I’m Tiffany Gantman, a Montreal designer and a student. Right now I’m studying Graphic and Web Design at John Abbott College. I’ve freelanced since 2020, and along the way I’ve started a few small projects of my own. That’s probably why people call me a young entrepreneur before I get around to calling myself one.
This blog sits between two things that usually stay apart. On one side, design learned formally, with critiques and deadlines and grades. On the other, design done for real people, with a budget and an opinion attached. Writing in that gap is the whole point of the site.
How I approach a project
Before deciding how something should look, I want to know who it’s for and what it has to do. A neighbourhood restaurant and an online fashion label both deserve a clear identity. However, the information a visitor needs and the decision they’re making are completely different.
After that, my preferences stay fairly consistent. Clean structure, typography that carries the tone, generous space, and one obvious thing to do on every screen. I’d rather cut an element than crowd the one that matters. The harder judgement is knowing when to override those instincts, and that’s the part I’m still building.
Because I work in Quebec, most of what I design has to hold up in French and in English. So I plan for both from the first sketch. Retrofitting French into a layout built around English copy gives you broken headlines and a site that reads like a translation.
Learning and building at the same time
At John Abbott I’m working through the foundations: typography, layout, logo and pictogram design, branding, book design, photography and web publishing. School gives me something freelance work doesn’t, which is permission to experiment and be told plainly when it didn’t work.
Freelance work gives me the opposite lesson. Projects come with constraints attached, and those constraints usually improve the result once you stop resenting them. I’ve learned more from one blunt client question about a homepage than from most tutorials.
Moving between the two keeps me honest about how much is left to learn. A critique from class changes how I handle a freelance project the same week. Meanwhile a problem from a project becomes the question I bring back to school.
What a Montreal designer actually works on
Brand identity and web design sit at the centre. I like building a visual system that holds together across a website, photography, social content and print without repeating itself. Then I get to watch whether it survives contact with a real business.
Photography and fashion shape how I see the rest. Both train you to notice composition, mood, and how one detail either supports the whole or quietly contradicts it. As a result, hospitality, beauty and lifestyle brands are where my instincts are most useful.
Being a Montreal designer shapes the work in a practical way too. Clients here are often small and local, so budgets are real and every decision has to earn its place. Bilingual copy, seasonal trade, and a customer base that spans the island all change what a homepage has to do. In other words, the city is part of the brief.
Digital products are the direction I’m pushing into. Designing an app or a platform means thinking about a task rather than a page, and I want more practice at that.
A few of these threads have turned into side projects of my own. I won’t go into them here, since this site is about the student side of things. Still, they’re where I get to make the calls and live with the results, and that changes how I show up in class.
What you’ll find on this blog
Most posts fall into one of a few kinds. A personal reflection on where I am in the process. A decision from a live project, and why I made it. An industry I’m curious about, or a skill I’m trying to improve.
There’s room here for work that isn’t finished. A final image shows the result, but the revisions hold the reasoning, and the reasoning is the part worth reading. Writing it down also forces me to notice when my own approach shifts.
Expect the occasional post about the business side as well. Pricing, scope, bilingual production and awkward client conversations all affect the design more than most portfolios admit. Since I’m learning both at once, it would be strange to write about only half of it.
Start here
Becoming a Designer While Building Something of My Own covers how I got into design, what school and freelance work each teach me, and the interests behind the work.
Design Career Goals: The Designer I Want to Become covers the strengths I’m building on, the industries I want to work in, the skills I still need, and what I want to have built by graduation.
Where this Montreal designer is heading
The long-term goal is creative direction. Plenty of people can make a page look good, so the more useful question for a Montreal designer is what happens after the handover. I want to help a business build an identity and a web presence it can keep developing, rather than a folder of files nobody can maintain. For now, the work happens skill by skill and project by project.
Writing here makes that progress visible, including the awkward parts. Being a Montreal designer this early in a career means most of the interesting material is still unfinished, so this is where it gets recorded.
If you’re working on something that overlaps with what I do, get in touch. I read everything that comes through.
Let’s talk
Have a project in mind, a question about my work, or feedback on something in my web or print portfolio? Send me a message below and I’ll get back to you.