My first career path was in journalism, where I learned to be a print designer. I also dabbled in film, working for a few years as an editor, producer, and grip. Here is a selection of the pieces that I still enjoy years later.
Ubyssey’s Active Business Cards
The idea with these business cards was to create a fun interactive moment. Each card could be turned into something that represented the editor’s department: a folder paper football kicker for sports, a spray paint stencil and paper airplane for culture (a.k.a. arts), a whistle to blow for news, a lightbulb for opinions (a.k.a. ideas), and a business card holder for the editor-in-chief (a.k.a. coordinating editor).
At the time, we almost never had full colour printing, so a lot of our designs had to make clever use of spot colours (i.e., whatever an advertiser paid for). We played a lot with the physicality of the paper. My old Ubyssey portfolio is available here (and includes some items from JHR’s 2009 Speak Magazine).
CiTR Circuit Design System
After the Ubyssey, I worked as a designer for the campus radio station, CiTR. I had to come up with a brand identity and make a lot of station materials, so I created a rounded circuit-like system that could be used for infographics or basic signage.
One year, for our call-in donation drive (fundrive), I used this circuit design system to create a workflow of pitches that radio hosts could use. It was printed large and put in the studio so they could see them while they were on the air:
CiTR Events
I did a lot of the advertising, events, and swag design at CiTR for a couple of years. Fundrive always included a lot of pamphlets, buttons and other informational materials with a new theme for every year:
For a while, I was also doing hand-drawn posters for our events. Nardwuar really liked having a frenetic poster:
CWILL at Beaty Biodiversity Museum
For a summer, I was the design assistant at the Beaty. Most of my work went towards making an exhibiton for CWILL, children’s writers and illustrators in BC. We had giant 10ft posters that took up huge sections of the wall:
Here are a few photos to show the scale:
For that exhibition, I also had to create a design system for 70+ didactics that we printed and put on the walls next to illustrations and specimens from the museum collection:
We also had a few other posters in our gift shop:
This was a major project where I ended up designing most of the materials. Seeing them printed large was very fun! Building on this, we did a few more large posters for the rest of the museum in a different style:
And over 10 years later, I’m back at the museum doing informatics.
Publication Design
Some of my favourite projects were publications, since there are so many moving parts. It is a bit like working on a film, where you have to coordinate actions with different departments and stakeholders. Here’s an earlier publication, the graduation catalogue for my visual arts degree. I managed to convince them to pay for a die-cut so that the yellow second page yolk showed through. Also, if you spread the pages, you could read a secret message long the edge.
I also designed the Syrup Trap’s Print Edition, a one-off magazine that we got printed inside another magazine (front cover illustration by Zoe Si, design mine):
Continuing to work with the Syrup Trap’s editor-in-chief, the wonderful Nick Zarzycki, I then designed Jesse Brown’s Canadaland Guide to Canada (cover illustration by Dan Buller, other illustrations by Andrew Barr and Deshi Deng, design mine):
Film work
I worked in film with the also wonderful Goh Iromoto. Our first film project was Town at the End of the Road, which I edited.
Here are some fun wood-based motion graphics from the film:
A lot of the films we worked on don’t have good online examples, but if you check out the Vimeo library, you’ll see some shorts I worked on with Rico Moran, and David Marino.
One nice film project was simply a long video of defocused lights in the rain:
This was displayed large-scale during a show in the AMS Art Gallery.