Ben Snyder
Storyboard showing Activa Canvas templates and storefronts

Activa Canvas & Commerce

Forging reusable web-to-print and ecommerce frameworks that launched dozens of late-2000s businesses.

Design & engineering | 2006–2009

My first internship during college was at a company called Active Media Architects (AMA) where I was part of a team of 2 designers (who also coded). AMA had 2 main products: an e-commerce platform and a Web-to-Print framework called Activa Canvas.

Most of this work has been lost to time, however, through the magic of modern digital archeology, I was able to uncover some of the multiple dozens of businesses we launched.

Activa Canvas

Activa Canvas was a Flash-based technology that could be rolled out to various use cases for “web-to-print” (think about all those t-shirt and sticker designers on the web today). Our biggest account was Kimberly Clark where we delivered a website that allowed customers to design custom tissue boxes.

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Activa Commerce

AMA was founded as a digital agency and we quickly turned the first ecommerce engagement into a reusable framework. Activa Commerce was responsible for launching likely dozens of early 2010s online businesses.

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