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Opening schedule confirmed...

visit our website for more details www.abc-nz.org

I'm please to be able to announce our schedule for the opening of the conference on Friday 24th October, full details can be found here

There is just one space left on Dominic Riley's Creative Gold Tooling masterclass, don't miss out!

Here is another wee taster of what you can expect at the conference:

SARAH MAXEY: POETRY IN GRAPHIC DESIGN

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.—robert frost

I’m interested in the idea of poetic thinking in graphic design—by this I mean the use of nuance, suggestion, playfulness and lyricism. 
I have worked for 20 or so years designing books for literary publishers both in New Zealand and in the UK. Inspired by my work on poetry books in particular, I have become preoccupied with concrete poetry—that in which the physical form of the type carries as much intent as the text itself. Language has such potential for double meaning, for simultaneous hilarity and melancholy, recognition and mystery. When coupled with expressive and sympathetic typography, it becomes that rare territory where type and image and meaning are equal partners. 
Illustrated with examples of design for poetry books from my own archive and pieces of concrete poetry, my talk will explore how this way of thinking can be used in problem-solving, often with delightfully unexpected results.
I will concentrate on two recent projects:
Sentimental Journey, a collaboration between a poet (Kate camp), a book designer (Sarah Maxey) and typeface designer (Kris sowersby) based on the surrealist game The Exquisite Corpse, using expressive typography. What began as something of a folly between friends went on to become a significant and influential project, winning two major design awards.
World Animal, a personal project about deliberately breaking established patterns of perception. Devised by two graphic artists working together from opposite sides of the world (Wellington & Birmingham UK), it has developed into something unforeseen—a new and lateral way of viewing our surroundings, a sort of visual poetry.

BIOGRAPHY

Sarah Maxey is a graphic artist. Her distinctive work has graced publications worldwide, including the New-York Times and many literary  books. she worked for Bloomsbury Publishing in London in the mid-90s, and for the intervening years has run her own studio specialising in print design for the arts. she has won numerous awards, most recently the 2011 Purple Pin, the highest graphic design accolade in her native New Zealand and a certificate of Excellence from the International society of typographers. Her work appears inArtists’ Postcards: a Compendium, by Jeremy cooper (Reaktion books UK, 2012), and Cover Up, by Hamish Thompson (Random House NZ, 2007).