
Undaunted
Undaunted was the 2021 spring portfolio show for North Idaho College's Graphic & Web Design program, presenting the work of the fifteen students graduating that year at the Jacklin Arts Cultural Center on April 23, in person and on a Facebook Live stream. The class built the site that carried all fifteen portfolios and named the show with one word, printing the dictionary definition of it on the opening screen under the line "resolutely strong". They also attached a game: a scavenger hunt of fifteen questions, one answer hidden in each student's portfolio, with a prize bundle of the graduates' sample work mailed to a winner.
Undaunted represents the graduating cohort of 2021 and the work they developed together during their time in the program.

Show Name
Undaunted
Year
2021
Students
15
Pitched By
Not listed
The Concept
Why “Undaunted”?
The class never argued for the name. They defined it. The opening screen of the site carries one line of body copy, and that line is the dictionary entry: "un·daunt·ed /ˌənˈdôn(t)əd/ adjective: not intimidated or discouraged by difficulty, danger, or disappointment." Above it sits the tagline "resolutely strong", which is also set permanently into the logo lockup. The only other statement anywhere on the site is a single first person sentence, on a link page the navigation never points to: "North Idaho College's Graphic Design students are back, and we are UNDAUNTED." That is the whole concept as the cohort published it.
What the copy leaves unsaid, the artwork argues. The A in UNDAUNTED is a hollow equilateral triangle, and that triangle then detaches from the word and works on its own as the show's mark in the header and the footer. In every banner it stands beside NIC's own logo, which is a mountain. A letter that doubles as a mountain, placed next to the college's mountain and set inside a word about not being discouraged, does the work the copy never does. Why the cohort chose the word is not recorded anywhere on the site.
Show Identity
The Brand Behind Undaunted
One typeface runs the whole site. The stylesheet imports Jost from Google Fonts across the full range, 100 to 900 with italics, and applies it with the universal selector, so every heading, caption and form field is Jost, and every heading is forced to uppercase. Jost is a geometric sans in the Futura line, which is the same skeleton the wordmark is drawn from: UNDAUNTED in white all caps with the A replaced by a hollow outlined triangle, and RESOLUTELY STRONG beneath it in a lighter weight, tracked out. There is no second family, no serif anywhere, and no vector of the wordmark. Every UNDAUNTED asset the site serves is a PNG.
The page ground is black with white type, and the colour lives in two gradient colourways laid over one piece of geometry. The main site runs crimson to orange, #8c021b through #de2312 to #ff7c01, starting from NIC's own cardinal and running out past scarlet; the splash door and the scavenger hunt section run purple to magenta, #843092 through #b62790 to #dc098c, with yellow at #fcb016 and #ffd82e for the gift illustration. Underneath both sits the same texture, large equilateral triangles tessellated edge to edge at slightly varied opacity. Every page header is then split by a steep diagonal, a solid black panel on the left carrying the NIC mountain logo and "North Idaho College", cutting into the triangle field on the right carrying the show lockup, so the seam is itself a triangle edge and the device and the texture become one idea at two scales. The build is mobile first by declaration, the stylesheet opening with "Remember - MOBILE FIRST! Thanks (:", and each section ships a 601x401 portrait banner and a 1894x447 landscape one that swap by CSS class. The student grid is auto-fill 300px columns with 300x200 thumbnails, one card per graduate. The only named accent in the stylesheet, a coral #ed605a, is declared for a home header panel and never used in the markup.




Development Process
How Undaunted Was Built
Like every GDES Portfolio Show, the students planned and produced Undaunted themselves, from the first idea to opening night.
Concept Pitched
A student pitched the concept that became this show's identity.
Concept Selected
Faculty and advisors selected the concept to represent the graduating class.
Show Produced
The class collaborated on branding, web design, marketing, and exhibition.
Work Presented
Student portfolios were presented to faculty, peers, and professionals.
Industry Judges & Advisors
Members of the GDES Technical Advisory Committee often participate as judges and mentors during the annual portfolio show. Meet the Advisory Committee →
Graduating Class
The Students of Undaunted
15 students presented their portfolios as part of the 2021 GDES Portfolio Show.
Explore More
Browse all student work, view the full student directory, or schedule a visit to learn more about the program.











