Maree Coote is a Melbourne based artist, writer, designer, photographer. She focusses on Melbourne history and contemporary culture and has created a remarkable body of work celebrating her home city. This Alphabet project has been an ongoing one, collected over 10 years. To date she has written and published 10 books on Melbourne themes, under her publishing imprint Melbournestyle Books.

"While photographing Melbourne for each new edition of my book The Melbourne Book - A History of Now, I kept seeing letter-forms in the city architecture and sculpture, and so began collecting the images to create this alphabet. The city is alive with letter-forms, I see them everywhere I look. Ridiculous as this will sound, good Fs and Ps are the hardest to find in my experience here in Melbourne. I try to avoid resorting to using any old signage from anywhere. Each image must be iconic: it has to say 'Melbourne' . I finally put them all together to use them as endpapers for The Melbourne Book Edition 4 in 2013.
This new childrens' picture book Alphabet City s the perfect vehicle for the collection. I hope it helps little kids to become more observant in their surroundings, more graphically literate, and of course to have fun while learning the alphabet."

Maree will inspire your students toward truly creative futures. She will explore and explain her design work, and set wonderful inventive projects to fire young imaginations. FOR AGES 4 TO TEEN AND BEYOND Active, interactive and truly rewarding projects, Including drawing, graphic design for grommets, typography for toddlers, ipad art, photography for phun, paper-cutting, story-telling and book making. Your students will love it. EMAIL US HERE