Calgary Municipal Land Corporation · Transit-Oriented Communities

We presented an information architecture before any design. The question it answered was how many kinds of page this program actually needs. CMLC's content framework settled it. One portfolio page carries the program, and each community gets a page of its own.

The portfolio page already existed as a district page, so we kept it there and gave it a map of the three sites rather than starting a second home for the same subject. Each community sits under /communities, with a short redirect like calgarymlc.ca/dalhousie for signage, print and QR codes.

Communities are a content type of their own, not loose pages. That is why the address carries the qualifier. The site models districts, projects and partners the same way, and a community pretending to be an ordinary page would have left the structure ambiguous for whoever comes next.

A master plan takes years, and most of that work is invisible to the people living beside the site. Two modules on each community page exist to make it legible. A phase tracker marks where a community stands, from site analysis through pre-approvals, development and completion, so Fish Creek-Lacombe reads as active planning while Anderson reads as early days. Below it, a six-step planning process runs as a carousel, its progress bar doubling as the section divider.

Those steps needed photographs of people doing work rather than renders, so we asked for site visits, boardrooms, sticky notes and engagement sessions. Everything CMLC sent went into Sanity with real file names and alt text, usable anywhere on the site later.

Engagement is the reason these pages exist, and no two sites are at the same point at the same time. Each community page carries an engagement section with its surveys, open houses and portal links, then a reporting-back section that publishes the What We Heard summaries as each phase closes.

All of it switches. Anderson was not in active engagement at launch, so those blocks stayed empty and nothing showed on the page. When engagement opens there, the page is already built for it.

Resonance's identity arrived as a naming structure, a logo and a graphic system. Carrying it into a live site is a question of behaviour more than appearance. How the mark resolves as a page opens, how section themes hold the palette, how a site boundary sits over an aerial photograph. We built a transition that animates the logo on load, and CMLC took it back the other way, using our animation as the reference for their own TOC video series.