Maria Centola moved to the UK after graduating from IDEA School of Design in 2016. Her 3-month design internship at Sennep in London became a full-time job. Maria mainly creates user interfaces at Sennep using Sketch, InVision and After Effects including new illustrations for Sennep's mobile game OLO.

Her freelance projects include editorial pieces for Montecristo, street banners for Port Moody, and postcards for the redevelopment of the Canada Post Office in downtown Vancouver.

In June 2020 she will start as a Digital Designer at an agency called SOON_. Check out Maria’s story and podcast!

Third-year IDEA students were put to task, over a 3-class UI design sprint. Students from IDEA Grad 2021, were given the challenge to make financial data analysis motivating and easy to understand for a niche user group! Shown above: CoinHub personal finance app UI design by Haluka Yagi (IDEA Grad 2021). Instructor: Christina Lee Kim Koon (IDEA Grad 2010).

Check out some of our favourites from this UI Design project!

Congratulations to Laura Pummel (IDEA Grad 2019) for gaining RGD Honourable Mention for Concept Development with her branding, advertising, guerrilla installation and website design project Richter Days. Check out her project!

IDEA22 set out to explore the working environment and day-to-day tasks of two Vancouver based digital design businesses.

This group of second-year students is in the process of studying interaction design foundations. This course focuses on: UX storyboards/user empathy, landing page design, motion design, HTML & CSS, and CMS structures.

Check out some photos from the field trip!

Garret Schauteet (IDEA Grad 2015) spent 3 years in Vancouver with the incredibly talented team at 123w while collaborating with partner agencies and a vast amount of freelancers from all over the world.

From there, he moved to BASIC® and spent 2018 embedded at Google in San Francisco, where he helped elevate Made by Google’s digital retail and product experiences on a global scale.

He’s recently transferred to BASIC®’s HQ in San Diego, where he continues to work on new Google initiatives and other global brands like Coach and Airbnb. Catch up on Garret!

"So many promo packages!" writes Emily Rose regarding her practicum at Production Road working under the owner of Chairman Ting Industries Inc., Carson Ting. Emily never thought she’d be part of an email chain with over 100 emails, working on a project from all different countries and different timezones!

Her practicum included designing icons to be animated, an album cover, learning different ways to apply her illustrations and even transferring domain names for a website client.

Check out Emily's practicum story!

As a third year interactive design student Evelyn Chua was challenged to redesign a popular Vancouver food blog - in only four weeks. Her case study was very successful and caught the eye of a Medium publisher & popular UX/UI website Prototypr. 

Many claps to you, Evelyn!

Shanene Lau’s practicum last year turned into an internship and then a job as a Junior Designer. In this Grad Spotlight, Shanene shares her advice to art school students regarding “paralyzing fears”, making decisions and concludes “Remember that you already have everything you need, in here *points to heart*”. Catch up with Shanene!

Congratulations to IDEA20 students Brynn Staples, Emily Huynh, and Courtney Lamb for their winning interactive design, Muse app (shown above) by the Jim Rimmer Community Scholarship for Design Awards.

Congrats also to our IDEA19 finalists: Charmaine Cheng, Emily Rose, and Jominca Engelbrecht. Well done!

The students in IDES 237 Digital Illustration were asked to create a short looping animated gif that reflected their experience as graphic design students. Nicole Shewchuk's 404 Error animated gif is shown above. Check out some of our favourites!

Graduating in 2009 after the recession gave Darcy Clelland no choice but to pursue freelancing. Now loving life on Vancouver Island, he works for a new company that is making apps in the farming industry but he still gets excited when he sees the records, shirts, hats and general merch that he makes for his friends bands. Read his story.

Canada faces challenges in meeting the expanding demand for skilled digital talent. Graphic designers now need to be familiar with web layouts or social media and these hybrids are in demand. Photo: IDEA School of Design student field trip to NGX interactive in Vancouver!

Congratulations to Lilian Leung for winning a D&AD New Blood Award!

We are pleased to announce that IDEA students were hugely successful in this year's GDC National Scholarship Awards! Many congratulations go to Grad 2015 students Michelle Lim, Wes Browne, Lillian Leung and Jocelyn Wong.