Jun 01, 2022

Connecting Studio Culture & Design Quality by Jessica Leong & Tristan Marantos

Tristan Marantos, Jessica Leong, and Frontier

About this video

Description

Jessica and Tristan speak about Frontier's purposeful approach to building and nurturing company culture and how we see that translated in the firm's work. They will share their experiences growing up with the office and how, now as Senior Design Leads, they attract, hire, onboard and mentor new talent within Frontier's culture framework. From encouraging young talent to contribute to strategy and design ideation and team collaboration, to how they iterate on work and manage clients through the design process, Jess and Tristan will share insights that demonstrate how culture is connected to design quality and the work that Frontier does.

About Jessica Leong
Jessica is a Senior Design Lead at Frontier and a detail-oriented designer who helps motivate and lead the design team to craft thoughtful and engaging experiences for clients big and small. She has taught graphic design at OCAD University and was previously a Creative-Professional-in-Residence there. Jessica was lead designer at Design Exchange, where she was responsible for creating and visualizing exhibitions and museum communications. She has also worked on teams at ERA Architects, Indigo Books and Bruce Mau Design.

About Tristan Marantos
Tristan is a Senior Design Lead at Frontier who helps organizations figure out who they are and where they want to go, translating research into strategic ideas and visual expressions. He has taught Graphic Design at OCAD University and was previously a designer at Bruce Mau Design. Tristan is a graduate of OCAD University, where he was awarded the Medal for Graphic Design, and has exhibited work at Gallery50 and East Room in Toronto.

Tristan Marantos

Frontier

I'm the creative director at Frontier, a design and strategy studio in Toronto, and have worked in design since 2014. At Frontier, I work closely with our design team to guide our work, elevate the things that we're most excited about, and ensure we're offering something to our clients that pushes them towards someplace new. I am also the creative lead of Live Magazine, a studio-run traveling editorial project, and support our weekly digital publication, Frontier Magazine, with art direction whenever needed (which is to say, almost never, because the people who run it are awesome). In addition to directing much of our creative output, I lead our hiring process, and as such, have a fair amount of experience reviewing portfolios and interviewing designers. While our studio does a variety of things, I'm most proficient with visual identity and strategy work. I really enjoy design research, getting to learn about a new client, and helping them tie together the interesting threads that make them who they are. Our studio's philosophy is based on the idea that stories are the most foundational tool for how humans understand the world, and so I guess my approach to design builds heavily on that belief. Aside from this, I'm experienced with web design, motion design, and wayfinding work, which we also produce at our studio. Outside of Frontier, I have taught graphic design at OCAD U, and prior, I worked at Bruce Mau Design. In another life, I worked as a production manager for a live concert promoter for eight years.

Jessica Leong

Frontier

We design big stories. Big stories are brave, imaginative, and guiding. They help you stand out, discover new creative territory, and generate meaningful action.

Frontier is a design office that believes in the expansive potential of storytelling to help people get somewhere new. We design the strategies, brand identities, and experiences that make big stories real.

For a decade, people have come to us because we’re experts at drawing together diverse perspectives into something unified and resonant. Generating ideas, building consensus, setting direction: we accelerate this work by listening closely and bringing to bear new tools and methods of understanding and shaping what’s next. We draw from diverse realms—like contemporary art, purpose design, playful speculation, and radical technologies—to help organizations and their people understand the edges and make progress that matters.

This pluralistic approach to purposeful branding leads to genuinely inspiring amd strategic stories that we turn into momentum-building brand identities, exhibitions, websites, campaigns, books, and videos.

In addition to design services for partners, our commitment to big stories runs through studio-initiated projects. These include Frontier Magazine, an online publication about new and newly relevant ideas in the arts, technology, and the built environment; Projectory, an experiential learning platform that trains organizations on building future resilience; and Live Magazine, a traveling editorial project.