I’m a recovering political theorist turned graphic designer and design researcher. I completed a PhD in political theory at Indiana University Bloomington in 2004, and an MFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. I’m an assistant professor of graphic design at Iowa State University, where I teach and study typography, design ethics, and computational creative design.
I’ve contributed numerous type and book reviews to Typographica and Fonts in Use. And I have two book projects underway: one is on the semiotic and creative potential of constructed scripts, and the other is a ‘speculative catalog raisonné’ of the constructed script designs of Jurriaan Schrofer.
I’ve presented my research in progress to audiences at Robothon, ATypI, TypeCon, Typographics, Type@Cooper, and the Letterform Archive. My constructed typeface design Kast was a jury finalist in the 2016 protoType competition at TypeCon in Seattle.
I’ve developed Kast into paper, photographic, print, and digital artifacts, and I make digital images and animations using Python and DrawBot—original designs, as well as reconstructions, algorithmic regenerations, and animations of other designers’ and artists’ work—to investigate parametric/algorithmic/generative formal systems and patterns, typographic and formal-symbolic representation, and the nature of instruction and translation.
Maurice Meilleur
Iowa State University
158 College of Design
Ames, IA 50011
meilleur@iastate.edu
maurice@mauricemeilleur.net