NYU Abu Dhabi

Project: “Vision” Brochure

Partner: Michael Bierut, Pentagram Design

When NYU launched its Abu Dhabi campus – the first in its “global network university” model, we were asked to create a publication that would excite and inform multiple audiences – opinion makers; secondary school heads, and college counselors; and prospective students, faculty, donors, and partners – about New York University’s new undergraduate honors college in Abu Dhabi: NYUAD.

The challenge was to create a piece that would help recruit future students to a college that did not yet exist, as well as to help establish the new entity within the world of academia. Many big ideas propelled the founding of NYU Abu Dhabi. Our approach was to represent these big ideas as key plot points in a big story – a global university in the heart of a changing world, a dream school comes to a dream city, embarking on the most ambitious endeavor in NYU’s history. The approach was to create the institutional heft, mythology, purpose, and history of a college that did not yet exist.