365 Days of RED Academy Toronto — Part 3 of 5
The third of a five-part story about 25+ students, 40+ real world projects, and 1 Global Pandemic over 365 days.
If you are just tuning in and want to read part one first click this, or if you want to read part two click this. It will provide some more context as to why I’m telling this story. If you want to skip ahead, feel free to keep reading — you can always catch up later.
Summer Q3
Cohorts were back to back at this time — one per season/term. With some restructuring, we were promised three cohorts a year with some more time off in between each for professional development. Unfortunately, that plan never came into fruition. It was a fun cohort nonetheless and one of RED Toronto’s largest. I met Cass, Taz, Maria, Laura, Francesco and Shees this cohort. Click their names to check them out! They were another group of amazing designers with limitless potential. We had a new classroom and finally some space to move around. I ran a lot more tutorials and introduced a new typography unit to the course. I found that we just didn’t teach enough of it and a lot of students really struggled with the practice of typesetting, so this really seemed to help with that. I also continued adding a lot more front-end development basics into the curriculum which was well received. We even got as far as some basic keyframe animations with CSS. We conquered advanced prototyping with Adobe XD and Figma, and played around quite a bit with Adobe Illustrator.
This summer cohort, we got the opportunity to work with some more amazing community partners. We worked with great local companies like Furious Fur, a Toronto-based faux fur brand launched in 2017 by the mother-daughter duo Philippa and Samantha Madigan. We worked with Vesta Social, an amazing initiative led by Lucrezia Spagnolo, that is changing how sexual assault survivors access justice by providing victims with a multitude access to resources.We even got a chance to improve our own mindfulness by working with U&Me Ritual, whose mission is to restore togetherness, peace and joy in human connection through mindful experiences of interpersonal connection and communication.
We continued to turn simple sketches and user-flows into high fidelity prototypes with Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch to create exceptional concepts and new features for apps like Open Stage, a mobile app to connect local street musicians to their fans, and SaveForward, an app that combines saving with doing good, bit by bit. This cohort we also got to collaborate with several fitness startups in Toronto. We were able to work with ROM Coach, a new iOS and Android application that provides mobility training, as well as Andy Hoang of Aviron Interactive to provide a new conceptual application to pair with their impressive interactive rowing machine. We even had the pleasure of testing the machine out in our classroom!
There were several other noteworthy local businesses that he had the pleasure of working alongside of, including Mortguage, a new digital platform providing a new money saving way to get a mortgage in Canada, and Ayd Cares, a trusted white-label platform for home care agencies and service providers. At RED, we were also thinking of innovative ways to expand our reach, which brought us to working with companies remotely before it became the new norm. For instance, we created interfaces for web applications like EPOCH, an employee engagement platform for companies to increase social impact and cross-functional connections. We also created dashboards for web applications such as Culturelike, an ahead-of-its-time tool meant for distributed teams with common interests and hobbies to share interactions.
Check-in next week to hear part four of five of this story with this link . If you want to go back and catch up, check out part two of five with this link here.
