Category Archives: Guest Speakers

Digital Design Assembly Draws Tangible Creative Director

avatar Amber Bezahler
Next-Gen CMO / Former Digital Design HOD
September 17, 2010


This week, Digital Design held a program-wide assembly that saw two current students, one grad, and a design industry heavyweight present projects that all reflected a ‘tactile’ theme.

Student Karen Poon kicked things off with a typography project (featured left) that involved laser-cutting Caslon Pro font letters from a thin wood panel, and using those letters to spell out the main parts of a story in evocative photographic images. Karen has documented it all in a mini case study on her blog.

Kashiya Taylor then displayed her work-in-progress motion design piece. She gave the audience a look at the amount of coding involved with interactive media, explaining that her goal is to create an interactive music video that will relieve stressed out viewers/users.

A recent grad who just took part in Digital Design’s Appetizers showcase, Kelsey Armour talked in detail about the highs, lows, and learning outcomes of designing and developing an interactive reading experience for the Entertainment Business Management-led initiative, Project Space Squid.

Rounding out the evening, the Creative Director of Tangible Interaction Design Alex Beim returned to the Digital Design Assembly stage. Three years ago, he had wowed the audience with “Zygotes” — giant colour-changing balls of light, recently displayed at the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Games earlier this year.

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Suplot Partner Visits VFS Digital Design

Digital Design Branding Instructor Maria Kennedy remembers first hiring Matthew Clark over a dozen years ago; he was fresh out of school, keen, and new to the design industry.

Clark has since risen to become a Partner at Subplot Design, an award-winning Vancouver-based studio that counts among its clients the Vancouver Aquarium, Okanagan Spring Brewery, Vancouver Police Department, and Caffè Artigiano.

Subplot’s Story

After sitting in and offering feedback on student branding project presentations, Clark spoke about Subplot as a kind of anti-agency agency — a four-person operation that primarily caters to more entrepreneurial clients, or those who haven’t been satisfied with the processes of larger companies.

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Digital Kitchen Drops By

Digital Kitchen: Wired Science Digital Kitchen, one of the top production design firms in the world – with studios in Seattle, Chicago, New York, and L.A. – paid a visit to VFS last Friday to speak with Digital Design students, conduct interviews, and tour the school.

Naturally, when you have DK in the house, you want a little show-’n'-tell, and Creative Director Matt Mulder and Creative Lead Brad Abrahams didn’t disappoint. They presented three case studies out of the Seattle studio – the opening sequence for the TNT miniseries The Company, a promo for Wired Science on PBS, and the hilarious Microsoft Recruiting viral video MindQuest.

The pair talked at length about these projects, delving into the exhaustive and exhausting process on The Company (Matt: “You want a rocket? Here’s 8 rockets”) and the hectic Wired Science shoot (Brad: “You never want to find yourself in a position where you’re on a greenscreen stage, someone says, ‘What’s next?’ and you have no idea”).

Digital Kitchen: The Company The MindQuest project offered a couple of simple lessons to any designer. First, it was put together on a shoestring, and even for a company like DK – who have won Emmys, and got lots of acclaim for the title sequence for Dexter – those jobs are worthwhile. Brad: “We take on [low- or no-budget jobs] occasionally just to keep us sane.”

Digital Kitchen: MindQuest During the Q&A, Matt, who’s one of the professionals on the Digital Design Advisory Board at VFS, said that there’s no shortage of opportunities out there for designers – “Everybody’s always looking for somebody” – but stressed the importance of being well-rounded and knowing more than just software. “Did they set out to communicate something and communicate it, or did After Effects take over?”

Exploring Design

seb-mark-indy.jpg A little more than a week ago, Toronto’s Metro Convention Centre was packed with 5,000 high school students — all gathered for Explore Design, an expo to help young people explore the possibility of a career in the design world.

Digital Design Head of Department Sebastien de Castell and graduate Mark Miller gave the Keynote Address, speaking to a rapt audience of teens.

Mark, on thehappycorp blog, said: “We chose to use our combined experience to give the students five areas of focus, things they could do that day walking out of the presentation, to help them decide if they should continue pursuing design.”

mark-miller2.jpg Sebastien shared his thoughts on the approach: “What we wanted to bring to the audience were concepts and stories that could help them bridge the gap between people’s preconceptions of design and the strange and wonderful reality of being a designer.”

For more on what that means, here’s a video of Sebastien at the event, discussing good design.

If you’re wondering where you know Mark from, we wrote about him when he graduated from Digital Design, and when his blog won awards at South by Southwest and Flash in the Can. Yeah, he’s that Mark Miller.

Joshua Davis Visits VFS

Joshua Davis There’s never a boring day at VFS. Case in point: This week the school had one of the world’s most audacious and innovative web designers over for a visit. Ever since the launch of his seminal website Praystation and its even more experimental offshoot Once-Upon-A-Forest, Joshua Davis has been considered a true artist in the world of Flash-based graphic design. Joshua’s work incorporates chaos theory, interactivity, and randomized content to create stunning, organic imagery generated by Flash Actionscript at runtime. In other words, each time the code is executed in Flash, Joshua makes a totally unique image.

Buzzing on his own incredible creative energy (plus at least two cans of Red Bull in the space of an hour), Joshua took Digital Design students and guests through a step-by-step Flash presentation that laid out his entire creative process from early code experiments to final results for clients like BMW and Adobe, as well as contemporary art exhibitions across the globe. Many examples of his process can be found at his workshop page, and it’s all open source so you can figure out for yourself how he’s done it. Joshua’s unflinching honesty, unsoaped vocabulary, DIY ethic, and willingness to answer any and all questions made his visit to VFS a unique opportunity to look into the mind of a true master.