Portfolio Review Night 2020

An annual event bringing creative students and professionals together to talk about how to kick-start careers.

The Event

I've been running Portfolio Review Night every year since 2015. Bringing experienced professionals and students or recent grads together is a powerful thing, and I've seen a lot of great relationships start at these events, to say nothing of all the wisdom shared.

2020 brought a brand new challenge in that this couldn't happen in person any more. My heart went out to students graduating in the spring, knowing that starting a new career is daunting and difficult in the best of times, and it must've felt completely overwhelming in the midst of a pandemic. I decided that PRN had to continue to help these people - but of course, it'd have to be entirely online.

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2020 Mark

Because this year was going to be so different from usual, I decided to create a new mark. The original logo references print portfolios with a book motif (read about it here) and because this year's event was to be online I wanted to move away from the print reference.

Very loosely, this mark represents the intersection of two screens, with a person looking at the screen on either end. The yellow and purple screen intersect to create an orange-brown, representing where people come together online.

This established my colour palette for all the promotional graphics and ads for this year, and I used the concept of the intersection of shapes and colours in a few other icons too.

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Design 2020

I created a cheeky campaign to promote the event that made light of us all being relegated to Zoom. Being upbeat and positive was important, so students still felt like they could take the first steps of their career and that the industry was here to help them, and I wanted my reviewers to know how important their help was too.

Since this year's event was entirely online, I referenced computer windows in the promotional graphics. While a lot of organizations were also making similar computer or internet visual references at the time, I felt it was appropriate since it helped make plain the changes this year, and avoid any confusion on if this were still in person in some capacity.

I established a typographic rule, using the pixelated font Mondwest for the part of the copy that referenced doing something online, and the sans-serif Brendan for everything else.

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Ads

I created social media ads to run on IG Stories and animated the graphics I created so far. I went with this "window stacking" animation, and an "alert" with the event's 2020 mark at the top - very much referencing 1990's/2000's Microsoft Windows UI.

Reviewers were also encouraged to share graphics announcing they'd be "at" the event and looking at portfolios, and reinforce the community feel.

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Work →→→

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Branding & Identity
Art Direction
Web Design
Editorial Design
Illustration
Infographics
On-set direction
HTML & CSS

About →→→

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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.

Contact →→→

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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.

LinkedIn →→→

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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