Design Journal

THE BRIEF

NYUAD has a small design program, but over the last 10 years, its design community has flourished.

Even without the support of a comprehensive faculty or design school, NYUAD students have made world-class and award-winning video games, magazines, brand identities, industrial products and more. These huge amounts of incredible design work reflect the grassroots culture around design at NYU Abu Dhabi.

In 2021, the NYUAD Design Department set out to capture this scrappy spirit of innovation, creativity, and discovery through an inaugural student-led magazine. I was chosen alongside one other designer (Tonia Zhang) to lead the initiative.

Under the guidance of Erin Collins, Instructor of the Arts, we compiled essays, curated a decade of class work, interviewed student designers, and ultimately put together a publication that would represent the playful, self-starting, and highly experimental spirit of design at NYUAD.

(Psst... Want to see the final journal first? Skip to the end here!)

DRAFTS

So, what is design at NYUAD?

For the first few weeks, we had just one question: what is design like at NYUAD?

It was definitely scrappy, self-started, and coming from all over the place. Some of the best design projects we had weren't even made by people who would call themselves designers. The best way any of us could describe it was this: Everyone, regardless of their formal design experience, was using their unique perspective to tackle design problems in the community.

Eventually, that became the direction of our drafts, the spirit of our editorial message, and the title of our journal. At NYUAD, everyone is a designer.

WIREFRAMEs

From there, we got to work!

Our team called nearly every week to bounce ideas off each other. We wanted the journal to reflect the messy, scrappy, experimental vibe that we felt from the design community, so every page was designed to stand on as a design piece rather than join a standard layout.

To get the ball rolling, we started a moodboard, I made rough wireframes of each page of the spread on pen and paper, and we discussed our ideas over Zoom.

As for the content, we compiled essays written for design classes from the past 10 years, scraped design work from old Google Drives, and personally set aside time to interview six NYUAD student designers. Since we ourselves had to curate and create the content, and the journal was a relatively short publication, we had to be very selective about what to include.

SO MANY DRAFTS

We experimented. A lot.

Our process on Figma went as follows: try things, try again, figure out what the piece was really trying to say, and then hone in on that message with the final iteration.

The entire process was incredibly fun, even online, with nine hours of time difference separating the team. Below are some snippets we left on the cutting room floor.

THE FINAL DRAFT

Three months later, we sent it to print!

After three months of curating, designing, writing, editing, and reviewing our work, we finally came up with a publication we were proud of, and we sent it off to be printed!

Now, the design journal is actually in people's hands, with copies all across campus: in the Arts Center, the Visual Design Lab, and the Art Gallery to name a few. It even took a trip with Professor Goffredo Puccetti for an exhibit about NYUAD design in New York!

If you're at NYUAD, you can find it in the Visual Design Lab (C3-012) on the second floor of the Arts Center (C3), with this lovely poster made by Tonia :)

Curating the inaugural NYU Abu Dhabi Design Journal

NYUAD has a small design program, but over the last 10 years, its design community has flourished.

So, what is design at NYUAD?