Mastercard Innovation Forum:
Forward Together

‍A sophisticated identity system built on the power of connection and momentum.

‍To design a comprehensive and highly conceptual visual identity for the Mastercard Innovation Forum, rooted in the core philosophy that connections bring us to life, together.

The design system ingeniously reimagines the iconic Mastercard circle assets. By exploring unconventional camera angles and extreme perspectives, the classic geometric motifs are transformed into a dynamic representation of forward movement and progress.

The brand’s signature vibrant color gradient operates as both a literal and conceptual spotlight. It is used strategically to pull focus toward relevant topics and acts as an accent to bring specific visual elements to life—literally highlighting what matters most. This radiant energy is intentionally juxtaposed with striking, high-contrast black-and-white photography, granting the brand a sophisticated canvas to express itself with profound elegance.

Motion serves as a powerful, foundational element of this visual identity. Far from simple animation, the movement allows the design system to be highly expressive and deeply conceptual, tying the entire framework together and reinforcing the forum's forward-thinking ethos.

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Conceptual brand film direction and motion design introducing the new Brand Performance Art to the world, transforming its core shapes into an engaging, conceptual audiovisual experience.

Truth Well Told s one of McCann’s foundational creative beliefs: the idea that the most powerful work comes from uncovering a genuine human truth and expressing it with exceptional craft. It’s not just about storytelling, but about telling the right story—clearly, honestly, and beautifully—so it resonates across cultures and channels.

This design system was created for a landmark moment at McCann Worldgroup: the first global Creative Council, bringing together creative leadership from across the network in Toronto. I was responsible for developing the full visual identity for the event, building a system that could scale across spaces, formats, and experiences.

The result was a clean, flexible design language that combined typography, motion, and generative graphic forms inspired by ideas of truth, perception, and discovery—anchored in subtle references to Toronto as the host city. The system was applied across a wide range of touchpoints, including environmental graphics, wayfinding and welcome signage, digital screens and apps used to guide attendees, printed communications, and event collateral such as tote bags, bottles, and coasters.

Designed to work both statically and in motion, the identity balanced conceptual depth with clarity and usability—creating a cohesive, immersive experience for one of the most important creative gatherings in McCann’s global calendar.

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Kids Help Phone is Canada’s only free, 24/7 mental health support service for young people. As demand for youth mental health support surged, a critical challenge emerged: many adults misunderstood what Kids Help Phone actually does. The name suggested emergencies only—when, in reality, young people reach out for help across the full spectrum of their lives.

Defining Help set out to reframe what “help” truly means to the youth who use the service every day.

Using anonymized conversation data, we transformed thousands of real reasons young people reach out into a living definition of help—reimagining the Kids Help Phone name again and again to reflect its many meanings. From everyday worries to life-altering moments, the campaign showed that help isn’t one thing—it’s everything.

Data also guided when and where the work appeared, ensuring the message showed up in moments when emotions were most relevant across media, environments, and culture.

At the center of the campaign, we redefined one of the most iconic calls for help ever written. “Help!” by The Beatles was transformed into a modern-day anthem for youth mental health, transitioning from the original opening into a contemporary cover. The resulting film brought real experiences to life through scenes inspired directly by conversation data—defining help not through explanation, but through emotion.

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Past guests, future destinations – and a new benchmark for inclusive AI.

A project that began as a 1:1 digital experience for Black & Abroad customers – and became a global data solution for bias in generative AI models. SeeYouThere.ai

A PROJECT IN THREE PARTS

1. Personalized digital experiences for Black & Abroad customers, in which we used generative AI to show past guests at future destinations.

2. A mass media campaign highlighting the racial bias problems we encountered along the way.

3. The Generative AI Bias Reporting System – our data solution to the problem of bias in generative AI.

Report bias here: https://biasreporting.ai/

IDEA

An uplifting domestic travel utility for Black & Abroad that visualizes Black cultural data as elevation. The greater the densityof data, the higherthe elevation.

A dynamic visualization of +330,000,000 points of data, including population, Black-owned businesses and cultural sites.

A powerful travel utility to search, geolocate, create “favorites” lists, “add to map”, route plan and explore +30,000 points of interest.

Explore dozens of content modules– such as Black-owned wineries(“Melanin Vines”) and restaurantsthat fuelled civil rights (“Civil Bites”).

See the heights of The Culture at BlackElevationMap.com

The world’s first fully generative search and signage system designed to put 8,402 of Mexico’s most creative hamburger and hotdog stands on the map.

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CREATIVE FOOD DESERVES CREATIVE DATA

From octopus to grasshopper, the creativity of Mexico’s street food is staggering. It’s also highly diverse, with each of these 8,402 stands selling unique and local recipes. Our data collection and application of it to mapping and generative AI reflects the variance and creativity of the food, while respecting a rich, traditional visual language. The food isn’t generic – neither is our technology solution.

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THE NOT-SO-SECRET SAUCE

To drive word on the street, we turned to 18 earned television appearances, radio coverage, foodie influencers and +340 social media posts, and digital ads to get people exploring local food vendors via the Google Maps API-powered website.

OUTPUT
We created a world-first workflow designed to turn data into prompts and prompts into food paintings, all are masked and combined with generative backgrounds. Dynamically typeset from hand-painted fonts, automatically retouched and branded, then ingested into our system as separate layers. Ultimately, we generated 42,010 unique point-of-sale materials for Bimbo’s small business customers – five versions for each vendor, all combined, up-resized and output to final specs – they received via WhatsApp ready to print.

