About the Author
After working in the graphic design and communications industry in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and London for 20 years, specialising in tourism, conservation and packaging design, Suzie became an academic. Teaching and managing in both the vocational education and higher education sectors has allowed Suzie to gain a wealth of knowledge of the design industry, as well as management and teaching practice. To supplement this knowledge Suzie has a Master of Arts (print media), an Executive Masters of Business Administration and a Graduate Diploma of Vocational Education. Suzie has written on design practice for a number of Australian publications. She currently holds the position of Academic Manager at JMC Academy.
Astred Hicks is a Sydney-based graphic designer whose freelance business Design Cherry specialises in book design. Since being awarded an Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design from the Design Centre Enmore (Sydney Institute TAFE NSW) in 2001, Astred has worked with a number of publishers, most recently McGraw-Hill Education, where she was Art Director for three years. She was featured in Curvy 4 and her work has appeared in the publications Curvy and Curvy 2 and the magazines Empty, Desktop Graphics and Noise.
In the Australian Publishers Association Book Design Awards Astred has been Commended and Highly Commended for her design and art direction for several years running. An active member of Australia's online design community, Astred is a vocal advocate for women in the industry and was the founder of Nest Collective, an online site created to promote and inspire female designers.
Andrew Barnum is a Sydney-based designer, design educator and artist (singer-songwriter, poet and painter) who holds an Associate Diploma Arts/Graphic Arts from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Master of Arts (Research) from the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney(UTS). He has been a design educator since 1999, when he started lecturing for both Billy Blue and UTS Viscom.
Since 2006, he has been Head of College at the Billy Blue College of Design, responsible for Billy Blue's shift to delivering Bachelor of Applied Design degrees in the higher education sector.
With his wife Lissa, he is a partner of The Barnum Group, which has been communications designer for coporations (Macquarie Bank, Ord Minnett, HongKong Bank, Sydney Futures Exchange), community (Clean up the world, Clean up Australia) and the arts (Sydney Dance Company, Bloomers, Art Bank) in Sydney since 1981, when they relocated from Los Angeles.
The Barnum Group has won AGDA awards and Hollywood Reporter Foreign Press awards, and has been highly commended by the Australian Publishers Association Book Design Awards for the book Girlosophy. The Barnums had video-music hits as electropop duo Vitabeats in the 1980s, and since then Andrew has produced four original solo albums, the most recent being the double CD/book Feed the Clouds - The Interactive Songbook, featuring the work of 25 artists and illustrators.
Felix's family has historically been involved in forestry, arms sales, shipping, baking, civil engineering and printmaking (and other visual arts) on his father's side, and on his mother's side printing (newspapers and books). He himself has studied chemical engineering, inorganic chemistry, German, some French and Italian and economics before finally settling down to study graphic design at Billy Blue. During the mid-2000s he also completed a Masters of Design at UTS.
In addition to being involved with three graphic design businesses during his career, he has also worked as a barman, and as a clerk in a courthouse. Felix's first contact with design was seeing his grandmother's woodblock prints (mostly bookplates and some book illustrations) and later muchking about on and old Heidelberg platen press, printing hot metal linotype slugs in reflex blue (the only colour available). he has a growing interest in typography and letterpress.
