What:

Working Session

Discipline-Bridging Brand Consulting

Defining & Designing Great Brands


    Working Session is a strategic design consultancy.
    We work directly with clients and as a consultant for other creative agencies.

    We don’t believe in the division of disciplines.


    We build and evolve Brands     from the ground up, and are unabashed experts across:

    • Research & discovery
    • Stakeholder engagement
    • Actionable insights
    • Brand strategy, platforms, & positioning
    • Brand architecture
    • Messaging & verbal frameworks
    • Naming
    • Campaign concepts
    • Visual identity development
    • Graphic design
    • Creative direction
    • Brand guidelines

                Being seen for who we truly are is no small feat.
    To get there, an organization needs to know itself—why it matters and where it’s going. That truth then needs to be captured, codified, and conveyed across every expression of the Brand. 
           Not an easy task.
    When you add in the fact that relevant organizations keep evolving, aligning who we are with how we’re perceived can feel incredibly complex.

           But it’s definitely doable.
    Strategic design starts at the beginning—discovering and building the Brand’s foundation—and carries through into tangible Brand expressions—the stuff that people can see and experience. 
            We make it make sense.
    This approach, with no siloed skillsets or dicey moments of creative handover, means that every aspect of the external-facing Brand is carrying forward the core insight about what makes that organization relevant and resonant.

         A compelling new story that needs to be shaped and shared—across each layer of a Brand—is where Working Session comes in.
    Within each of these layers, there are Strategic, Visual, Verbal, & Experiential components of Brand.
    Who:

    Leadership, Collaborators, & Clients

    Kind, Smart People, All Around




    Amanda Happé leads the creative practice.

    Amanda is a multidisciplinary Brand expert with a passion for the translation of insight into implementation. With work that spans strategy, design, identity, messaging, and roll-out, she keeps a consistent focus on the seamless connection of creative insight from day one of discovery through to external touch-point manifestation.

    She leads clients and collaborators through complex projects with a strategic toolkit. In the make-or-break moment when research learnings must evolve into tangible outcomes, Amanda helps build bridges between what's been learned and what it can mean for visual, verbal, and experiential outcomes.

    With empathy for the client mindset, the design-team mindset, and (above all) the audience mindset, she is uniquely adept at guiding each point-of-view towards inventive and responsive output.

    With over 20 years of Brand expertise, Amanda’s experience crosses industries and audience demographics with an emphasis on cultural, education, financial, and development (real estate) sectors.

    Before founding Working Session in 2016, Amanda was the Director of Strategic Design at Bruce Mau Design.



    Clients & Collaborators

    Agency Partners
    • Publicis Brand Design
    • FCB
    • DesignAgency
    • Frontier Design
    • Puncture
    • Cossette
    • Whitman Emorson

    Select Direct Clients
    • Anywhere
    • TED
    • TJX
    • Pride Toronto
    • Facing History & Ourselves
    • YMCA
    • Workshop Architecture
    • Queen’s University

    Select Via-Agency Clients...
    •           In her role as Creative Director for Bruce Mau Design, Publicis Brand Design, and FCB, Amanda has led branding projects for:
    • RBC (Royal Bank of Canada)
    • SickKids Foundation
    • Rogers
    • QuadReal
    • Doane Grant Thornton
    • OLG (Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corp.)
    • The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
    • Pulitzer Arts Foundation
    • Sasaki 
    • Sinai Health System
    • Harvard Graduate School of Design
    • Hutchins Centre for African & African-American Studies
    • USC Annenberg
    • Rutgers University
    • Arizona State University
    • Columbus Metropolitan Library
    • Loussac Library (Anchorage)
    • Wolfsonian Museum
    • University of Maine
    • Hutchins Family Foundation
    • Big Blue Bus of Santa Monica
    • City of Sudbury
    • Brookfield Residential
    • The Mayo Clinic at ASU


      Connect & Contact
      Working Session is based in Toronto, Canada.

       While we are sometimes at capacity for creative work, we are always grateful to be connected with new clients and collaborators. 

      Please get in touch if you’d like to start a conversation (email link)


      Why:

      Testimonials

      😳



      "Sasaki asked Amanda [and her team at BMD] to do the impossible. To have any chance at articulating our point of view as a cohesive practice, we desperately needed her to find clarity in the midst of our creative chaos. We couldn't have asked for a better partner. Amanda led us through a challenging process of self-discovery, and at the end, we emerged with a unified, recommitted sense of self: a renewed practice."

      –F. Philip Barash
      Creative Director,
      Sasaki Design

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      "There are very few people as intelligent and intuitive as Amanda. There are even fewer who can communicate their ideas with such clarity and kindness. She is truly special and has taught me many, many things, not least of which: that you cannot make good work and effect positive change without allowing yourself to be changed along the way."

      –Alec Donovan
      Associate Creative Director,
      Bruce Mau Design

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      "Amanda is strategic, creative, incredibly ambitious and raises the bar on every project that she tackles. As a collaborator she is generous, has outstanding integrity, and is wonderfully
      skilled at building out big ideas that inspire and are greater than the sum of their parts."

      –Christina Bagativius
      Founder and Cultural Strategist,
      Bespoke Cultural Collective

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      "Hiring Amanda means you'll have a true expert in your corner — one who will give a damn about your business and its goals.       I can't recommend her highly enough."

      –Jubin Kwon
      Director of Marketing and Analysis,
      Montclair State University

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      "Amanda Happé was the lead on our fundraising campaign project. Before anything, she and her team [at BMD] got to know our school better than we knew ourselves. Their reflection back to us of who we were and what we stood for was accurate and intuitive. The work was not easy. The end product was beautifully conceived and thoroughly developed. Thanks Amanda: you were a delight to work with, I learned much from you, and your professionalism and creativity have made every agency collaboration since a disappointment."

      –Francesca DeMarco
      Head of Individual Giving Bocconi University Milan, Italy
      Formerly, Assistant Dean of Development and Alumni Relations USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

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