You’re invited to

The Intermission: Grad Show

When

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Industry Reception

4:30pm—7pm

Doors Open

7pm—11pm

Where

The Liberty Grand

25 British Columbia Rd, Toronto

The Intermission is the 2016 York/Sheridan Program in Design’s annual showcase of the best work produced by its graduating class. It is a night for the industry to connect with emerging designers and explore their works, and for students to celebrate their past four years of hard work with you!

Getting to the Show

Getting to the Show

TTC
29 Dufferin → Saskatchewan Rd
504 King → Dufferin St
509 Harbourfront → Manitoba Dr
GO
Lakeshore West → Exhibition
Get directions on Google Maps

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the show free?

Yes, absolutely. However, we do help fund the event through sponsorships. If you’re interested in supporting this or future years, get in touch.

What can I expect to see and do at the show?

The show is an opportunity to browse the work and meet in-person with grads from one of Canada’s top design programs.

Will there be drinks?

Yes, we’ll have a cash bar available throughout the night.

What is the 'Industry Reception' portion of the show?

We dedicate a part of the night exclusively to people working in the design and creative industries. All students will be there to answer any questions about their work and experience. No ticket or registration is required.

I'll be at FITC on April 19th. Can I still come?

Definitely! The FITC schedule ends at 6pm on April 19th. We’re open until 11pm, so there’s lots of time if you’d like to swing by in the evening.

Where can I park my car?

There is a parking area located beside the Liberty Grand that will be available.

Come Meet the Cast!

Let us know if you're coming on Facebook and add the event to your calendar. We hope to see you there!

Grad Show Liberty Grand, TorontoApril 19
View Event Details
View Full Site
View Event Details
Menu
View Full Site
Web Design
Messence

Preliminary Research

Messence started off as an exploration of the aesthetics and ecology of Toronto’s water infrastructure. The first aspect of this was documenting the aesthetics of water infrastructure around the York University campus. Based on this exploration, I created a booklet documenting these “unseen” functional aesthetics, which would later influence the look and feel of the Messence brand.



Final Research


Following the photo documentation aspect, I started to focus on cartographic representations of Toronto’s water infrastructure, and issues affecting it. I discovered a dataset in the city of Toronto’s Open Data Portal showing the distribution of water main breaks throughout the city. Intrigued, I starting researching the topic further, and discovered that the issue had a number of factors that contributed to it. After learning how to visualise these data sets with GIS mapping software, I created an infographical poster arranged around the different layers of the issue.




It was around this time that I came across Michael Batty’s The New Science of Cities, which aims to create a scientific language for understanding the growth of cities and their infrastructures. Batty presents a concept for understanding spatial issues that consists of 4 elements: Actors, Policies, Problems, and Factors. By understanding how these elements of a given social issues interrelate, he suggests we can model the solutions to these problems.

Defining the Project

What is the problem I can address?

Lack of communication and understanding about the complex issues that affect societies


Who are the potential users?


Leaders, politicians, and activists with social, political, and economic power


How can the users meet the problem?


Model, share, and follow issues that are of concern to these agents

Design

Wireframing

This involved laying out the prefered process that I wanted the user to follow, specifically for the modelling interface and the registration process. I drew inspiration from multilevel flow diagrams, a concept in engineering that I had come across in my earlier research.




Mockup


My moodboards generally involved me collecting things off of pinterest and behance that cot my eye in terms of layout, fonts, and colour. Mainly, this was to establish a feel for the aesthetics of the project, keeping in mind the photographic research done at the beginning.




Prototyping


After mocking up the visual style of the app, I started prototyping some of the key interactions that the user would undertake in Framer.js. However, I quickly realized that, given the approaching deadline at this point, it would be far more advantagious to just start developing the site.

Development

The development process was an opportunity for me to really explore javascript more fully, and to practice working with multiple libraries. For the modelling interface, integrating vis.js, which I used for the network models, with the info panels was a major challenge that I was able to overcome. On the dashboard page, getting the news feed to change depending on the selected model was a sizeable achievement. Finally, I learned how to use angular.js with the registration process interest select page, which let me keep my code clean.