365 Days of RED Academy Toronto — Part 1 of 5

The first of a five part story about 25+ students, 40+ real world projects, and 1 Global Pandemic over 365 days.

Let’s cut to the chase: RED Academy took a turn for the worse. They laid us all off and closed, partly due to Covid-19, but mostly of RED’s own accord.

They let down a lot of students and a lot of alumni, but most importantly a lot of good people, friends, contractors and employees. Despite the hardships that RED went through, this post is not about that.

This story is about my personal account working with 25+ students, on 40+ real world projects over 365 days in what was RED Academy’s Full-Time UI & Communication Design Program. So dear reader: I am probably not writing this for you, but I am writing this for us. To the many students of RED Academy that I have worked with over the past year, I hope you can read this and know your work is not forgotten. It wasn’t exactly easy to track and write this all down, so please let me know if I'm missing anyone or anything. This story starts on a cold winter day when I walked into RED Academy Toronto excited to be teaching again.

The entrance of RED Academy Toronto. RED Academy had three campuses, Vancouver, Toronto, London and a short-lived partnership with the University of Alberta.

Winter Q1

I joined RED about 10 weeks in and the students I met, Sebastian, Veronica and Paul, were already working away on several web capstone projects. Click their names to check out their work. At RED, our students got to work on 3 real-world projects. Coined the “Community Partnership program” — one would apply to the program for student work, we would read their proposal, make a short list of candidates, and invite them in for a kick-off. It was a full-service design opportunity. We’d take their idea from napkin sketch to keynote presentation.

An average day in RED Academy Toronto’s largest classroom.

There was endless research, brainstorming, designing, testing, more testing, and of course iteration after iteration of lo, mid, and hi-fidelity designs. We worked in an agile methodology and met daily to actively tend to our Kanban boards. We used Trello to speed up the process and Teamwork to organize deadlines. We relied on Google Calendar for scheduling milestones and big meetings. We hosted clients on-site at RED and mostly used Keynote, Google Slides, Powerpoint and Prezi to create beautiful presentations that often felt like episodes of Dragons Den or Shark Tank. We even conducted a few remote presentations over Zoom, before it was cool and before it was necessary.

First iterations of the Lo-Fidelity sketches for the ACMP Toronto website redesign by Zakary Herbert and Veronica Simonyi.

Although I joined well into the first cohort of the year, we still got the chance to work with a variety of interesting community partners. This cohort, RED Academy partnered with TLAC Toronto Printing & Publishing, a local top rated company specializing in commercial print services. We also worked on a very unique e-commerce opportunity with Hédonist, a curated platform of French made products from décor to apparel. We even helped the Toronto chapter of ACMP, a national Association of Change Management Professionals, to establish a new digital presence with a research-backed, ground-up redesign of their website.

Homepage Concept for Hédonist by Sebastian Mendez and Ali Angco. Read more here and here.

Continue this story next week for part two of five, to continue reading part two click this link.