Najeebah Al-Ghadban
April 9, 2021
Lately it has become clear that I’m interested in both-sides-ism. (Not the perilous pseudo-journalistic kind of both-sides-ism — a different kind that I made up.) As someone fascinated with the writer-editor relationship, I’m intrigued by people (like Jazmine Hughes and Hannah Goldfield) who have been on both sides of the publishing equation. As a former model now working as a photographer, I think a lot about what it means to have experience on both sides of the camera. And as someone growing ever more curious about the world of design, which exists at the nexus of visual and textual story-telling, Najeebah Al-Ghadban's work — as an art director and designer and collage-artist — delights me. Najeebah represents a new, even more complex version (three-sides-ism?) of the creative multi-hyphenate dynamic I’m so curious about.
I found Najeebah’s work on Instagram, where her handmade collages, assembled from cut-up photographs layered with the detritus of modern life, first caught my eye. Najeebah uses the platform to share both pieces from her personal art practice and commissioned illustrations for publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. Scattered throughout the grid are book covers and lay-outs from magazines, elegant and often moody samples of her graphic design work. Scrolling through Najeebah’s archive, the full spectrum of her creativity is on view, from examples of pure play to complex problem-solving. Seeing all of Najeebah’s work in one place makes clear the ways her ideas rhyme and repeat, no matter the form or medium. This thread of connectivity — the Najeebah-ness of each piece — captivated and impressed me. It also raised familiar questions on which my interest in both-sides-ism is based: For creative people, how porous are the boundaries between personal aesthetics and professional obligation? As your artistic footprint expands to encompass different roles, how do you stay true to your own instincts? What advantages and insights come from experiencing both sides — and the relative power, responsibility, and vulnerability — of a working relationship?
Najeebah, who is from Kuwait and now lives in Brooklyn, currently works as an art director at Apple. She was candid about the various challenges and triumphs of the unique career she’s built on multiple parallel tracks. Her task, across disciplines, is always to communicate information and emotion visually, but the constraints of book design are vastly different from those of editorial illustration. Through our conversation, I better understood how a person’s design sense is at once innate and the product of so many formative environments: art school, the office, and one’s community of peers.The interplay of Najeebah’s distinct style and her extensive, varied experience makes for sophisticated and emotionally charged work.
This interview took place in January and March 2021. It has been edited and condensed.
Could you walk me through the various jobs you’ve had since graduating from college?
I did my BFA and MFA at SVA. Once I graduated in 2013 I freelanced for a little bit and ended up working as a freelance book designer at Abrams, where I got hired full-time. I worked there for about two years or so. Then I got offered a job at The New York Times Magazine. They had just started doing the kids’ section and had the little experimental NYT Mag Labs department that was making special bespoke print sections to encourage subscribers to buy the printed newspaper. I worked there for almost three years and got to really explore a lot of design in a way that I hadn't before. Now I'm an art director at Apple.
When you were considering The New York Times Magazine job and heard "kids’ section" did you think, "Is this gonna be goofy and cartoony in a ‘little kid’ style"? What was going through your head?
When I interviewed, Debra Bishop (the design director) showed me the first two issues and described the concept as really about not talking down to kids. She always said she wanted to make it rock and roll — that idea sold me on it. Based on my own portfolio, you wouldn't necessarily assume that I’d enjoy working on something like the kids’ section, which is super bold and really playful. But I think that's kind of what drew me to it. Designing for kids pushed me to be less rigid; my rigidity also sometimes worked in my favor. I fit in just enough that my style didn't overwhelm the playfulness that the illustrators brought. We did a lot of interactive things and I got to play as a designer. It was always about making the section beautiful but interactive and meaningful.
How did the assignments and frameworks you encountered in design school relate to what you actually ended up doing once you got a design job? Did you feel like you were prepared for joining an office?
I think school prepares you formally. I walked out of school with an understanding of how to recognize good work and how to make my own work good by practicing my craft. You have to look at and consume a lot of information to actually expand — not just design work but art, film, music or literature, work that inspires you to want to create things. So my more crafty, explorative formal side was really developed. When it came to actually dealing with the business side of design, even just questions of "How do you freelance?" or "How do you invoice?" ... that took a while to figure out on my own. I don't think design school prepares you for that world as much. Also, as an international student in that environment, most people don't understand what you need to do if you want to work and stay in the country. So there was a lot of figuring things out on my own or with my tight community of other students and friends going through the same thing.
Do you feel like your immigration status determined a lot of the choices you made about getting jobs?
