I'm a designer, teacher, and manager with fifteen years of experience, currently based in Nova Scotia, Canada. My work is driven by social responsibility, with a particular interest in guiding teams through complex growth and change processes.
My past clients include Tate Britain, McGill University, Microsoft, Nike, Disney, UNICEF, and Bandcamp. My work has been featured in The Guardian and The New York Times.
Outside of work, I’m a father to a magical three-year-old, I help run a small poetry press, and I’ve toured around the world as a musician. I love books, forests, and building things. I am endlessly grateful for the collaboration of my peers.
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My first design project came at age twelve. My brother's basketball coach wanted a website to market himself as a first aid instructor, and I made him one using Macromedia Flash. My (luckily unarchived) juvenialia also includes several embarassing animations, digital art monstrosities, videos, photographs, a couple books, and some websites.
In 2012 Pascal Huot and I began a decade-long collaboration as designers, photographers, video makers, website developers—basically, artists who could be as pragmatic or eccentric as required. We first named our practice LOG Creative Bureau, then LOG-CB, then Huot & Vallentin. We worked with hundreds of clients in North America, Europe, and Asia, and received awards from the AIGA, Graphis International, ADC Young Guns, and Tokyo TDC.
In 2016 I was selected for a postgraduate fellowship at the Fabrica Research Centre in Treviso, Italy. Fabrica is a creative laboratory housed in an underground bunker designed by Tadao Ando and funded by Benetton. It has enabled creative young people from around the world to gather and work on innovative projects since the early 90s.
I joined Coralie Gourguechon, Angelo Semeraro, Monica Lanaro, and Jolibrain in creating Recognition, an early-days AI project which matched the latest Reuters news images with pieces from the Tate Britain's collection. This project won their £100k IK Prize with Microsoft, and resulted in a 3-month exhibition at the Tate in conjunction with a self-generating interactive website, occasionally displayed live in Times Square. Our work was featured in The Guardian, the The New York Times, and other well known publications.
During these years I also began presenting, leading workshops, and teaching. In 2018 I developed and taught a six-week course on accessible UI/UX design for McGill University's OSMO Foundation, which trained hundreds of pre- and post-graduates. My appreciation for the opportunity to learn with others has only continued to deepen over the years, and I'm grateful to continue mentoring many of my former students.
In 2019 Pascal and I were filmmakers for the She Is Indigenous project, a nine-part documentary series celebrating Indigenous female leaders across Canada. In hindsight, this experience changed the course of my life, and my work has increasingly focused on a range of efforts you could define as sustainable development.
In 2021 Pascal became a creative producer at Spruce, an agency focused on nonprofit initiatives, and I became the lead product designer at Side Door, a startup connecting a global network of DIY art spaces and performers. In my three years at Side Dor, we generated over $3m for our users and helped create livelihoods for thousands of artists and presenters.
In 2024 I was invited to become the transitional director of Tatamagouche Centre, a 15-acre education and community centre based in rural Nova Scotia. The Centre's grounds have long been a sacred Mi'kmaq gathering place, containing a 2000+ year old burial site. With Catherine Martin (Order of Canada and Director of Indigenous Relations at Dalhousie University), I oversaw the Centre's signing of a historic Rematriation memorandum, outlining its transfer from the United Church of Canada to Women of First Light, a Wabanaki Clan Mothers charity.
Presently, I lead the product development team at OneFeather, building technology to remedy systemic imbalances and empower Indigenous sovereignty.
Overall, I would summarize the progression of my practice as follows:
Artifacts → Symbols → Experiences → Systems
The first five years of my career were focused on creating artifacts: posters, books, websites, apps, logos, typefaces, videos, photographs. The next five years were focused on creating symbols: artifacts embedded with meaning beyond the sum of their parts. The following five years were focused on experiences: how we interact with symbols, environments, and other people to create narratives. The last five years have been focused on systems: how we can leverage all of these tools to solve societal challenges.
If I have learned anything, it's to keep asking questions.
Product Manager at OneFeather
Victoria, BC, 2026
Executive Director at Tatamagouche Centre
Tatamagouche, NS, 2025
Lead Product Designer at Side Door
Halifax, NS, 2021-2024
UI/UX Professor at OSMO Foundation
Montréal, QC, 2018-2019
Design Director at Huot & Vallentin
Ottawa, ON and Montréal, QC, 2012-2021
Postgraduate Fellowship at Fabrica Research Centre
Treviso, IT, 2016
Joint Hons. BA in Communication and Sociology at University of Ottawa
Ottawa, ON, 2015
Arts & Crafts, Bandcamp, Disney, Microsoft, Nike, Pauktuutit, SeeChange, Tate Britain, The Beam Magazine Berlin, The Indigenous Institutes Consortium, The National Arts Centre, The National Association of Women and the Law, The Province of Ontario, UNICEF, Universal Music Group, and many others.
| Community Land Trust Summit | Halifax, NS | 2025 |
| Natural Building East | Ship Harbour, NS | 2025 |
| Full Circle Festival | Newport Landing, NS | 2024 |
| Volta Democamp | Halifax, NS | 2023 |
| Wonderhorse Festival | Whitehorse, YT | 2020 |
| C2 Montreal | Montréal, QC | 2020 |
| McGill Infonexus | Montréal, QC | 2019 |
| LUCFest | Tainan, TW | 2019 |
| City University of HK Symposium | Cordoba, ES | 2018 |
| Cucalorus Festival | Wilmington, US | 2018 |
| xCoAx | Lisbon, PT | 2017 |
| Torino Graphic Days | Turin, IT | 2017 |
| Ars Electronica | Linz, AT | 2017 |
| Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig | Leipzig, DE | 2017 |
| Tate Britain | London, UK | 2017 |
| Daikin: You Shape the Air | Milan, IT | 2016 |
| Art Fair Suomi | Helsinki, FI | 2015 |
Aaron Gillett 🇦🇺, Ali Kaveh 🇮🇷, Allyson Rousseau 🇨🇦, Alma Ceclia Suarez 🇨🇭, Angela Henderson 🇨🇦, Angelez Ortiz 🇪🇨, Angelo Semeraro 🇮🇹, Catherine Martin 🇨🇦, Carl Rethmann 🇩🇪, Coralie Gourguechon 🇫🇷, Daniel Rous 🇬🇧, Drew Nikonowicz 🇺🇸, Elise Santangelo 🇦🇺, Federico Floriani 🇮🇹, Frieda Femfert 🇩🇪, Giorgio Gasco 🇮🇹, Jochieh Huang 🇹🇼, Jonas Eltes 🇸🇪, Jonathan Chomko 🇨🇦, Karim El Maktafi 🇲🇦, Lorena Alvarado 🇻🇪, M Wingren 🇺🇸, Marina Vitaglione 🇬🇧, Mattia Mura 🇮🇹, Nicolas Vamvouklis 🇬🇷, Pascal Huot 🇨🇦, Rachel Kohut 🇨🇦, Quentin Vuong 🇫🇷, Roberta Donatini 🇮🇹, Seki Toshiyuki 🇯🇵, Shek Po Kwan 🇭🇰, Solomon Nagler 🇨🇦, Tine Modeweg Hansen 🇩🇰, Venus Chung 🇭🇰, and many others.