TFS Teams Up with DesignTO to Mentor Next Generation of Designers
Toronto Film School’s Graphic Design & Interactive Media program is strengthening its ties to Toronto’s design community through a new collaboration with DesignTO, one of the city’s most respected design organizations.
What started as a mentorship opportunity for GDIM Program Director Pheinixx Paul and Student Outreach Manager Michael Barry – who are currently serving as mentors in DesignTO Youth‘s seventh edition, “Otherworld” – has now sparked conversations about TFS and DesignTO continuing to work together in the future.
“Every single connection that we can make with the design community is really valuable, because it opens doors for our students,” Paul said of the recent cooperation between TFS and DesignTO.
“We have a guiding mandate to make sure that all of our programs at TFS are feeding the industry and that shows up in a lot of different ways – from our curriculum, to our projects and everything we do in the classroom. It’s all meant to feed into the needs of the industry.”
For Paul, who has used the hashtag #noticedesign for more than 20 years, DesignTO represents an organization that shares a fundamental philosophy about design’s role in society.
“Design, in its so many forms, it quite literally surrounds us every single day and people don’t really notice or think about it and appreciate it, and I think DesignTO shines a light on that with people,” she said. “So, I’m excited for this opportunity to work with them and connect our school with them.”
The “Otherworld” Program
DesignTO Youth’s “Otherworld” program provides young creatives aged 18-29 with access to creative disciplines and professionals. Drawing inspiration from James Baldwin‘s The Creative Process essay and Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, this year’s program centers imagination as the driving force behind radical transformation.
Paul and Barry joined two other independent professionals as mentors, representing diverse design disciplines including fine art, installation work, and architecture. The program kicked off with a virtual panel that lasted about 45 minutes, where mentors discussed world building and the balance between creative vision and professional demands.
“We were asked about world building and what world building means to us in our work,” Paul said. “And then, yes, some practical things about how you balance what you want to do with what you kind of have to do as professionals.”
The one-on-one mentorship sessions that followed the panel proved particularly rewarding for Paul, who worked with three talented young creatives on vastly different projects: one creating a textile-based installation, another developing a zine, and a third working on a piece that intersects music, photography and discussion that is ultimately rooted in teaching.
“It was a lot of fun to hear things that are so completely different and without a client involved, with just the pure purpose of telling the story for no other reason than to tell that story,” Paul said, noting that she admired the participants’ commitment and depth of thought.
“I was very impressed with the ideas that I heard and just how much they wanted to make people stop and think differently and think in a new way. I thought that was really remarkable.”
Looking to the Future
While this year’s mentorship program marks TFS’s first formal involvement with DesignTO Youth, Paul said discussions about the possibility of expanding the school’s participation in future iterations of the program are underway.
She has suggested a phased approach: TFS could take responsibility for delivering one of the program’s learning modules next year, with the possibility of hosting an entire program at the school’s campus in the future.
That timing aligns well with TFS’s move to a new consolidated campus in April 2026, as the new location will bring together all of the school’s programs, equipment, and facilities under one roof – resources that could uniquely support DesignTO’s programming needs.
“If they wanted to do something that was based around film or content creation or video, we could do it all in our studios,” Paul noted. “Literally at one address there will be hundreds of experts, millions of dollars of professional equipment and studios and classroom space.”
Strategic Industry Alignment
Paul said a DesignTO partnership would represent an exciting strategic connection with an organization that, unlike businesses with commercial goals, focuses on bringing design awareness to broader audiences and connecting diverse voices within the creative community.
“DesignTO is an important and key member of the Toronto design industry,” she said. “They don’t have a commercial goal in mind, they just bring design to the masses, so to speak, and they bring design to other eyes that are not part of the industry.”
Paul sees any collaboration with the organization as creating mutual benefits – especially for TFS students, in terms of opening doors to networking opportunities: “It just extends our reach and, whether it’s through Career Services or the exposure of our students and their work, that can be really valuable.”
At the same time, a partnership with DesignTO could also bring new perspectives into TFS classrooms. “Coming in the other direction, it could open our doors to all these other voices that could influence and inspire our students,” Paul added. “And that’s exciting, too.”
Participants of DesignTO Youth’s “Otherworld” program will showcase their final projects at the 16th Annual DesignTO Festival, which takes place across several venues in the city from January 23 – February 1, 2026. For more information, go to https://designto.org/
