Curio is Edmonton’s premiere graphic design studio, delivering agency-level work with small-team ingenuity and agility for over 20 years.
Our designers are trained illustrators who work directly with our clients. We create custom concepts from scratch, then collaborate to refine those concepts, ensuring client goals are built into the DNA of the design.
The final results are always polished and professional, but imbued with remarkable character and personality.
Though we specialize in illustration, branding, and digital design, we are constantly expanding our abilities into such areas as package design, copywriting, and animation.
Curious to see what we can do for you? Please get in touch with Amanda Schutz, Owner and Creative Director, at amanda@curiostudio.ca or at (780) 809-2221. If you’re in the market for creative projects that celebrate what makes your brand truly unique, we are already excited to meet you.
The Curio Team
Amanda
Creative Director
Amanda Schutz, Creative Director, has owned and acted as Creative Director of Curio Studio since its inception in 2003. Then a recent graduate of MacEwan University (and later a distinguished Alumna and a Design Instructor), Amanda founded Curio from her downtown apartment with no seed money and no client roster to speak of. Twenty years and over 600 clients later, Amanda’s adventurous talent, inexhaustible work ethic, and insatiable auto-didactism has sustained an illustrator-led design boutique renowned for dependability and high quality of output. Outside of Curio, Amanda is a fine artist, a professional illustrator, and founder of the non-profit Canadian Women in Design. In 2022, Amanda was named a Fellow of the Design Professionals of Canada; only 72 other individuals have been bestowed this distinction since 1960.
Amanda is a proud mother to one Jacob and roughly three thousand tomato plants at any given time.
Graham
Senior Designer
Graham Johnson has clocked over 20 years in the design game (15 of those as a Senior Designer, i.e., managing projects and overseeing other designers to ensure high-quality work). A talented aesthete, Graham’s curiosity and fastidiousness (which originally led him to pursue a degree in Biological Sciences) imbue him with uncanny powers of problem-solving. As our team’s Quality Control Lead, Graham is present both at initial conception of every design and at the last moment before delivery, ensuring that every element of every design product is in-line with Curio’s highest standards of quality.
Graham loves music, cuisine, and above all, his adorable family. He is the proud owner of several immutable opinions on potato chip flavours.
Matt
Communications and Development
Matt Steringa is the token non-designer of the Curio team, though his 20 years of experience in Marketing, Communications, and Sales have provided enough experience to field-spot a crack team of artistic professionals from a prairie mile away. His work for Curio Studio’s Communications and Development efforts, then, is a matter of how to best convey to others the rare and amazing talents of his designer teammates (a pretty enviable position to be in, he’ll admit). A new-ish recruit to Curio, Matt also works closely with the design team to develop systems and policies for ever-better service delivery, efficiency, and accountability (a task befitting his medical “systems-thinking” training as a respiratory therapist).
Per his contract, Matt has no interests outside of work.
Jayden
Illustrator/Designer
Jayden Fandrick graduated from the University of Alberta’s Visual Communications Design program in 2022, providing her with the most current and complete education available in an ever-changing design landscape. Adjunct to her degree is a Diploma in Illustration & Sequential Art, which aligns perfectly with Curio’s approach of applying classic illustration techniques to solving design problems. Jayden’s rich experience in sales and customer service make her the ideal Team Lead for Client Relationship Management, a role that sees her constantly improving the partnership experience for our esteemed and extensive roster of clients.
Jayden’s book collection has surpassed what criminal profilers would characterize as “unhealthy” a long, long time ago.