julie mader-meersman is a graphic designer, visual artist, and design educator. she earned her mfa in visual communication design from the university of washington school of art, seattle in 1996. for four years following, she was the senior designer at whittington & company, a marketing and communications firm in austin, texas. there, she did design, art direction, and project management encompassing the entire creative process for editorial, informational, and commercial projects including corporate, institutional, and product brochures; magazines; identities; catalogues; annual reports; posters; billboards; newsletters; trade show exhibits; web sites; and self-promotional items.
after moving to minnesota, she telecommuted for whittington & company before becoming assistant professor of graphic design at minnesota state university moorhead in 2000. there she also served as design and production director of new rivers press, a non-profit literary small press. a native of kentucky, in 2003, she began teaching in the visual communication design program at her undergraduate alma mater, northern kentucky university (bfa graphic design, 1993), where she is now a full professor. she has extensive freelance experience, having done work for clients spanning entrepreneurs to major corporations, universities to mid-sized companies, and nonprofit organizations.
her research areas include electronic and traditional forms of publication and book design, artist’s books, design history, design pedagogy, typography, graphic culture, information design, interaction design, sustainable design, visible language systems, and women’s issues. as an extension of her love and interest in typography, publication/book design, creative processes and their impact, in her independent fine art, she produces mixed media works that focus on thoughts and questions on the definition and conveyance of meaning; personal narrative/experience; domestic life; the visual/physical properties of words and books; and the processes of recording, cataloging, mapping and documenting meaning and experience.
her art, design and research have been presented broadly, including in venues and publications such as the resurrecting the book conference (library of birmingham, birmingham, uk), the carnegie center for visual and performing arts (covington, ky), the aiga head/heart/hand conference (minneapolis, mn), the riffe gallery of the ohio arts council (columbus, oh), how magazine, the arts + literature laboratory gallery (new haven, ct); manifest creative research gallery and drawing center (cincinnati, oh); communication arts magazine; aiga/cincinnati origination design competition; print magazine; plains art museum (fargo, nd); the aiga/minnesota design show of excellence (minneapolis, mn); the national design educator’s exhibition (stillwater, ok); the gallery of nbbj (seattle, wa); teaching graphic design: course offerings and class projects from the leading undergraduate and graduate programs, edited by steven heller; masters: collage, edited by randel plowman; and in a/b/c: an exhibition of altered books and experimental artists’ books (the gallery, university of northampton, northampton, uk).
