The ISO logo was the first project I ever did in this industry, and it holds a special place in my heart. In 2018, I was at the downtown office of Cross Lake Education Authority when my school advisor told me there was a nationwide logo contest for this new organization called Indigenous Screen Office. I was still in the second year of the Graphic Design program at Red River College and still needed to figure out what I would do once and if I would graduate. So when she emailed the contest details, I took a chance and submitted my portfolio with the wild hope that I would be chosen to do the job - and I was!

Being a kid from the North living in the city, I constantly miss seeing wâwâtew or the the Northern Lights in the dead of winter. When the sun would dip past the treeline, and you could see your breath materialize in the crisp winter air, they would come out and dance across the evening sky. Whenever I felt brave enough to do so, I would whistle at them and watch them cascade lower and lower toward me until I screeched and ran back inside my house. As a child, my mother would also whistle at them and run away when they seemed to get too close. There's a sense of awe and curiosity about them that I'm sure many people experience when they see the Northern Lights come out.

Many tribes and nations have different stories and explanations for what wâwâtew are, but we all agree about their relation to the spirit world. Wâwâtew hold a significant spiritual significance to Indigenous people. The brief that ISO had given me was to create a logo that would resonate with Metis, Inuit and First Nations peoples, and so I thought a logo based around wâwâtew would be the best way to achieve that.

The shape, a square with rounded corners containing the Northern Lights, depicts the focus points that appear when looking through a camera viewfinder.