Marcus Diamond

Marcus Diamond is a practitioner-researcher, academic, and design educator whose work spans practice-led research, visual communication, critical theory, and material culture. His pedagogical approach is informed by more than two decades of interdisciplinary professional practice and emphasises experimentation, critical inquiry, authorship, and socially engaged design.

Diamond contributes to curriculum development, research culture, and international partnership activity. He is Programme Leader for the MA Visual Communication at Teesside University, where he teaches across both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. He also serves as Link Tutor for international partner institutions, including Prague City University, Noroff University College, and SPD Scuola Politecnica di Design. His students have achieved national and international recognition through awards and accolades including the D&AD Awards, International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) Awards, Creative Conscience Awards, RSA Design Awards, Penguin and Puffin Design Awards, and the World Illustration Awards.

Alongside his academic role, Diamond maintains an active professional and research practice. He is co-founder of North Eastern Works, established with Ellen Mather, a collaborative research and creative practice that explores dialogic, curatorial, and socially engaged approaches to visual communication. Through both academic and professional activity, he continues to develop interdisciplinary projects that connect research, design, heritage, culture, and public engagement.

In 2000, Diamond founded Neasden Control Centre, a multidisciplinary studio working across animation, branding, motion graphics, print, product design, installation, and exhibition design. The studio gained international recognition through two monographs published by Die Gestalten Verlag and its inclusion in Computer Arts magazine’s 200 Best Design Moments Ever. Selected clients included Amnesty International, ActionAid, the BBC, 55DSL Diesel, Island Records, MTV, and Rome Snowboards. His work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions and projects in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.

Diamond’s research explores image-making as an expanded field of inquiry situated within a postdigital cultural landscape. Employing hybrid, intermedial, ethnographic, phenomenological, and autoethnographic methodologies, his work investigates the relationships between visual communication, material practice, authorship, memory, narrative, and cultural production.

His doctoral research, Hybrid Illustration: An Expanded Practice Through Intermedial and Postdigital Methods, examines how intermedial methodologies can reconceptualise the conceptual, material, and aesthetic foundations of contemporary illustration. Central to this work is the development of the anti-image as a critical strategy that resists fixed meaning and encourages open-ended interpretation. Through this research, Diamond has reconceptualised the sketchbook as a laboratory, archive, and site of inquiry, employing error, chance operations, mechanical processes, and networked systems to challenge conventional notions of authorship, control, and resolution. A significant strand of this research investigates polyphonic authorship and collaboration as modes of knowledge production.

His wider research portfolio demonstrates sustained engagement with socially responsive and interdisciplinary practice, exploring graphic authorship, critical materiality, heritage, participation, speculative futures, and the handmade as a postdigital intervention. Through graphic design, illustration, printmaking, and material practices, he examines how visual communication can function as a method of inquiry, public engagement, and knowledge exchange.

Diamond has contributed practice-based research outputs to REF 2021 and has led or collaborated on projects that have generated cultural, civic, and policy impact. This includes research undertaken with Dr Caroline Wroe and Michael O’Malley on organ donation communication, which contributed to knowledge mobilisation within healthcare settings and informed wider policy discussions relating to organ donation in the UK. He has also secured funding for and delivered interdisciplinary projects, including Magnetic North, Forged Futures: Speculative Heritage and Civic Re-Making, and the IAA-funded Deliberate Ink: Facilitating and Changing Perceptions of Women’s Political Participation Through Writing and Printmaking.

His current research explores heritage, memory, place, and civic participation through collaborative projects, including the Middlesbrough Old Town Hall Regeneration Project, Memorialising Middlesbrough’s Women, Green Corridors North East, and A Call to the Wild. Through these initiatives, Diamond examines how creative practice can generate new forms of public dialogue, participation, knowledge exchange, and social impact, connecting visual communication with cultural heritage, environmental futures, and community engagement.