Turning the Table: Howard Poon

Howard Poon is VP of design at DDB Canada in Edmonton, where he collaborates with a cross-disciplinary team of strategists, creatives and designers to use insight-driven design to build exceptional brands. Poon has a passion for nurturing young talent and giving back to the next generation of creatives. He has been an advisor on MacEwan University's Bachelor of Design Advisory Committee and is a design management sessional instructor at the University of Alberta's Visual Communication Design program for the past four years. He was also a member of this year’s Photography & Illustration Awards jury, lending us his valuable time and visual acumen, for which we are immensely grateful. Poon and his team are no stranger to awards. Their work has been awarded internationally, nationally and regionally, including by Applied Arts, as is the case with the project he suggested be featured when we asked him to share some work he is particularly proud of.

The City of Edmonton is rapidly growing. In the coming years, it is expected to add a whopping one million people to its population, doubling itself while maintaining its current boundaries. Poon and DDB Canada were tasked to help the city design their city plan: a 182-page document that outlines the city’s rationale for future planning filled with maps, infographics and photographs. It’s heady material perfect for stakeholders, but not the easiest pill to swallow for your average web surfer.

The Future is Urban completely revolutionizes the concept of a city plan. Disposing of the binders upon binders of paper and replacing them with an immersive, experiential website that uses animated illustrations and data visualization to draw in an audience a traditional plan would never have reached. The rollicking, scrolling-based website is a joy to navigate and ingeniously displays the key points of the Edmonton City Plan, which is also provided in full as a PDF on the website ensuring that citizens have full access to the plan.

The mobile-first nature of the website further opened the plan to the people of Edmonton, with 75% of all traffic coming from mobile devices. Poon and DDB Canada brought the future of infrastructure into the future, and rightfully won a 2021 Design Award for their stunning site.  

You can experience the whole site here and see more of DDB Canada’s work here.