A Partnership Built for What Comes Next
For emerging artists and designers, the leap from graduating student to working professional is one of the most challenging transitions in a creative career. A strong portfolio website can make all the difference—not just as a place to show work, but as a tool for shaping a professional identity, attracting clients, and opening doors to opportunities that might otherwise stay closed.
That’s the idea behind the partnership between Format and OCAD University‘s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists and Designers (CEAD). Through the collaboration, OCAD U students and faculty gain free access to Format’s professional portfolio-building platform—one designed with the specific needs of creatives in mind. The partnership supports students at every stage of their studies, helping them build, refine, and launch digital portfolios that present their work with the seriousness and polish that the professional world demands.
Format × OCAD U: The Career Launchers Award
Each year, the Format Career Launcher Award recognizes four graduating students—one winner and one runner up from Art, and one winner and one runner up from Design—whose Format portfolios best exemplify creativity, intentionality, and professional readiness. The winners receive: a cash prize, a free lifetime subscription to Format, recognition across Format’s platforms, and a profile feature in Format Magazine.
This year’s recipients couldn’t be more different in background—and that’s exactly what makes their stories so compelling.
Check out this year’s lineup!
2026 Winner Lineup (Art + Design)
L'art
- Winner: Sue Mackay—https://www.suemackay.com/
- Runner Up: Bree Roseberg—https://bree-rosberg.format.com/
Conception
- Winner: Denise Cabanero Sagmit—https://detrinity.format.com/home
- Runner Up: Cindy Tran—https://cindy-tran.format.com/
Art Winner: Sue Mackay
The Promise She Made to Herself
Some artists know from childhood that making things is their calling. Sue Mackay took a longer path—and says she wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Toronto-based painter completed her BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University, but her route there wound through a business degree at Wilfrid Laurier, part-time art courses, OCAD U’s Florence program, and years of independent studio practice—all while raising a family. Long before she set foot on campus as a full-time student, she had made a quiet commitment to herself.
“If I could keep my brushes wet until the kids were launched, I could be a painter. And when they both graduated from university, I said, here’s my moment.”— Sue Mackay
That moment arrived, and Sue made good on the promise. Because of her extensive prior coursework, she arrived at OCAD U with roughly two year’s worth of credits already fulfilled, allowing her to map out a program focused almost entirely on thesis work in her final year. The result was a period of genuine creative transformation.
“My work has gone from fairly traditional—because I had painted myself into a box prior to going back to school—to more expressionist work on weird substrates,” she explains. Once at OCADU, the questions started coming. Why this? Why not something bigger? And as Sue puts it, “the moment you start asking questions, the opportunities somehow present themselves.” She ended up working through material exploration, eventually painting on plexiglass—surfaces transparent, luminous, and unlike anything she had tried before.
Community Across Generations
Returning to art school in her sixties meant entering a studio environment filled primarily with students young enough to be her children. Sue admits she arrived carrying some of her own assumptions about how she might be received.
“I think I’m the only person who brought ageism to the party,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve been thinking they’re gonna hate me because I’m like their mom—and honestly, I don’t think I felt an ounce of that ever.” The students she painted alongside were generous, she says, and the exchange of ideas ran both ways. The technical staff, too, made a lasting impression: she describes going in with a problem or an idea and having the technicians collaborate with her, drawing on their deep knowledge of materials. “It was really one of my favorite parts of this year, actually.”
She also credits several faculty members by name— Nicole Collins, Laura Millard, Spencer Harrisonet Tannis Nielsen—as people who were consistently in her corner, both inside the classroom and beyond it.
Studio Practice and Looking Ahead
Now graduating, she’s thinking about what comes next. She’s interested in a master’s degree—likely for 2027, to give herself time to build on this year’s body of work—and has begun exploring the possibility of gallery representation. She’s also heading to Paris for a residency in May, the first step in what she envisions as a recurring rhythm: a few months each year in a different environment, letting the change of place change the work.
For her Portefeuille Format, Sue sees multiple uses: as an archival system for keeping track of her growing body of work, as a professional presentation tool for approaching galleries and submissions, and as a platform that signals seriousness. “I feel like when you present it, you don’t look like you’re an Etsy site,” she says. “It presents the work seriously.”
Her advice to anyone considering a similar leap back into education? Don’t wait.
“The only person holding you back is you. I think there is so much opportunity out there—and also an incredible amount of support. It’s a little bit of self-belief and then pouring your energy into it and committing.”— Sue Mackay
View Sue’s portfolio at suemackay.com
Design Winner: Denise Cabanero Sagmit
The Illustrator Who Got Her First Commission on the Playground
Denise Cabanero Sagmit—known to most as Denny—has been drawing since she was five years old. By second grade, she had already landed her first commission: Super Mario characters, sold to classmates on the school playground. “I guess you could call me a young entrepreneur,” she says.
