Jordi Ng

Book design and art direction for Watch This Before You Turn 18, a (significantly more mature) follow-up to Hey Kids, Watch This! that’s packed with recommendations for movies that hit hardest when you’re a teenager. Divided into five different chapter genres, this book has 171 titles chosen for a new generation of movie-lovers whether you’re into action epics, international cinema, horror thrillers, or sports dramas. 368 pages with a flush-cut board cover.

Design and art direction for the Field Meridians Observer, a quarterly neighborhood newspaper highlighting local news, ecosystems, and multispecies. The Observer is published at the turn of each season and distributed for free to the Crown Heights community. Printed in black and an orange spot color. Find a copy at your favorite Crown Heights spot and at the Brower Park Library.

Ongoing art direction, concepting, and design for a range of cover stories for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Here is a selection of covers I especially loved working on.

Publication design for Erasure by Design by Mitch McEwen. Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day. This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, “urban renewal”—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents.

Design and art direction for Texas! — a 624-page, local as all get-out guide to the Lone Star State. Published as a follow-up to Florida! (published in 2022), Texas! is as blue as its predecessor was pink — an ode to bluebonnets and open skies. The book features places and traditions beloved by the real-life Texans who live there: the cats that patrol the grounds at the Alamo; the drippin’ paint jobs on SLAB cars; and the festivals dedicated to everything from strawberries to mosquitos.

Texas! is available to purchase from the A24 Shop here.

Publication identity and design for x-change, Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s annual exhibition and publication celebrating student work from first year to Ph.D. candidates. The book features an exposed spine, a die-cut dotted “X” on its cover, and is printed on thin, porous paper, all of which support the framework of cross-pollination between the various student works. The front and back cover features a a set of treated imagery from student work, highlighting the diversity of ideas, methods and pedagogical frameworks that shape the School of Architecture’s programs, and creating a versatile cover template that can be iterated endlessly for years to come.

Identity design for SculptureCenter’s Annual Gala in 2025. Themed around 10 (X) years of Valeria Napoleone XX SculptureCenter programming, the identity revolved around sculptural X’s that were stretched and modulated to create flexible, multi-dimensional backdrops. Gala program menus were riso-printed in four colors.

Art direction and design for Which Way Out?, a puzzle zine companion to the horror movie Heretic. Much like the two girls in the movie, the reader is trapped in a spooky house and has to choose one of two unique paths through the house. Each path takes the reader through a set of rooms with a different puzzle in each. All puzzles were designed and art directed to be carefully integrated into the illustrated environment of each room, allowing for the reader to be fully immersed in each room’s setting.

Book design and art direction for Hey Kids, Watch This! —a 288-paged book jam-packed with over 100 kid- and adult-approved movie night recommendations that span decades, countries, and genres. A thick flush-cut board cover references classic children’s board books. Divided into four chapters of 20 films, each chapter caters to a specific age group with special sections and activities interspersed throughout. The architecture of each spread was deliberately designed to be flexible, allowing recurring page furniture to move from spread to spread in dialogue with the illustration, providing a sense of discovery for a child flipping through the book. Illustrations reference film techniques and visual styles whenever possible, capturing the diversity of the selection of movies in the book.

Hey Kids, Watch This! is available to purchase from the A24 Shop here.

Book design for A24’s Euphoria Fashion: a deep dive into the costume design and fashion world of hit TV series Euphoria, as written by costume designer Heidi Bivens. The book breaks down the evolution of costumes for the various characters and their character arcs, alternating between deep character costume studies and key episodic write-ups. It also features conversations with cast and crew, original essays by William Van Meter, Mitchell Kuga, José Criales-Unzueta, and Biz Sherbert on high-camp, normcore bondage and Euphoria memes found on Twitter. The book is a 4C-printed clothbound hardcover topped off with rainbow holographic foiled typography, and features a violet-silver Pantone ink throughout.

Euphoria Fashion is now available to purchase from the A24 Shop here.

Book design and art direction for A24’s Florida! — a 574-page hyper-local travel guide book to the most far-out state in America. The book features a puffy cover with blocky, eccentric display typography reminiscent of classic Florida postcards (here, a stretched version of Zaft by Jacob J. Wise). The color palette revolves around a “Florida Pink” swatch, a shade of pink that was pulled from the wildlife and architecture of the state. Each chapter of the book corresponds to a different geographical part of the state and begins with a fold-out illustrated map of the locations and landmarks in that chapter. Folios on the side of each page provide strong wayfinding and a sense of location throughout the book.

Florida! is available to purchase from the A24 Shop here.

Ongoing art direction, concepting, and print design for a range of longform feature stories and special issues for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.

Book design for Aeropolis, written by Nerea Calvillo and published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Aeropolis follows air across its many forms—through smog and dust, bodies and breath, pollen, and weeds––laying out an unruly and relational way of designing-thinking-making across human and non-human matter, geopolitical ecologies, and aerial regimes. The book insists that we acknowledge the diversity of air and its relations, both physically and affectively; that we become sensible to it by living, breathing, seeing, holding, touching, queering airs.

