The Preface
How a Calgary home gets marketed
Real estate that deserves a page.
We design the marketing and we sell the house. The photographs, the written listing, the printed pieces, the sign at the curb and this page all come off one set of drawings.
The licence covers residential and commercial. An investment property or a small commercial building runs the same way.
What is published
The Desk carries more than one hundred posts. There are pages for more than seventy Calgary neighbourhoods and for more than fifty condominium buildings, and none of it is attached to a listing.
A neighbourhood guide runs past 800 words on where the boundaries run, what the housing is made of, how people get downtown, and where to start on a Saturday. Each one carries an Edit, four places to start, or two where a neighbourhood runs to two. We checked every one against the operator before it went up. We wrote sixty-six Calgary neighbourhood guides before anybody on those streets called.
The photographs
The listing set is digital and crisp
The set that goes to the MLS is sharp, straight, evenly lit and complete, every room a buyer expects to see. That is its job and it is built for it.
The marketing runs warmer
Everything around the listing, meaning this site, the social frames, the print and the sign, carries our own imagery. Warm and film-like, with nobody in the frame. One home, two registers.
Somebody has just left
In our own frames a chair sits angled away from the table and the steam is still on the cup. The person missing is the one holding the camera.
Things come out before the shoot
The extension cord, the calendar on the fridge, the bath mat, the shampoo along the tub. The walk-through happens first and you get the list.
The words
Every listing is written. None of it is assembled from the field sheet, and the paragraph gets to be about the back bedroom in the afternoon rather than about the countertops.
The em dash is banned outright, and so is the exclamation point. Headings and titles set in sentence case, which is why nothing here shouts. The middle dot separates a label from its value.
The colour
Four values carry the whole site. Carbon Black, a warm near-black at #1D1D1F, carries all the type. Felt Grey at #F5F5F7 is the page ground, and every reading surface sits on it. White at #FFFFFF is the one raised surface, and a white panel on the grey ground is closed by its fill alone. Black at #000000 is kept for the square stamps. None of the four is a colour.
There is no accent colour and no hover colour. A link sets in Carbon Black with an underline, so nothing here needs a colour to be read. Count the colours on this page. Every one you find is inside a photograph, or on the flag in the header.
The typeface
Inter Display, on every surface, with no second family anywhere in the system. The optical size axis is pinned to 32 so the Display drawing selects at every size, down to the smallest caption.
The tell is the lowercase e. Its terminal sits horizontal. On the text drawing it slants, and a page that renders the slant has loaded the wrong cut and does not ship.
The corner
Every corner on this site is square. No pill, no rounded square, no disc, and no drawn curve of any construction. The radius tokens are still in the stylesheet and every one of them resolves to zero.
We ask one question of every surface here, whether it could be printed on uncoated stock and lose nothing. A drawn corner does not survive the question. Neither does a shadow under a card, nor frosted glass behind a menu.
A page set this way can go to a printer without being redrawn.
Where to start
Tell us about the home. We will read the recent sales around it and come back with a number and the reasoning underneath.
Or read The Desk. It is the whole shelf, and it costs nothing to open.
Ricky Jin
Founder
FOUNDRY COMPANY · Marketing & Design
Real Estate Professionals Inc.