Julie Mader-Meersman

Julie Mader-Meersman is a graphic designer, artist, and design educator. In her role as Professor of Visual Communication Design in the School of the Arts at Northern Kentucky University, she recently completed a fall 2024 sabbatical to design and create the “css Dollhouse,” a web design resource for artists and designers (nku.edu/cssdollhouse). This work included a two-week Maker-Creator Fellowship residency at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library (the former Wilmington, Delaware home-turned-museum of Henry Francis du Pont & family), where she conducted environmental and artifact research for the project that helped lead to the site’s maximalist, digital curiosity cabinet of coding micro-demos.

In her design practice, Julie focuses on creating high-quality, research-driven design largely for non-profit, community, and arts-based organizations/projects. Her work covers a wide range of media, client, and project types, including creative direction, brand design and promotion, and ui/ux design and consultation. Her designs have been recognized in regional, national, and international publications and competitions, including the Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards, Graphis, Communication Arts Design Annual, the aiga Cincinnati Origination Design Competition, the aiga Minnesota Design Show of Excellence, How Magazine, and in the book, “Teaching Graphic Design: Course Offerings and Class Projects from the Leading Undergraduate and Graduate Programs,” by Steven Heller, among others. Lovers of Cincinnati food trucks may be familiar with her truck designs for Marty’s Waffles and Red Sesame Korean bbq.

As a practicing artist, her work in mixed media/collage and artist books appears in publications, exhibitions, and permanent collections, such as Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library, and the Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell Collection. She has presented in academic and corporate venues, including: Design Principles and Practices: Design as Collective Intelligence, Procter & Gamble’s Feminity Today forum, and the Resurrecting the Book conference in Birmingham, UK. Julie holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the University of Washington.