The book features a clear glossy foil stamp and a blind-embossed air particulate pattern over the cover. Throughout the interior pages, the oversized page numbers move up and down the page, fluctuating in response to Nerea’s narrative shifts in the footnotes.

Aeropolis is available to purchase from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City here.

Identity design and accompanying illustrations for The Walker’s Skyline Mini Golf 2022 which features a ten-hole, artist-designed course on the rooftop of The Walker. The identity revolves around a golf course of holes and balls suspended in a dreamy summer air. The main display type used across the identity features oversized oval tittles that serves as a further visual nod to the world of golf holes and balls.

The identity was carried out across out-of-home posters in Minneapolis, print collateral for The Walker such free passes and tickets, museum signage, T-shirts, as well as digital ads.

Design and photo-illustrations for a 32-page risoprinted zine that served as a print accompaniment to Portraits of Her, a vinyl album created by Vans and Record Store Day in celebration of groundbreaking women in the music industry. Risoprinted in Scarlet, Aqua, Yellow, Black and Metallic Gold and featuring a matching metallic gold foil stamp on the cover.

Magazine redesign and art direction for Tracksmith’s Meter Magazine, a longform publication about the hidden side of running culture. Overhauling its original broadsheet format, the redesign sought to lengthen shelf life of the magazine, featuring a printed cloth tape spine with the table-of-contents running off the edges to allow for readers to quickly browse past issues at a glance.

Past and current issues of the magazine featuring the redesign can be purchased from Tracksmith here.

Publication design for the 50th issue of MIT School of Architecture’s peer-reviewed journal, Thresholds. The theme of the issue, “Before | After”, deals with the poignancies of the passage of time, looking backward and forward, at pasts, past futures, and present possibilities. As an allusion to the murky thresholds of “before” and “after”, the book features a neon red PMS spot color that ebbs and flows from the cover art through every single red in the book in fluctuating amounts—whether it’s through archival imagery, present-day photographs, differing gradient floods, handwritten elements, and even the threads in the Swiss-bound spine—serving as a metaphor for in-between moments that hint at the future and remind us that the past is sticky, persistent, and, in many ways, always with us.

Thresholds 50: Before | After can be purchased directly from MIT Press here.

Book design of the exhibition catalogue for Fantasy America at The Warhol that accompanied the eponymous limited exhibition which featured work by Nona Faustine, Kambui Olujimi, Pacifico Silano, Naama Tsabar and Chloe Wise. The exhibition invited all 5 artists to revisit Andy Warhol’s America (1985) and offer their own picture of contemporary American life.

Publication design and art direction for The Verge’s Offline Activities zine, produced in celebration of their 10th year anniversary. The zine takes the form of a maximalist activity book, resplendent with inside jokes exclusive to the tech industry, unhelpful technical occult advice, and nugatory activities that can be conducted without an Internet connection. Printed with a neon green spot throughout and finished with rainbow holographic foil on the cover.

Publication design and illustration for Munchies, a cookbook-zine by Sundae School that features savory and sweet recipes from 10 different AAPI chefs. Chefs include Michael Cho, Bao Boys, Monica Lo, and Kim Pham. Munchies was produced as part of a larger month-long program of events and activities by Sundae School celebrating AAPI heritage. Risoprinted in 4 colors.

Copies are available in print and in digital from Sundae School.

Publication design & illustration for Sap Sup, a 4-color risoprinted coil-bound publication, produced by The Menu Radio in Los Angeles. Sap Sup, a Turkish onomatopoeia meaning “to eat”, contains writings, photographs and illustrated works dedicated to food and identity. All proceeds from the publication sales go to No Us Without You, a non-profit organization that raises funds for undocumented workers in Los Angeles.

Art direction and design for MasterClass’ “The Victory Dog” campaign. To celebrate the launch of Wayne Gretzky’s new MasterClass, they partnered up with 3 legendary hot dog slingers around the country (Pink’s in LA, Byron’s in Chicago, and Gray’s Papaya in NYC) to honor The Great One’s greatest ritual—eating four hotdogs before every game. For a limited time, each hotdog vendor offered their version of a Victory Dog for 99¢. The campaign included limited-edition young Gretzky hockey cards, Victory Dog T-shirts, engraved hockey pucks, a life-sized mural, and more hotdoggery.

Publication design for Artist in Residence, a bilingual—and dare I say palindromic?—book of performance prompts that can be performed at home. It can be read front-to-back in English, or back-to-front in Spanish. Printed on colored stocks that have been mixed in at random and featuring a letter-pressed cover.

Artist in Residence can be purchased directly from Publication Studio Hudson.

Design for YES! — a limited-run broadsheet print piece created to accompany a mural series in Wieden + Kennedy, New York. Printed in black and cyan in a limited edition of 500. The issue consists of internal interviews held with employees at Wieden and Kennedy.

Album and packaging design for Sudan Archives’ debut album, Athena, in collaboration with Stones Throw Records and Constant Artists.

Publication design and illustration for Life is Sweet, a 3-color risoprinted children’s zine about a silly egg that eats too many sweets. Printed by Tiny Splendor in Berkeley. Limited edition of 50.