The Kootenay Slate

The idea arrived as a cold email. A local insurance broker who liked The Kootenay List wrote to say the region needed the same thing for events: twenty sites, no frontrunner, and Facebook quietly charging hosts to be seen. He was right on all three counts. The research that followed mapped 63 local event surfaces across both Kootenays and found nothing region-wide, freshness stamped nowhere, and structured feeds sitting unused on municipal and venue calendars.

The hard problems were named before a line was written. A business listing is true for a year. An event is true for a night, so freshness is the whole product. And the data is messy: the same show posted five ways, dates in twenty formats, prices left blank. The rules came first. Extract, never infer. Every field traces to its source. Nothing is scraped that forbids it, and the design does not depend on Facebook at all.

The name came out of a ritual, not a brainstorm. Twenty-seven sites mapped, the words the region had already used up (Calendar, Live, Vibe, the tourism formula) refused, three names shortlisted with the domains checked. The Slate won because the metaphor carries the product's hardest truth: a slate is wiped and rewritten every day. It also sits beside The Kootenay List as one publisher's two properties.

The design was chosen from plates, not argued from a concept. Five directions were generated and put in front of me as whole worlds with tested palettes. The chalkboard I had started from lost to the poster wall, and the poster wall was retuned for all ages, kids and adults both. Then the whole site became a risograph print of the Kootenays in four inks, with 28 town skylines drawn from their real landmarks and a map rebuilt on real geography after the first draft invented the shape of the region. Maps are drawn on references now, and that rule is written down.

Coverage turned out to be a conversation, not an engineering problem. Ten feeds normalised into 356 real things, and a Friday night in Nelson from feeds alone was three listings. So the Slate is curated: a board earns its place by publishing real events on its own page, sources are hunted across a thousand hosts, and the towns and venues that do not publish get a phone call rather than a scraper.

The gates ran the way they run on every build. Zero accessibility findings from the automated sweep and a contrast gate that refuses a green with no nodes counted (a lesson the Slate taught, after the tool dropped a rule silently). CLS at zero. A security pass on the live domain with the headers served as written. A residents' court of ten scored the walk-throughs until the blocks were closed, and the phone menu was redrawn as a wall of doors when the first version confused people.

The product is honest about what it does not know. If a source does not state who an event is for or what it costs, the poster stays quiet rather than guessing. Boards that go stale come off. Anyone who wants a listing gone says so and it goes. The board page credits every source. That restraint is why a parent, a venue, or a town can trust a wall assembled from other people's calendars.

The Slate is also the studio's proof of a second kind. A data product can be built, gated, launched, and run by one hand, on the same honesty rules as the List, then handed to a daily operator with written briefs for every source scan. If your business lives on people finding out what is on, when, and for whom, this is the standard.