Meet the team who are organizing the ATypI 2024 Brisbane conference, the Griffith University organising committee. Detailed biographies are below.
- Associate Professor Dr Dominique Falla — Design academic and Typism founder
- Dr David Sargent — Design academic and WIL coordinator
- Dr Libbi Reed — Sessional academic
- Dr Yanqiao Jiang — CARI event coordinator
- Pascale Schmid — Sessional academic and doctoral candidate
- Skye Smith — Sessional academic and doctoral candidate
- Aurelie Maron — Sessional academic and professional lettering artist.
- Siva Kalyan
Dr Dominique Falla
Associate Professor Dr Dominique Falla is a design academic with over 25 years of experience in design education and is passionate about helping creatives become Creative Entrepreneurs. She achieves this through her research and teaching at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), Griffith University and her Creative Spark podcast, where she provides insights and tips for aspiring entrepreneurs.
As a design academic focusing on creative entrepreneurship, Dominique develops curricula and mentors students from the Bachelor of Design and Business, particularly encouraging and supporting entrepreneurial ventures. An entrepreneur herself, she also founded Typism—a unique type and lettering community for lettering artists.
Typism has given Dominique extensive experience in organising the annual conference. Since its inception in 2013, she has been the driving force behind the event, growing from a modest 120 attendees to over 300 yearly. The conference features internationally recognised speakers, workshops, and networking and is a key Australian event for typographers, lettering artists, and designers.
Dominique completed a Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA) at Griffith University in 2014. Her research investigated Tactile Typography and established her as a creative practitioner of international standing.
Dr David Sargent
David is a design practitioner passionate about design that engages users, communicates information, and sparks social change. He specialises in typeface design, expressive lettering, and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, with his works exhibited in Australian and international institutions.
As Creative Director of Liveworm, a full-service work-integrated learning design studio, David prepares design students for lifelong creative careers by engaging them with real-world projects. He also serves as the Major Convenor of Visual Communication Design at the South Bank and Gold Coast campuses of Griffith University.
David teaches various design courses, including publication layout, typeface design, brand identity, design thinking, and digital user interface design. David was awarded a Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA) degree from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in 2019, where he researched emerging communication design technologies. Additionally, he completed the Type West Postgraduate Certificate in Type Design through The Letterform Archive in San Francisco, California, in 2022.
Dr Libbi Reed
Libbi is a designer, lettering artist and illustrator who loves helping people visualise their thoughts, transforming their meaningful insights and experiences into creative and engaging sketchnotes. She teaches design, drawing, sketchnoting and typography in the Queensland College of Art design program.
Libbi uses sketchnotes to unpack and make sense of her thoughts, understand complex things, and help her remember what she’s learned. Sketchnotes tap into multiple learning modalities that use more brain power to synthesise and creatively explore an idea differently.
Libbi’s doctoral research focused on sensemaking, which involves making meaning out of information and experiences, and she discovered that sketchnoting is an effective tool for this purpose.
Since teaching sketchnotes at Griffith University, Libbi is excited to move the sketchnote process into personal sensemaking. Using a sensemaking framework with sketchnoting has been invaluable in reaching her goals. At the beginning of 2021, she completed a Doctor of Visual Arts, sketchnoting her way to completion.
Dr Yanqiao Jiang
Yanqiao is a professional graphic designer with a Doctor of Visual Arts degree and an alumnus of the Queensland College of Art (QCA) at Griffith University. With a wealth of experience in branding and corporate communication projects, Yanqiao specialises in exploring cross-cultural design.
Her strengths include brand design, offering relevant design support to various departments, especially in typeface design and asset delivery, and collaborating with professional companies to deliver design assets within budget.
Yanqiao has worked for multiple organisations, from corporations with multiple brands in China to the Griffith University Creative Arts Research Institute as a designer and curator. She has also organised events for the Creative Arts Research Institute, providing guidance and assistance in launching events.
Pascale Schmid
Pascale Schmid is a Swiss/Australian type designer, researcher, educator, and author with a background in commercial aviation. She completed a Bachelor of Design Futures & Honours at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art (QCA) in Brisbane in 2018 and is pursuing a PhD.
Her research project focuses on developing a Variable font (V1) for Electronic Flight Bags that prioritises user-centred typeface design and maximum legibility. In addition to her research, Pascale teaches typography courses at QCA and Multimedia Design at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She has also worked for The Boeing Company on one of their typefaces used in flight deck systems.
Pascale is fascinated by the creative process and the impact of small changes on an entire typeface. She is also a published author, creating an eBook series for aspiring flight attendants and a user guide for rescue greyhounds.
Skye Smith
Skye is a passionate graphic designer, tutor, lecturer, researcher, and yoga teacher. She believes in the power of design to shape our world and is driven by a desire to create a better world through design. Skye’s approach to design considers the complex and interconnected nature of contemporary challenges such as climate change, waste proliferation, and escalating mental and physical health conditions, emphasising the importance of deep and collective understanding in solving complex problems.
Skye completed her Bachelor of Design in 2008 and worked in the design and advertising industry for four years, becoming aware of design’s role in encouraging mass consumption. In 2013, Skye completed her Master of Digital Design, where she researched the link between technological advancements and declining social networks. She now teaches full-time in the Queensland College of Art design program.
Skye is researching Circular Design for her PhD. With her research, Skye hopes to contribute to the development of design practices that consider the entire life cycle of a product and its impact on the environment. In addition, through her teaching and research, Skye strives to inspire her students to think critically and creatively about design, encouraging them to use design as a tool for positive change.
Aurelie Maron
Aurelie is a well-known lettering artist based in Gold Coast, Australia. She was awarded a Bachelor of Digital Media from Griffith University in 2010, where she developed her passion for typography. Her lifelong love for drawing has fueled her devotion to mastering the art of typography.
Aurelie has spoken at multiple type and lettering conferences, including Typism, inspiring established and emerging artists and designers. She also teaches typography at Griffith University, passing on her knowledge to the next generation of designers.
Aurelie operates her own design business from her home studio and is dedicated to providing exceptional results for every client on every creative project. Through her online courses, Aurelie shares her knowledge with aspiring designers and hand letterers. In addition, she enjoys helping others discover the magic of typography and hand lettering through practical workshops and coaching.
Siva Kalyan
Siva Kalyan is a typography enthusiast with a background in mathematics and linguistics, and a growing interest in AI. He is currently developing a tool to automate optical scaling.