Industry Impact & Leadership: The AGDA Tenure

From 2014 to 2019, I served as National Editor of the Australian Graphic Design Association, Australia's peak body for graphic design, where I curated and shaped national design discourse for a membership base of thousands. The centrepiece of this role was the monthly Quick Squiz newsletter and its associated digital platforms, through which I conducted nearly 200 interviews with figures across every level of the profession. Subjects ranged from internationally recognised practitioners such as Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic and Jonathan Ellery from Browns, to emerging voices at events like First Five Out, with each conversation translated into content that was at once intellectually serious and broadly accessible.

The role demands careful framing, because it resists easy categorisation. It was not a publishing job, though it produced publications. It was not a communications role, though it shaped national discourse. It was not a stakeholder engagement position, though it required me to operate with confidence and sensitivity across every tier of the profession, from board members and studio principals to students submitting their first piece of public writing. What it demanded, above all, was Cultural Strategy: the ability to hold a profession's identity in mind as a living, breathing, continuously contested entity, and to make editorial decisions about tone, emphasis, inclusion, and timing that nudged that identity in directions that serve the field's long-term health.

The practical outcome of conducting those nearly 200 high-profile interviews is a form of professional capital that is difficult to replicate: a trust-architecture built across the full breadth of the Australian design community, from graduates to senior partners. In Melbourne, where the design sector is dense, interconnected, and relationship-driven, this history of industry-wide engagement is an immediate operational asset. Victoria's creative industries — a $31.6 billion sector and the subject of a $288 million government investment under Creative State 2021-2025 — increasingly prioritise exactly the kind of Knowledge Exchange capability this tenure demonstrates (Victorian Government, 2021). The content operations maturity I developed across five years of managing complex, multi-stakeholder publishing channels maps directly onto strategic communications, content design, research translation, and programme coordination roles across the consultancy, government, and not-for-profit sectors.