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 also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I have worked commercially as an independent graphic designer and illustrator for almost twenty years under the studio moniker Totally Okay, a graphic design and illustration studio whose work focuses on identity and creative direction for people and brands.

My research focuses on print and screen-based narratives, interrogating the structure of the image and the potential of co-authorship, and exploring the 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 go on living beyond the ideal intentions of their designers, inevitably slipping back from the ideal into the mundanely real.

'Deakin and Dyer give language to a new way to talk about and evaluate design.' Fuller, J. (2023) ‘The purpose is what it does’, Eye Magazine, (104).

'The book is important because it fills a gap: there is too little novel theoretical work in graphic design discourse right now, and this book is admirably ambitious in its efforts to encourage us to interrogate graphics in unconventional ways.' Haylock, B. (2025) Design Issues, 41(2), MIT Press.

Continuing this line of enquiry, in 2025 I edited and designed the book 'Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops: The Way We Attend to Things' (Deakin and Dyer, 2025), published by Set Margins. The workshops are practical challenges to the ways we think about the world we live in, with contributors ranging from designers and painters to philosophers, dancers, poets and documentary filmmakers.

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.