Somerset, one of Canada’s top printers, wanted a website that showcased their capabilities as printers. So we brought the experience of touching and feeling the page online.

First we created a printed website; over 20 techniques were printed on a single, duplexed press sheet.

We created online interactions like a map that could be zoomed with stickers, a GIF made with scanimation, buttons that were embossed, and much more.

Then we painstakingly shot every interaction in stop motion to bring print online in a truly tactile experience.

Every second in Canada an act of violence against women occurs. Interval House, Canada’s first centre for abused women and children (now celebrating its 40th year) and we are bringing this staggering statistic to life, with a new project called Every Second Matters. The Facebook connect driven website puts familiar faces on victims of domestic violence, and prompts visitors to take a stand by buying a second of the day, with each second representing the victims of domestic violence.

The interactive experience begins when users connect to Facebook, giving the site permission to access their friend list. From there, a clock appears showing the current time of day, with a message, “Every second a Canadian woman is abused.” As the clock continues, the user comes face-to-face with a photograph of a female Facebook friend, and are asked the question, “Who has to be affected to make you care?” With every second that passes, a new face appears.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day, and the purpose of the website is to sell all of them. Every donation, no matter how small, goes towards helping the women who turn to Interval House, to help turn their lives around.

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The problem we were asked to solve for Mount Pleasant Group (one of Canada's most prominent cemeteries) was a tricky one. People don't like talking about their own death – much less planning for it. Our work needed to find a way to start this delicate conversation without scaring people off. So we created a campaign about life.

Working with Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Hubert Davis, we created The Art of Saying Goodbye – a series of shorts that explored the emotional journey of real life people pondering the end and reflecting on their legacies.

Yellow Pages was launching a new search app. So, why do people would use YP app instead of google? Because big search engines are good to find big things.

But not so great finding the little local things.To do this, we went local. We took our knowledge of the streets, to the streets. Using geo target OOH, we highlighted all the hidden gems/small business around Canada in tons of different executions.

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OBJECTIVE

To reignite consumers’ excitement for All-Day Breakfast.

CONTEXT
People are rebelling against the rules for so-called breakfast food. Our task was to remind them McDonald’s not only supports the rebellion, they encourage it.

IDEA

We took the shackles off breakfast food and urged people to do breakfast wherever, whenever: Like at the office during lunch with hotcakes and PJs.

Lyft sees their drivers as not just employees, but as partners. To help express how valued each driver is, we developed a series of personalized communications to celebrate their milestones, from earning achievements and positive reviews, to the number of rides and years driving with Lyft.

Drivers are always on the move. We needed to create emails that could catch their attention quickly. So we designed a series of email-friendly GIFs that showcased celebratory dances and achievements, each customized to different driver demographics.

To celebrate drivers' birthdays, we made a personalized music video, complete with an originally composed track and a quirky set of illustrated characters singing Lyft’s praises for their driver partners.

McCafé 100% Ethically
Sourced Coffee

When McCafé got the their “100% ethically sourced” certification, they asked us to let Canadians know with a farm to cup story. So we did. We followed a single, tiny  bean from the moment it was picked to the moment it was sipped.

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We had the opportunity to do something never done before: reimagining one of the most iconic signs in the world.

For Toronto Pride, we transformed the McDonald’s Golden Arches by placing a rainbow above them, creating a one-of-a-kind sign that invited pedestrians to actively share their Pride. As people passed by, the sign responded in real time, changing its behavior based on their expressions and interactions, turning a global brand symbol into a living, participatory celebration of inclusivity.

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Chances are you’ve helped families staying at Ronald McDonald House Charities just by visiting McDonald’s. So these families got together with world-renowned duo Choir! Choir! Choir! to thank you with a Beatles favourite. In two weeks, the video earned over four million views. And some tears.

Agency:
Leo Burnett

Art Director:
Pedro Izzo

Copywriters:
Stephen Stahl / David Barber

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Wisk's new formulation cleans not just the obvious surface dirt on clothes but tackles deep down hidden "gunk" and funky odours, which get trapped in modern fabrics.

To bring this hidden problem to life, we created a mockumentary-style campaign inspired by investigative filmmakers like Michael Moore. Treating trapped gunk and odours as a serious (almost conspiratorial) threat, we follow a determined “investigator” on a mission to uncover the truth modern fabrics don’t want you to see. The contrast between the overly earnest tone and the absurdity of the subject turns a mundane laundry issue into an entertaining, memorable story.

We needed a way to dramatize and bring attention to this hidden but deadly problem.

Agency: CP+B

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Kids love to play with their parent’s mobile phones, but phones don’t do much for children’s imaginations. So we’re going to give parents and their children a more imaginative experience to enjoy on their mobile devices. Introducing The Play-Doh Adventures Phone Case: a Play- Doh dispensing phone case that works in tandem with fun, interactive stories contained in a downloadable app.  

How it works:

It starts with parents and their children following along with our stories. The fun comes when characters within those stories ask children to use our Play-Doh dispensing phone case to take part in the adventures.  For example, one of the adventures might feature a cute alien searching for ingredients to make space spaghetti. At certain parts in the story, the children will use the phone case to dispense Play-Doh “spaghetti ingredients” to make some space spaghetti of their own.  Other stories might include creating wacky lunar hairdos, or helping a baby alien get used to his long, chameleon-like tongue. The idea is to combine the power of storytelling with the tactile qualities of Play-Doh to unlock children’s imaginations in a whole new way.

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