Jonathan is one of the most well-known graphic designers in Britain. Since 1990 he has chosen to work with a mixture of cultural institutions, activist groups and charities as well as completing a steady stream of personal posters. He is also known for his collaborations with Adbusters, Damien Hirst, his work for David Bowie and his ubiquitous fonts designs released through Emigre and his company Virusfonts. His contribution to graphic design was recognised by a major exhibition at the Design Museum in London. His monograph, published by Rizzoli is available here.

Ellen is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).

Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is used by students, designers, and educators worldwide. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art. The Lupton twins’ latest book is Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (St Martin’s Griffin, 2009).

Other books include Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008) and Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006).

Ellen is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S.

Ellen has contributed to various publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has published essays and illustrations in The New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Ellen will speak about design to anyone who will listen.

Ben is Publishing Director of Penguin Australia, overseeing the editorial and design processes. He has worked in publishing for fifteen years in Australia and the UK.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an internationally renowned cultural critic based in Chicago. A Fulbright scholar, UN Press Fellow, and the Truthout columnist behind Ladydrawers: Gender and Comics in the US, she is the author of several award-winning books. Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh (Cantankerous Titles, 2011) received a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for best book from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation in 2012. Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004) made Yes! Magazine‘s list of “Media That Set Us Free” and Reclaim the Media’s 2004 Media and Democracy Summer Reading List. The first Best American Comics made both Entertainment Weekly‘s “Must List” and Publishers Weekly‘s Bestsellers List. Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007) made Reclaim the Media’s 2007 Media and Democracy Summer Reading list and was named a Best Book of the Year by Mother Jones. Anne herself was recently called a “general phenom” by the Chicago Reader and “one of the sharpest thinkers and cultural critics bouncing around the globe today” by Razorcake.

Anne has worked with young women in Cambodia on independent media projects, and with people of all ages and genders on media and gender justice work in the US. Her journalism focuses on the international garment trade. Anne exhibits her work frequently as conceptual art, and has been the subject of two documentary films. She has lectured around the world on independent media, globalization, and women’s labor issues. Co-editor and publisher of the now-defunct Punk Planet, and founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches in the Visual Critical Studies and Art History departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The multi-award-winning author has also written for The Baffler, N+1, Al Jazeera, Good, Snap Judgment, Bitch, the Progressive, The Onion, Feministing, Snap Judgment, The Stranger, In These Times, The Boston Phoenix, and Tin House. She has twice been noted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series. She has appeared on CNN, WNUR, WFMU, WBEZ, Voice of America, GritTV with Laura Flanders, Radio Australia, and NPR’s Worldview, and others. Anne mounted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2011 and in 2012 participated in Artisterium, the Republic of Georgia’s annual art invitational. Her work appeared in the 2008 Whitney Biennale, has been exhibited in the Spinnerei in Leipzig Germany in 2010, and made up one of the first conceptual art exhibitions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2010. Her work has been featured in USA Today, Marie Claire, Phnom Penh Post, Portland Mercury, Bust, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out Chicago, Hyphen Magazine, Truthout, Make/Shift, Bookslut, Today’s Chicago Woman, New York Review of Books, Windy City Times, Print Magazine, and the New York Times, among many more. She has lectured at close to a hundred universities, libraries, alternative spaces, and conferences around the globe.

Her good friend and one of her favourite writers Elizabeth Crane wrote a short story about her that was widely reviewed, and thus the Village Voice once called Moore a “Possibly perfect protagonist.” Washington City Paper mused she must be “A woman who has always been comfortable in her own skin,” and Hipster Book Club called her “A perfect altruistic punk-rock super-heroine.”

Her recent book New Girl Law: Drafting a Future for Cambodia (Cantankerous Titles, 2013), the follow-up to Cambodian Grrrl, was called “a post-Empirical proto-fourth-wave feminist memoir” by Bust. She likes cats and pie.

From being described as a ‘typographic evangelist’ by Eye magazine through to being cross-examined by Julian Burnside QC as a typographic expert in the Federal Court, Stephen has lived a life full of type. He is founder of Letterbox, a typographic studio based in Melbourne, Australia. Rather than writing about how to kern Clarendon Bold at 144 point, Banham’s typographic explorations centre on the social and cultural aspects of letterforms. He has written and produced over 16 publications on typography, including the Qwerty series (1991-96), the Ampersand series, Fancy (2004) and the Oblique series (2008–). His latest book, Characters: Cultural Stories revealed through typography, was published by Thames and Hudson and is available here.

