Annika McFarlane (IDEA22) gains RGD Honourable Mentions for Social Good Design and Print Design
September 16, 2019
James Neufeld
Congratulations to Annika McFarlane (IDEA Grad 2022) for gaining the RGD Honourable Mentions for Social Good Design (The Calm Commute) and Print Design (Collectible City Shopping Bags).
The Calm Commute
The Calm Commute is a campaign that promotes healthy tools to deal with anxiety and stress in an accessible way by utilizing transit shelters, on board transit ads and the free time of transit users to teach them easy to use tools to reduce anxiety in their daily routine, starting with their commute. To make a difficult and often intimidating topic more approachable, I created a weekly challenge and three characters to go along with each challenge. I loved getting to create all of the characters for this project. The most tedious part was probably when I decided to add all of the hand lettered elements near the end, and spent a good couple hours pen-tooling each individual letter. I'm sure there was a much more efficient way to do that, but at least I learned some patience.
Annika McFarlane (IDEA Grad 2022)
Collectible City Shopping Bags
For this project I chose to utilize the handle of each bag in the design and turn it into a key attraction for each city. The idea is that each city could create its own bag in the series and act as a collectible for tourists as they travel around the world. The playful design would also encourage tourists to regift or reuse the bags therefore helping to advertise tourism for each city as well. I had a lot of fun working on this project. To create the inky texture I actually painted all of the black elements by hand on tracing paper and then brought them into Illustrator and digitized them. I think it's always nice to add handmade elements when you can and it shakes up your process from only being executed digitally which can be a nice change too.
Annika McFarlane (IDEA Grad 2022)
Many congratulations to all our RGD Award winners and honourable mentions! This year, there were 973 submissions from 462 design students attending 34 post-secondary schools across Canada, so we did exceptionally well!
Carol Aitken, Co-Coordinator of IDEA School of Design
The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) is a non-profit, professional Association that represents over 4,100 design practitioners, including firm owners, freelancers, managers, educators and students.
For all the winners, see rgd.ca .