Our Guest Speakers
Dr Claire Timpany – Senior Lecturer of Design, University of Waikato
Dr Claire Timpany is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the University of Waikato. She never planned on working at the University, instead wanting to work in branding, publication or interaction design, but she took a chance and discovered she enjoyed the combination of teaching and research. Her love of books, especially interactive books, the design of books, and the typography used in books, has led her into research how people interact with information.
The current focus of Claire’s research is how the typefaces we choose, and the way we visually show the structure of a document will impact how easy it is to access and understand the content. Lately this has specifically meant she has been exploring how best to emphasise headings within text to help people search for information.
In her teaching at the University she covers a range of areas; she runs the Internship programme, teaches Design History at first year and, and with the second year students teaches a course raising the awareness of cultural and social issues within design.
James Cleary – Head of Creative, King St.
James is currently the Head of Creative at King St where he has helped forge a creative team whose process consistently leads to work that sings. The last few years has seen this team create stand out work for some of the our most loved places, institutions and brands from Rotorua tourism council to the University of Waikato and more.
Before returning to New Zealand 3 years ago he worked as creative for a decade in London at a handful of the worlds biggest and most exciting agencies. The multi-disciplinary process based approach he was taught at the fine arts department in the University of Canterbury has enabled him to work on a wide variety of projects spanning the worlds of fashion, advertising, music & art with world leading brands such as Levis, The Times (London), HSBC, Google, Absolut and HTC.
Connecting the creative community
A meetup for Graphic Designers | Webdesigners | Illustrators | Creative Directors | Photographers | Copywriters | Videographers | Marketing Managers
Join us for drinks and canapés while you hear from industry leaders like Loryn Engelsman, Oriel Davis-Lyons (Spotify), Alexander Wastney, Maria Low, Jeremy Johnson and many more as they talk about their creativity, inspiration and of course, their process.
Thanks to our event sponsors

