Hello, I’m Nick and I’m a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Graphic Design undergraduate degree course. I have been teaching since 2013 and joined Leeds Arts University in 2019. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I have worked commercially as an independent graphic designer and illustrator for over fifteen years and my commercial practice centres around brand identity and book design under the studio moniker Totally Okay.

My research focuses on print and screen-based narratives, interrogating the structure of the image and the potential of co-authorship, exploring emergent qualities of encounters in the everyday.

In 2022 I co-authored, edited and designed the book Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design (Deakin and Dyer, 2022) in which I consider how graphic designs are not static, but that they go on living beyond the ideal intention of their designers and inevitably slip back from the ideal into the mundanely real. This research continues to evolve through a series of talks, exhibitions and workshops expanding on the themes foregrounded in Graphic Events.

Books

Deakin, Nick and Dyer, James (2022) Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design. Onomatopee, Eindhoven

Articles

Deakin, Nick and Dyer, James (2020) Everyday graphic design. Evental Aesthetics, 9 (1).

Exhibitions

Deakin, Nick (2018) Uncanny valley. Temporary Contemporary, Market Gallery, Huddersfield. 7 – 21 December, 2018.