Meet The Judges — The Australian Book Design Awards 2017
The ABDA committee is pleased to announce the judges of the 2017 awards. With experience across a wide range of publishing, design, academic and media platforms, we’re thrilled to have them on board to uncover the best and brightest, most original and beautiful designs of the last year.
DAN WAGSTAFF is Publicity and Marketing Manager at Publishers Group Canada, a Canadian book distributor that works with independent publishers from the US, UK, Canada and Australia. He is the author of The Casual Optimist, a popular blog about books, book design, book culture and publishing. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Toronto.
MICHELLE MACKINTOSH is an award-winning book designer, author and illustrator with a passion for mixing up the discarded with the new. She has designed dozens of books on a wide range of topics, from cookbooks and craft to city guides and diaries. She has illustrated six books written by her husband Steve Wide, co-authored two city guides Tokyo Precincts and Kyoto Precincts, and turned her love of analogue correspondence into the books Snail Mail and Care Packages.
SUSAN WYNDHAM has been a journalist for more than 30 years and literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald for 12 years. She is the author of Life in His Hands: the true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist, and contributing editor of My Mother, My Father: on losing a parent.
MURRAY BATTEN is a Melbourne based multi-disciplinary designer who has worked in the areas of branding, digital and publishing design since graduating with a Bachelor of Design from RMIT in 2011. He currently works as a Senior Digital Designer at Deloitte Digital, as well as freelancing as a book designer. Over the past five years he has worked on both the art direction and design of an extensive range of illustrated book titles in the areas of food, photography and fashion.
REG ABOS is an award-winning designer and lecturer who runs the design consultancy Studio Regina. Her passion and expertise lie in book design, having worked extensively with publishers such as Oxford University Press, Black Dog Books (an imprint of Walker Books) and UNICEF. Reg also lectures in Data Visualisation, her other big passion. She runs a blog called Collected where she designs info graphics on everything from hot chocolates she consumes to the songs stuck in her head.
STUART GEDDES is a graphic designer and occasional publisher, mostly of books, and occasionally other kinds of projects (magazines and journals, exhibitions and websites). He also co-publishes/edits/designs/prints motorcycle magazine Head Full of Snakes, and is an industry fellow, researcher and PhD candidate at RMIT University.
FOONG LING KONG has two decades’ experience in the publishing industry as an editor and a publisher of books across a wide range of genres, from children’s books to fiction, non-fiction and illustrated titles. She has worked in-house at Penguin, Hardie Grant, Melbourne University Press and Allen & Unwin, and freelanced for most Australian publishing houses. She was Managing Editor of Anne Summers Reports and is presently working at the Parliament of Victoria as Editor of Debates.
SARAH JANE JONES has 20 years experience in Visual Communication Design in Singapore, Auckland, Christchurch and Sydney and lectures in Visual Communication Design at The University of Technology, Sydney. She is currently responsible for the second year Typography core subject, Print Production electives and Environmental Graphics subjects and is also a PhD student (researching in the field of Typography and Environmental Graphics). Sarah Jane has won Australian Graphic Design Awards; been a finalist in the New Zealand Best Awards, and represented UTS at the 2015 AGDA Awards.
MELANIE FEDDERSEN has more than 20 years design experience. In 2000, she started i2i Design – a small design studio with a focus on publishing and the arts – after working at Harper Collins Publishers, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Studio Duenk in Amsterdam. She is chuffed to have received some awards on her way. Melanie has spent more than seven years learning traditional to contemporary bookbinding techniques and collecting letterpress fonts. She is inspired by meshing the old, the new and the tactile.