by Lesley

With the holiday season fast approaching, we wanted to take the opportunity to thank all of you who have donated generously, participated in our fundraising events, or supported us in any way. Thank you for all you have done to help young adults with cancer in Canada! 

2009 has been a tremendous year and we are proud to report that we were able to offer more support services to young adult survivors than we ever have before. On behalf of the entire team here at Young Adult Cancer Canada, we extend our warmest wishes to you for a very joyous holiday season and a very prosperous new year ahead! 

Watch your inbox for our Holiday fundraising appeal during the festive season. The Holiday Appeal includes a video featuring 36 of our amazing young adult survivor family members as they recall their first holiday season since being diagnosed with cancer. For some, it was more than ten years ago, for others, this will be their first year. Take a moment to think about how different your holiday season would be if it was you.

We appreciate all of the generous support you have given us in 2009. We were so fortunate to have the opportunity to work with so many inspirational young adults, and witness many inspirational moments. We will count on your support as we continue our work to inspire, inform, and support young adults with cancer all across Canada.

Posted on Dec 22, 2009 - 11:21 AM

by Emily

Many thanks are extended to Samantha Phelan, Nick Phelan, and Matthew Fox of the Creative Balance Team for the Nestea Recruit Challenge which has been taking place over the fall semester at a number of universities across Canada. As part of their challenge, Team Creative Balance held a fundraiser at the end of October with all of the proceeds going to Young Adult Cancer Canada.

By all accounts, the evening was a fun-filled success! Held at one of the downtown St. John's hotspots, many came out and had a great evening in support of Young Adult Cancer Canada and raised over $600.

Many thanks to Samantha, Nick and Matthew for approaching us, and to all who attended the festivities and supported YACC in the process! 

Posted on Dec 17, 2009 - 01:26 PM

by Duncan

Until now, Young Adult Cancer Canada has published our annual report as a paper document. We’ve put it on the web, sure, but as a PDF. And, PDFs are great: they allow you to embed fonts, and get the exact layout and context in a digital way but, they aren’t great on the web. They’re slow, and they take some patience.

Given that we’ve got a national focus, and a desire to spend less on trees (and more on programs for our awesome young adults), we figured it sounded like a grand idea to do an annual report website instead of the tabloid printed paper version this year.

Inspired by blogs like Jason Santa Maria’s excellent blog wherin he does true graphic design for each blog post, I figured we could do something similarly striking on the web.

And the reaction has been great. We’ve had a huge response (average time on site is  nine minutes 48 seconds for visitors to the AR in November, and page view counts that are through the roof), but we faced some challenges on the technical side along the way.

First off: I think I let myself think too much in the paradigm of print. I built a website that imitates print in many ways, complete with discrete pages. That metaphor works, but, it’s not quite webby enough.

Secondly: I really underestimated the difficulties of Internet Explorer 6/7 positioning issues. The report looks pretty good on my mac in the latest version of FireFox, but pull it up in Internet Explorer 6, and it’s nowhere near as smooth. Elements misaligned and misplaced.

Thirdly: I didn’t take the time to design a proper grid. And as a result, I think the pages suffer for it. There isn’t that underlying comforting Swiss precision that seems to match so well with the web as a medium.

Fourthly: I committed a cardinal sin by using frames. They really shouldn’t be ever used. At the start, they seemed like a neat way to quickly throw together the concept I had in mind, but, this would work so much better with some AJAX to pull the content from page to page.

But, on the whole, I think we’ve made a big step forward in making our Annual Report more accessible and more comprehensive. And that, is what really matters.

Posted on Dec 02, 2009 - 04:26 PM