tell you the story.
A cast for every mood in the room
Workshops go through every emotion, so the brand got a character for each one. They show up in slides, on sticky notes and on the website. Yes, there's a poo. Some ideas deserve one.
Happy
In love
Surprised
Confused
Sad
Scared
Angry
Done for the day
That idea
Chatty
Sunny
Proud
One icon per service
Same shapes, same palette, same playful geometry: every service and every enterprise design map has its own icon.
Design sprints
Sprint 0
Vision
Launch
Ecosystem
Foresight
Operations
Service blueprint
Planning
Workshops
Conferences
Timeboxing
The enterprise design maps
People map
Venn
Relation map
Milky Way
Universe map
The website
A bilingual site that sells complex services in plain words: what we do, how we work, and case studies that show it. The icons carry the message where words would be too long. Its projects run from Hydro-Québec to the Sépaq, and include the Quorum kiosks of Le Québec, autrement dit, the Musée de la civilisation exhibition that won the Numix 2025 social impact mention. The poo character was not consulted.
Visit andfriends.ca (opens in a new tab)
A shared language for enterprise design
Our workshops run on EDGY, the open enterprise design language from Intersection Group, which I contribute to as a co-author of its evolution, co-speaker and case-study author. It lets leadership, teams and partners look at strategy, culture, operations and experience on the same map, and actually agree on what they're seeing.
We turned it into a game
La Partie Prenante (Boardroom Adventure in English) drops a team into a fictional company and lets them feel, in an hour, what usually takes years to learn the hard way.
Where &friends is today
&friends still works from Montréal and Québec City. Its site now leads with three flagship offers: enterprise design, design sprints and strategic retreats, plus AI and design engineering. It lists nine services and seven training formats, with case studies from Intersection 26 to Carelancer. Its serious game, La Partie Prenante, sold more than 400 copies in its first year. Figures from andfriends.ca.