Once a year, design professionals in Montreal meet with suppliers following a scripted tour that they can personalize on their mobile devices. This is a new way of drumming up business.

Since 2014, Index-Design, a distribution platform created by designers in the design and architecture sector, has been holding its Circuit Index-Design tour in September. This day-long event, dedicated to exploring design, features activities and encounters that bring together designers, architects, and design fans.

To promote the event, Index-Design called on the TP1 agency to define the tour’s visual identity and web platform allowing visitors to explore the venues on the tour and to prepare a “design itinerary” across Montreal.

This event for design professionals showcases designers’ suppliers. In 2015, during the second edition of Circuit Index-Design, they were invited to explore Ahuntsic and the Mile End, two neighbourhoods undergoing rapid transformation, and where many suppliers are established.

Participants in the event, including, for example, Ciot, Sistemalux, Lambert & Fils, and Jamais Assez, enjoyed the opportunity to tour the premises of participating companies as well as special presentations and workshops.

TP1 created all the products needed for the tour, even including the posters the various used to display their participation in this day-long open-house event.

“We organized creative workshops in-house and carried out research,” explains Patrick Williams, creative director at TP1. “Then we created a mood board, that is, a collage of words and images, and we went to the client’s offices to make a presentation.”

The agency team always works very closely with its clients; accordingly, it met with Index-Design at least a dozen times.

“Since 2014 marked their first ever edition of this open-house event, we provided constant support as they built up their program,” adds Patrick Williams.

Thanks to the site, participants were able to create their personal itinerary and see the locations of interest to them. They had to fill in a form indicating whether they were professionals or designers, wanted to see this or that material or were interested in one neighbourhood in particular, and so on.

To create the event’s visual identity, TP1 drew inspiration from the itinerary and developed a dotted-line design. Whenever the agency develops a project associated some aspect of culture, as in the case of Circuit Index-Design, it devotes more time to research and produces more in the way of deliverables.