Stephanie Mahon-Smith

Communication Design

Stephanie Mahon-Smith is a graphic designer who works with organisations and businesses to create branding, logo design, and applied design. Stephanie believes that a brand should be well represented in order to stand out in a society where people are bombarded with branding.

Stephanie has been involved with creating branding for The Salvation Army, as well as designing for Mark Sadka Music. She appreciates design with the potential to create positive impacts on communities and intends to pursue this into the future.

Stephanie is a trained pastry chef, wedding cake designer and creator. In her spare time, she enjoys photography, creating baked goods, going on walking adventures with her dog, and exploring new restaurants.

Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Design, majoring in Communication Design at Swinburne University.

Mark Sadka Music

Mark Sadka Music is a new business teaching piano and violin to students. This design suite included all components of branding, web creation, and additional deliverables, all fitting comfortably into a high end market and able to compete with similar businesses.

Preston Band Centenary

This brand was created for a unique 100 year celebration for a local church band. The requirement was a logo that showcases both tradition and modernity in an eye catching design. This logo was applied to shirts, awards and all advertising.

Faust Poster

This forms one of several posters created for a one man show based on the legend of Faust, to be presented at the Malthouse Theatre. Images were shot in the studio, heavily edited, and presented with bold typography.

Patissiere Magazine

This magazine cover was created through well considered studio food photography, editing, typography and layout design. The end result was an effective, vibrant image, bold enough to stand out.

Faust Booklet

The booklet created for the one man show as a take-home deliverable, with important quotes from the show and striking black and white imagery. Bringing this together required extensive photo editing, typography layouts, and ensuring print specifications were prepared accurately.

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.