Banham’s design work and writings have appeared in countless type international publications. He has spoken at international design events from Barcelona to Beirut, New Zealand to New York. A member of the International Society of Typographic Designers, Banham has been a lecturer in typography since 1991 and holds a Masters in Design Research. In 2011 he was awarded a creative fellowship at the State Library of Victoria.

Born in Norwich, UK (1965), Nick left school at 16. He studied graphic design during the economic boom years of the mid 1980s. Enthusiastically, on a BTEC National Diploma at Great Yarmouth College of Art and Design and then earnestly on a BA at the London College of Printing (now LCC). He entered the design profession in 1987 at the time of the Black Monday stock market crash.

Foolhardy as it might seem, Nick set up his own design practice in 1988 yet quickly found a voice that chimed with a moment suffused with a cocktail of Cranbrookian anxieties and Studio Dumbar-esque excess. His overwrought and somewhat precious early efforts recorded in the compilation that was to launch graphic design publishing – Typography Now, edited by Rick Poynor.

Much more recently, Nick Bell has become reasonably well known, in the museum world, for his studio’s collaborations in exhibition design (notably with Casson Mann) and before that for his creative directorship of Eye, the graphic design magazine of critical writing – college tutors may remember him, should current students be drawing a blank.

In 1992 (the year of Black Wednesday when the British Conservative government blew £3.3 billion withdrawing the pound from the ERM) the Californian design magazine Emigre devoted an entire issue to Nick Bell’s work, that of his students at LCP, and to his critical thinking and teaching methodology – that which it was at this time at least. Rick Poynor would later hold up this particular issue as evidence of Emigre editor Rudy VanderLans’ aversion to editing.

The Nick Bell who was D&AD President in 2003 is not the same Nick Bell – he is a high-flying advertising creative director. In 2008 (year of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression) our Nick Bell was appointed Visiting Professor of Graphic Design at London’s Royal College of Art. He is now a Visiting Critic.

In 2009, (the year the Royal Bank of Scotland posted the biggest annual loss in British corporate history of £24 billion whilst granting a £693,000 a year pension to their former chief executive) Nick became a member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI).

A little self-consciously, Nick sees his career to date as falling into four distinct episodes. One: leaning on others to live cheaply enough to afford to experiment and learn. Two: keeping a lid on overheads so the work can remain fulfilling. Three: working for a Russian billionaire. Four: not working for the Russian billionaire.

Nick Bell would like it known that he has had to sell his house and studio on two separate occasions to keep his business afloat. He says that he has only made money on property – apart from the brief period with the billionaire. Bell lives in London’s East End with his partner and young daughter.

Born in Paris in 1942, Pierre studied graphic design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris. He studied poster art in Warsaw with Henryk Tomaszewski and went on to obtain his master’s degree from the Institut de l’Environment in Paris in 1971.

Pierre founded Grapus in 1970 with two graphic designer friends, Gérard Paris-Clavel and François Miehe, who were joined by Alex Jordan and Jean-Paul Bachollet in 1976. Twenty years later, in 1990, Grapus ceased its activities. That same year, the group was awarded the French Grand Prix National des Arts Graphiques.

He then founded the Atelier de Création Graphique and designed, among other projects, the visual identities of the Louvre Museum and the French National Parks. From 2001 until 2008 the Atelier designed posters and communications material for the Pompidou Center.

An AGI member since 1987, Pierre taught graphic design at ENSAD until 2007. He was awarded the 2006 Erasmus Prize for his work in the area of “design for the public domain.”

Pierre Bernard died on 23 November 2015.

Tony leads the Master of Design Futures program and teaches Design Futures theory courses across all disciplines at QCA, Griffith University. He is a designer, design theorist, cultural theorist, educator and farmer. He was the founding director of the EcoDesign Foundation, Sydney (1991-2001) and formerly Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, (1998-2001); Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney (1996-2001); Associate Director University of Sydney National Key Centre of Design Quality (1991-92); Senior Lecturer in Design History and Theory, Power Institute, University of Sydney (1985-96).

He has held visiting professorships, lectureships and fellowships at universities in Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA. As a consultant Tony has worked in many areas of design, sustainability and futures for the corporate sector, professional organisations and government. He was also an environmental design manager for several Sydney Olympics venues. Tony has been a member of award winning design teams for both national and international projects and design competitions.

Tony is the author of ten books, numerous book chapters and articles. His latest book – Becoming Human by Design by Berg Publishers is available here.