The Filipino-Canadian illustrator is now based in Toronto and on the precipice of graduating from OCADU’s Illustration program. At this turning point in her professional journey, Denny brings that same entrepreneurial energy to her professional practice. She’s already working with independent authors on book covers and editorial clients, and her senior thesis, a series called Harbingers, demonstrates a sophisticated command of illustration as a medium for serious cultural commentary.
Harbingers: Making Heavy Things Digestible
Harbingers is a thesis series exploring the concept of harbingers of the apocalypse—casting real-world figures as contemporary deities, each representing a different category of existential threat as a means of exploring topics impacting our physical, emotional and environmental wellbeing.
“I wanted my final thesis to have weight,” Denny says. “I wanted to say something. There are a lot of big things going on in the world around us—you’re seeing it across the news and social media—and I wanted to put all of my thoughts and feelings surrounding that into a cohesive series.”
Choosing illustration as the medium for such heavy subject matter is a deliberate decision. In Denny’s view, illustration has an accessibility that other art forms don’t always share. It invites people in rather than holding them at a distance. “As an illustrator with autism, I often find it difficult to use the right words when expressing the ideas unfolding in my mind. That’s where the medium of illustration helps to fill in the gaps of communication to my audience, giving them a glimpse into how I see the world,” she says. Her portfolio, with its bold lines, solid blocks of primary and complementary color, and expressive portraiture, reflects influences from book illustrators like Cassandra Jean Piedra to classic animated series and Norman Rockwell‘s richly characterful paintings.
“I think illustration is something that can be digestible to a wide audience… it invites questions.”— Denny Cabanero Sagmit
OCAD, Books, and the Digital Studio
Denny describes her time at OCADU as invaluable. The program drilled in the fundamentals, but it also pushed her outside her comfort zone—literally. She took ceramics classes that introduced her to texture and composition in three dimensions, something the lifelong 2D artist hadn’t encountered before. Peer critiques helped her build the confidence to talk about her work and hear other perspectives. “It was great to hear different voices,” she says.
The direction she’s heading post-graduation is clear: book illustration. She fell in love with the form through Blair Drawson’s class at OCAD, where students spent time creating covers, spreads, and endpapers for novels and graphic novels. Among her portfolio projects is a mock cover for Deadly Class, a graphic novel following teenagers at a school that trains the next generation of the world’s top crime families—a story whose aesthetic aligns perfectly with Denny’s affinity for dark themes, bold graphic compositions, and expressive portraiture.
Editorial illustration is also on the radar. Denny sees her work fitting naturally into publications like The Narwhal, where illustration serves not just as decoration but as a mode of argument.
On Portfolio vs. Social—and Why You Need Both
Like many working illustrators, Denny maintains both a curated portfolio site and an active social media presence—and she thinks carefully about how they serve different purposes. “My portfolio is mostly catered toward book illustration,” she explains. “It has more of my finished work, whereas my social media is more lax and fun—a lot of process work and fan art.”
Elle Format site functions as her primary professional tool—the first link she sends to prospective clients, the place where her breadth of work is curated with intention. “I think my Format website is going to be crucial to my transition into the professional world,” she says, “because it really showcases my breadth of work, my style, my personality as an illustrator. It’s just a great way to curate your work for any kind of audience.” She found the platform approachable from the start: “As someone who isn’t familiar with coding and backend development, it was pretty easy to get the hang of things and put my personality into my site. It’s very customizable.” In particular, she found Format’s FlexBlock feature well-suited to the grid-based, storyboard-like thinking that illustration naturally involves.
Her advice to aspiring illustrators echoes something she learned the hard way—through sitting at her desk, staring at a screen, and resisting the urge to stay in one lane.
“It’s so important to try things. There’s so much to learn from other specialties—ceramics, jewelry making, painting, even cooking and writing. It’s important to exercise your creative muscles in different ways. In the end it makes your work more well-rounded and interesting.” — Denny Cabanero Sagmit
Denny’s Harbingers thesis series was on display at OCAD U’s GradEx from May 6–10 on the sixth floor. View her portfolio at detrinity.format.com
Two Artists, One Invitation
Sue Mackay and Denise Cabanero Sagmit are at different stages of their journeys, working in different media, with different visions for what the next chapter looks like. But they share something essential: a commitment to making work that matters, and the seriousness to present it well.
That, in the end, is what the Format Career Launchers prize is about—not just recognizing great portfolios, but recognizing artists who understand that how you show your work is part of the work itself.
Congratulations to Sue and Denny, and to all of this year’s OCAD U graduates.
Learn more about Format’s partnership with OCAD University and the Career Launchers program at ocadu.ca/format.
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