Designing a city from scratch, one volume at a time.
Toronto's eastern waterfront had sat mostly industrial for decades, cut off from downtown by a highway and a rail corridor. A masterplan for a stretch of land like that has to persuade three different audiences at once: the public it will be built for, the city that has to approve it, and the leadership that has to fund it.
Sidewalk Labs had produced thousands of pages of technical, economic, and policy research for the site. The challenge was not more research. It was translation, making a vision of extraordinary complexity legible, credible, and emotionally compelling to Google leadership and the Toronto public alike.
Hedof built the cover artwork, a figure-based illustration system that reconfigures across the four covers, section dividers, and exhibition graphics.
The Overview
Volume 0, purple. The argument in brief, why the eastern waterfront, what the plan proposes, and what it would mean for Toronto.
Portraiture full-bleed on the opener, a deliberate reversal of the plan's own renderings-first hierarchy elsewhere.
The contents page doubles as a colour key, teaching the four-volume system before a reader opens any chapter.
The 40% callout is set at diagram scale, oversized against a stacked bar broken into rental and ownership tiers below it.
The Plans
Volume 1, orange. Quayside as a proving ground, priority outcomes, and the case for tall timber construction.
A single hand-drawn line weight carries the whole spread, skyline and figure alike, so nothing outranks the chapter title over it.
Street network reduced to line weight and colour alone, no basemap clutter competing with the hierarchy of routes.
A small locator map with a dot pin, dropped into the corner of the site plan, orients the reader before the detail drawing takes over.
Urban Innovations
Volume 2, blue. Technical plates and library-of-parts systems for the public realm and mass timber construction.
Isometric projection held at a shallower angle than the mobility diagrams, so transit infrastructure reads distinct from street-level plans.
The volume number, a giant white "2", sits larger than the title itself, which is reduced to small type at the bottom of the cover.
The Partnership
Volume 3, green. The financing volume ran as its own visual register, table-heavy and printed to signal a change of register.
Same system as the other covers: an oversized volume number, "3", laid over the street-scene illustration, title reduced to a caption at the bottom.
Tabular type set smaller and tighter than the other volumes' body copy, a register shift that signals vision giving way to transaction.
The system
Each volume owns one core colour, and each core carries three variations used for illustration, diagrams and plan keys. Nothing crosses between families, so a reader always knows which volume a spread belongs to.
Core colour on top, its three shades below, running light to dark.
“Design is the difference between a plan that sits on a shelf and one that changes a city.”
The activation
Thousands of portfolios were reviewed and twenty designers interviewed to build a four-person craft team, a typographer, a cartographer, an architectural illustrator, and a generalist, against the gaps the content architecture exposed. Design worked directly with policy, engineering, and product leads in daily stand-ups so every chapter was reviewed by the people accountable for its content. An outside production partner carried the system to print, briefed and reviewed so the visual language held identically across all four books.
Toronto Tomorrow became a benchmark for smart-city design and urban-systems storytelling, and is used as a teaching reference at Harvard.
