A few years ago, Tim Jetis and composer Damian Barbeler drove around New South Wales looking at eucalyptus trees. Not collecting them. Looking at them. The light through the canopy, the texture of bark, the particular quality of stillness in Australian bush. They were paying tribute to Murray Bail’s novel Eucalyptus. The project that came out of it, Visiting Eucalyptus, became a photographic installation, a 16-minute concert work, a book, and a film. Thirty copies of the book were printed.
It was not a commercial project. It was not meant to be.
Sydney-based studio of Cabinet of Wonder – Photo Courtesy of Tim Jetis
Jetis is Creative Director of Cabinet of Wonder, a Sydney studio with thirty years of practice behind it. He has built creative identities for Sydney Mardi Gras, B2B Vivid Sydney, and campaigns for Tourism Australia. He co-organised and exhibited ‘Outpost’, Venice Biennial. He coordinated the art department at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop across three feature films, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Five Children and It. He has taught at Billy Blue College of Design for fifteen years. His work has been recognised by the Type Directors Club New York, the Mohawk Awards, and the National Print Awards.
“Good design resolves a problem,” he says. “Outstanding design goes further. It holds clarity, but also a sense of anticipation. It feels simple, but carries depth. There is an internal logic to it that allows it to endure beyond its immediate function.”
Extract page 2 of “A Meeting of Words” – Courtesy of Tim Jetis
For Jetis, getting there begins before the screen. Material exploration first. The handling of things, the resistance of physical media, decisions that can only be made by touch. His most recognised print work reflects this. A Meeting of Words, a hand-bound typographic book made with printer Theo Pettaras, explores the written passages that have signalled cultural and political change throughout history. Fifty copies were printed. It earned the Type Directors Club New York Award for Typographic Excellence in 2016 and was exhibited at the Australian Design Centre. The book is, in his own framing, an argument: that design is transformative, that it has a human dimension and a social obligation, that literature and political speeches have shaped culture in ways that design can trace and amplify.
Extract page 1 of “A Meeting of Words” – Courtesy of Tim Jetis
Extract page 8 of “A Meeting of Words” – Courtesy of Tim Jetis
Around the same time he and Barbeler made A Match Struck Twice, a live performance work where art direction, design, and composed music operated together in real time. A collaborative exploration of emancipation through Year 9 girls’ poetry. Not illustration of music, not music as backdrop. A genuine three-way negotiation between disciplines in front of an audience. It is the kind of work that does not fit a portfolio category, which is partly the point.
He has spent fifteen years teaching at Billy Blue College of Design. He is not interested in teaching students how to make things look good. The focus is critical thinking, process, and craft. The discipline of asking what a piece of work is actually trying to say before deciding how it should look. “Be clear about what you are trying to say, the intent of the outcome. Not just how it looks, but why it exists.” He says this in the classroom. He means it in the studio.
Ask him what work he returns to and he does not hesitate. Vaughan Oliver’s identities for 4AD. Béla Tarr’s films. Cormac McCarthy’s prose. Marina Willer at Pentagram. “Pieces where form, idea, and execution align quietly, without overstatement. You need a bit of design envy.”
Michael Wolff put it in a way Jetis has not let go of: curiosity is a muscle and it needs to be trained every day. “Projects that carry a strong internal logic tend to stand apart. And curiosity matters. It is a discipline. The more you train it, the more your work evolves.”
“Design is not decoration. It is a way of thinking — and when done well, it shapes understanding, not just appearance.”
On Australian design, Jetis is direct. There is a growing confidence, he says, a willingness to engage with broader cultural and social contexts. But running alongside it is a tendency toward sameness. Shared references. Work that mirrors global trends rather than reflects local experience.
“The opportunity is to move beyond that. To find a distinct local language grounded in real experience, to develop a voice reflecting an Australian lived experience and cultural specificity.”
His own practice is built on that argument. Visiting Eucalyptus is a work about looking at Australian landscape rather than at received images of it. Spiritchaser, his award-winning short film, follows a young woman tracing her connection to the hidden culture of Burma, blending live photography with animated illustration to recreate the texture of memory. It won recognition at the New York Indie Film Festival and the Asian Region Film Festival. Jetis is now reinterpreting it as a graphic novel, returning to the same material with different tools.
Spiritchaser / graphic novel – Courtesy of Tim Jetis
Spiritchaser / graphic novel interior – Courtesy of Tim Jetis
The work he does with the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals sits in similar territory. The cooperative model is one of the oldest and most distinctly non-corporate structures in Australian economic life, member-owned, collectively governed, built on mutual benefit rather than shareholder return. Getting that across in brand and communications work means finding a language that is genuinely different from the individualist frameworks that dominate most of the sector. It is a long relationship, ongoing, and it is one of the clearest examples in his practice of design being asked to do something that matters beyond the visual.
The Venice Biennial project, Outpost, asked something different again. Co-organiser, curator, visual artist. Three roles that in most practices would belong to three different people. For Jetis they are expressions of the same instinct. The work is always asking what a space, a context, an institution can hold. What it can say if you put the right things inside it.
The Design Magazine Awards drew him in for a reason he states simply. “Recognising work on merit, without barriers, creates space for voices that might otherwise be overlooked. That feels worth supporting.”
Blind judging. Free entry. No institutional advantage. For a practitioner who has spent thirty years asking whether design can carry meaning beyond its immediate function, it is a straightforward thing to support.
The Design Magazine Awards 2026 are free to enter, blind-judged, and open to designers, studios, and students worldwide. Early entry closes 31 July 2026.
Tim Jetis · Creative Director, Cabinet of Wonder · Sydney, Australia cabinetofwonder.com · @_cabinetofwonder
