Toronto Design Directory
A Shared Solution
The Toronto Design Directory (TDD) is website and community resource I've been running for over a decade. It was intially a simple solution to a common problem: as a new grad in 2011, I didn't know where any of the Toronto agencies and studios were, and neither did my classmates who were all job hunting. After a lot of research and digging around, I built a list of 100 design businesses, and created a website to host the list and share it with other designers. It turned out to be a very needed resource, and word of the TDD spread quickly. This was the beginning of a decade long journey that still continues today.
The visual design
Representing a city like Toronto visually is a challenge: it mostly boils down to cliches that can be applied to almost anywhere (transit, local landmarks, food). While a depiction of the CN Tower is fine and certainly iconic, the community the TDD has built is about more than a building locals rarely interact with.
Ultimately, geography served as inspiration. Toronto's proximity to Lake Ontario is part of its identity, and the rivers that feed the lake (the Don, Humber, and Rouge) create ridges and valleys that shape how we live in the city and a lot of our relationships.
The home page features a simplified illustration of trees along the lakeside (inspired by the Mohawk word Tkaronto, "where there are trees standing in the water"), and the simplified oval shape of the lake is the foundation for the shapes and curves used throughout the site and in other collaterol.
The colour palette speaks of the city too: the purple repesenting the concrete and asphalt and the green representing the parks and ravines throughout ("a city within a park" as they say), with the occasional touch of blue to bring us back to the water.
I shared this behind the scenes video on the website redesign to Instagram shortly after launch.
The Directory
The directory is a list of businesses who offer graphic design or related services. The criteria I used to sort this list was boiled down to two things: founded in Canada, and "type of work", which was broken down into advertising, brand design, digital design, experiential design, and print design.
I build the website using Webflow myself, and used Zapier automations to run some updates. Users often submit to this site, with updates to the Directory to additions to the Community Event Calendar, so I developed a back-end system to make that work either completely automated or very little manual work for myself.
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Branding & Identity
Art Direction
Web Design
Editorial Design
Illustration
Infographics
On-set direction
HTML & CSS
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Winner of Silver Davey Award (website: sustainability) for Ecology & Society, 2023
Winner of Silver Davey Award (website: science) for Ecology & Society, 2023
Familiar with Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Wordpress, Webflow, and AODA (accessibility) requirements for print and web.
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Bachelor of Design in Graphic Design
OCAD University, 2011.
Margot holds dual citizenship in both Canada and the United Kingdom and is legally eligible for work in both countries. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
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2011 - Present:
Senior Designer, Square
Senior Designer, Office/Bureau
Senior Art Director, H+K Strategies
Instructor, Toronto Film School
Art Director, Publicis
Art Director, Juniper Park\TBWA
Designer, Critical Mass
Designer, Indigo Books & Music
Lead Designer, Blue Ant Media
Designer, WIND Mobile