Wealthsimple is a Canadian fintech company that manages $50 Billion in assets.

TLDR is Canada's Largest money newsletter with 4 million subscribers. I helped on the launch team. It helps the company onboard and retain customers and won a webby award .

To show the mindset of this stoic hero we played this 1 minute video.

More on the campaign Here. 

Ben art directed the athletes in this commercial on set as they created lettering for the campaign tagline (#NowOrNever) to be used in the print campaign. At times only 10 minutes with an athlete would be available, so we had to make the best of it. One of the 15-20 final selects was used in the spot directed by Mark Zibert. 

Client: Canadian Olympic Committee 

Agency: Cossette, Toronto (Canada)

Creative Director: Glen Hunt, Yusong Zhang, Dhaval Blatt

Copywriter / Art Director: Dave Laing, Heather Kinoshita

Director: Mark Zibert, Jordan Dashner

Production Company: Sons and Daughters, Descendants TV

The intent of the campaign is clearer here. The COC hopes to raise funds to help train Canada's future olympic competitors. It's a long, tough road. 

"Ben Weeks has Many Loves" was a 2-year project. I researched creative leaders around the world, created an icon for each of them to represent their work, found their contact information, hand-customized 1200 posters for each recipient and mailed them out.

GQ, Hillstone, New York Times Magazine, Rodrigo Corral and Apple contacted me as a result of this mailing. It also garnered blog coverage and awards from D&AD and Communication Arts (No. 392 May/June 2013 pg.71) Over 4 years, my compounding annual rate of return on this investment turned out to be 3X.

The content inspiration was notes and sketches a designer might make to themselves. Embedding self referential elements a designer could appreciate, laugh at or be encouraged by was also a consideration.

(Left: Back Cover. Middle: Spin., Right: Front Cover. Black printed as gloss varnish.)

Photos from RGD Launch Party

Illustration for a children’s book to raise funds for Covid-19 Efforts. This page is “E = Everyone. We’re all in this together.” Art Director Gabriella Rackoff.

Illustration for The Dwell 24; the top new emerging designers of the year. This spread showed some of the things that inspire those designers as selected by the magazine’s editors. Art Director: Penny Blatt

The Mother of Innovation is Collaboration. How Calgary and Edmonton work together to build an innovation corridor.

Wolf Olins SF Creative Director Forest Young spoke at RGD DesignThinkers who asked Ben to illustrate his talk. AD: Tristan Marantos. CD: Paddy Harrington. Agency: Frontier.is

“The understanding of human nature becomes a set of tools to influence people for the better.” —Katy Milkman. Designed by Jenny Hung for Pentagram.

“Chain Reaction: Ivey alumni including Alan Wunsche, MBA ‘91, explain how blockchain is transforming industries, business and society.” The illustration shows a word cloud of related concepts linked together.

Design Firm: Aegis Design

AD: Greg Salmela, Sabrina Xiang

Maisonneuve cover, winter 2019. Art Director: Brian Morgan. Story: Mark Czarnecki, Phage Crusade. “A Canadian scientist once harnessed the power of viruses against bacterial infections. In dire times, a new generation of scientists is fighting to do the same.”

Double Page Spread Illustration for an article on Depression's Upside. Designed by Robert Vargas. 2010

New York Times Magazine, 2010

An article on Performance Enhancement for the Week In Review section. Art Directed by Joon Mo Kang.

Cover illustration for The Business of Creativity issue Summer 2016. Art Directed by Glenn Taylor.

Stanford School of Business Magazine

Art Direction by: Pentagram

Design Firm: The Office of Gilbert Li
Photographer: Chris Thomaidis
Designer: Brian Banton

Design Firm: The Office of Gilbert Li
Photographer: Chris Thomaidis
Designer: Brian Banton

The Right School: Cover illustration elements. Art Directed by Jessica Rose.

