Professor David Crow is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for internal communications and Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design.

A former student of the communication media degree, his MA in Communication Design focuses on unofficial visual language systems. He gained industrial experience in London where he worked on the design and production of promotional material. As a senior designer for Island Records, he was responsible for art direction and production and managed promotional and advertising campaigns for a variety of artists. On setting up his own studio as a freelance designer, his client list included Sony UK and USA, Virgin Records, Island Records and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In 1993 he moved into HE as a Senior Lecturer in graphic design at University College Salford where he helped to write a new, ambitious degree in design practice. He was appointed Head of Graphic Arts at Liverpool John Moores University in 1995 and joined MMU in 2004 as Head of the School of Design.

David Crow’s research specialty is experimental typography, using font-authoring software to generate systems of symbols. As a practising artist, he has produced and exhibited works in different media using animation, CD-ROMs and interactive and non-linear work and has exhibited in the USA, Korea and Israel as well as Europe.

Well-published in his field, Professor Crow has written two books on semiotics which have been published in the UK, Germany, the USA and Korea. He served as a member of the publishing house TypeBoard of FontShop International in Berlin from 2000 to 2008 and has presented at conferences on typography in San Francisco, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Seoul and London.