I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I'll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, "Where did it all go? Where are they now?" It's so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.

Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.

If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.

We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.

Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.

I can see how some people get sentimental about how we used to do things in 'the good old days' but in a way I just think they are being nostalgic for the way they were brought up.

I wanted to be a graphic designer from the time I was 15, without ever having actually met one. I lived in the mid-west, not in a media centre, and I didn't know anyone who did that for a living. It took me a while to find out what that thing I wanted to do was actually called, but once I sorted that out I got really interested in it.