Julie Spivey is a designer and design educator with a particular fondness for typography and effective information design. She is associate professor of graphic design in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia and is also active in design practice, specializing in publication design, information visualization and all things typographic. She was a member of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee from 2010–15 including serving two years as co-chair. Spivey discovered her interest in visual communication during her undergraduate studies in journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and eventually pursued an MFA in Communication Arts at East Carolina University.
In her creative research she collaborates with researchers and outreach specialists in projects that allow her to use design to communicate complex ideas, visualize information and data, and advocate for users to addresses relevant issues related to environmental and sustainability concerns. These projects include working with UGA extension units to help coastal Georgia and NC communities prepare for sea level rise and increasing severe weather hazards, and collaborating with colleagues in marine science on a funded project that aims to develop a digital tool to visualize data related to deep ocean habitats in a changing climate.