Illustration for an article on the interesting things students do when they take a year off school. Art Directed by: Corliss Elizabeth Williams

University of Waterloo Magazine, Spring 2017

Cities of the future. 

Table of Contents

University of Waterloo Magazine, Spring 2017

Living longer, living better.  

"What Scares Google: How the search giant hopes to stay on top." For an article on paradigm shifts in the tech industry. Art Directed by: Jason Treat

Adult children living at home growing roots. Not present. Checking out of life.

For a story about the school's 100 year anniversary. Designed by Erin Steed.

Art Directed by: Chris Lee who taught me how to triangulate colour placement. 

Mortal Hazard feature illustration. Art Directed by Brian Morgan. Designed by: Paul Kim

“How Siemens got its Geist Back”

For an article exploring: "What is a Sophisticated Investor?" Designed by: Patricia Hwang. Featured in TASCHEN’s Illustration Now! 4.

Cover illustration for a feature article exploring designer's personal projects. Design Edge Canada. Art Directed by Michael Hewis.

Shopping Guide Cover lettering. Many stores featured in this issue like to post it at their establishment "Featured in Toronto Life." Always amazing to see your work in use all over the city. Art Directed by Jessica Rose.

Is Getting Your Kids to Eat Healthy Food Even Possible?

Art Director: Todd Albertson

Jackman Humanities Institute Year in Review 2023/24. Theme of Absence. Designer Gilbert Li. Studio: The Office of Gilbert Li. Client: University of Toronto

Brand: PizzaPops (a Pillsbury brand of General Mills) Agency: Cossette. Campaign: Weird Good. Producer: Lindsay Goeldner, Scott Ramsden. Art Director: Greg Leblanc. Designer: Joshua Dorman

Honda Fit Campaign with Grip Limited. Creative Direction by Barry Quinn, Alan Madill. Design Direction by Mark Buchner. Honda sold 24,141 units of the Fit in Canada in it's first 2 years, with an average price of $20,000 making the total estimated value sold $482 million.

Agency: Grip Limited. Creative Director: Barry Quinn, Alan Madill, Stephen Bennett. Design Director: Mark Buchner

Honda Fit: Mall Domination & OOH Campaign

Agency: Grip Limited. CD: Barry Quinn, AD: Mark Buckner, Producer: Liz Crofton

Me being happy to see my work 3 stories tall in the Eaton’s Centre. (One of the biggest malls in Canada in Toronto.)

Xbox360 Contest for Microsoft when the agency was called McLaren McCann. Creative Director: Mike Halminen, Producer: Karyn Marshall, Art Director: Petar Stoilov, Client Side: Cheri Chevalier (Now Microsoft CMO)

Lettering for Pizza Hut. Agency: Grip. Design Director: Pia Nummi. The challenge on this one was making a range of lettering styles which could plausibly have been created by the talent in the TV spots. The artwork was composited into the commercial.

Lettering for Pizza Hut. Agency: Grip. Design Director: Pia Nummi.

Our campaign was trolled by Seth Meyer when he was doing Weekend Update on SNL. 

Wrap around artwork created for special cans for a campaign contest. It was fun working within the brand visual language already established.

Art Director: Matt Howe. Created for an interactive site integrating video of talent appearing to draw into the frame. The artwork was created in advance. We did a green screen shoot where talent gestured a trace of the drawings. In post, masks were used to reveal the artwork to give the impression that talent were drawing features related to the car.

"The price of anything is the 

amount of life you exchange for it."

—Henry David Thoreau" 

Holiday Wrapping Paper. Grey was printed as metallic silver. The other colors were Pantone. Art Direction: Jim Ryce & Gary Beelik. Design: Kristin Steenstra

"ALS takes your arms. Your voice. Your legs. Your life."

Photograph: Phillip Monk. Creative Director: Christina Yu. Agency: Lowe Roche. Client: ALS Societies in Canada. 

Photos and design by TUNG.