Details
Free, no booking required
NGV Federation Court
180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC, Australia
Dates
Fri 15 May 3 – 4pm
Presented by the Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) this engaging panel discussion explores publication design within the evolving landscape of contemporary museums. As institutions expand beyond traditional exhibitions, publications ranging from catalogues to experimental print and digital formats play a critical role in shaping how audiences experience, interpret, and remember art.
This conversation brings together leading publication designers to examine how editorial and visual strategies respond to the unique demands of the museum context. Topics will include the balance between scholarship and accessibility, the impact of digital platforms on print practices, and the ways design can extend curatorial narratives beyond gallery walls.
Panelists will share insights into collaborative processes, material choices, and the challenges of designing for diverse audiences. The discussion will also address sustainability, distribution, and the future of publishing as museums reimagine their role in public discourse. This event offers a valuable opportunity to gain behind-the-scenes perspectives and participate in a dynamic exchange about the intersection of design, publishing, and contemporary art practice.
Participants
Megan Patty (moderator)
Megan Patty is the founding Curator of the Melbourne Art Book Fair.
Stuart Geddes
Stuart Geddes is a graphic designer working mostly with books. Stuart is also a lecturer, researcher and PhD candidate at RMIT University, where his research interests converge around the form of the book, through collaboration, emerging histories, and material practices. In Stuart’s practice, the book is a medium of primary focus, and the exploration of book design as a discursive practice is a primary idea—how books come to exist out of a complex set of relationships, and how books then operate as actors in the world.
Karina Soraya
Karina Soraya is a designer based in Naarm / Melbourne. A co-publisher of Mode and Mode — a periodical that addresses printed matter in fashion practice — she is also a graphic designer at the National Gallery of Victoria. Most recent publication projects include Westwood | Kawakubo, A Legacy of Light: Women Photographers 1900–1975, Precarious Movements and Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection.
Ela Egidy
Ela Egidy is a typographer, book designer, and researcher. She is a Lecturer in Design at the University of Melbourne and a PhD candidate researching the prototypographic practices of nuns in early modern Italy. Her research emphasises critical feminist perspectives to study typography in its varied forms, spanning commodity feminism and the fetishisation of language, design’s relationship to control and dissent, and sixteenth century bibliography.
Though these areas may seem disparate they are all connected by an unyielding fascination with the materialities of language and their sociopolitical implications. Ela’s dual engagement, as practitioner and researcher, allows her to approach printed artefacts both as historical objects of study and as sites of embodied expressions of practice.