Yeah. I remember when I was going out on interviews after I graduated, I showed my portfolio at one place and they really loved my work. When I mentioned, "Actually, I have to apply for a visa at the end of the year,” (because once you graduate you have one year to work on your student visa before you have to transfer to a work visa) they were like, "Sorry, bye."
I've been very lucky; I've had so many opportunities in my career, I recognize that. But it's also not easy to make plans or to make changes. If I want to leave a job, I have to make sure my paperwork is in order to do that and doing these visa applications is draining. You have to make a portfolio of all your work and talk about how you're the greatest in the world and then you have to ask people to write letters that also say you're the greatest. It can be quite embarrassing to have to ask that of people.
Wait, it sounds like doing that every few years could actually be a very useful ego boost.
Only if you didn't have to ask people to say these things about you! But usually people are very understanding because they've helped out a lot of designers who are on visa statuses.
I bet you didn't have to twist too many people's arms to say you make great work. Hearing you describe this process makes me realize that I take for granted how, because I don't have to think about my immigration status, I can move between jobs freely, be wildly underemployed for stretches of time, and generally have a lot of flexibility. The kind of constraints you’re describing are really career-shaping and life-altering! When you were in high school did you see an art or design career as viable? Was that something that your parents supported? I know that in some families the idea of going to art school is frowned upon and a design degree is seen as the more practical alternative.
When I was younger both my parents worked day and night so my siblings and I would go to school and then come straight home. I didn't get to spend much time with my friends, so the internet became a way of connecting to people and also expressing myself. I had a website when I was 11 (a fan site for a pop band, I won't say which one) and that's what I used to pass the time outside of school: writing and skinning my own website. Teaching myself how to use PaintShop Pro and then later Adobe was when I realized you can make things digitally that didn't involve drawing — I wasn't very good at drawing. It felt like magic to me. Because I make collages now, when I look back I can see that that's what I was doing digitally back in the day.
I didn't realize design could be a career growing up because in Kuwait design was not as visible — or I wasn’t as aware of it being an option. When I decided to go to college, most of my family wanted me to pursue medicine because I was so academic. I thought, “I’m not sure that I want that life. But I do like making these websites, that's fun for me. Maybe there's a way I can take whatever I've been doing in my downtime and make something out of it.” That's how I ended up in design. In Kuwait there’s a program where you can apply to universities outside of the country on a full scholarship. I picked my degree from the list that they had; luckily they had design. I applied to four different schools from there and then settled on SVA in New York. I had to make my dad a Venn diagram because my family was scared of me going to a big city on my own. I had to explain why my decision made sense, “New York is the center of a lot of art and creativity and you're exposed to so much. It's not just about me pursuing an education, it's also about me being in the right environment.”
My dad is incredibly supportive of me. He was also an art major; he got his bachelor's in fine arts, specializing in ceramics, with a minor in Art History. He worked a long time as the Director of Exhibitions at Dar al athar Al Islamiyyah, the Islamic Museum in Kuwait. (He later became the Assistant Secretary General for the National Council for Cultures, Arts, and Letters in Kuwait.) My mom’s background is in computer science and her job was to educate teachers about how to use technology to better teach their students. Somehow, in me, that piece of my mother and a piece of my father — of computer and art — met. When I was choosing to pursue design, it didn't even occur to me that I was going to be drawing and taking sculpture classes once I got to SVA. I had a huge awakening when I got to art school — in high school I had been very much academic, I would never have described myself as artistic.
I love that you, a graphic designer and illustrator, had to make your dad a graphic illustration explaining why you should go to New York. How deliberate were you, as you left school, about not doing “just design” or “just illustration”? I think it probably would have been easier to pick one or the other but you've done both.
I started my physical collages around the end of undergrad and just kept doing them and sharing them on social media because I enjoyed creating them. One of the first illustrations that I ever did was for the cover of The New York Times Book Review. I had no idea after that cover image was published that anyone would hire me again but it gave me a platform by showing my work to a lot of people. I got asked do things for smaller publications and then The Times came back again; interest slowly continued to build from there. That first assignment sort of unlocked the illustration side of my career. Timing is everything.
Maybe one day I'll decide on doing just one and not the other but there's something about having both that helps keep me interested and excited and curious. As a designer, and even an art director, I get to see how other illustrators work and I learn a lot through the process of asking them to do things. When I work with other art directors as an illustrator, I learn about what different people’s art direction styles are and how they talk to their illustrators when they reach out. So it's always such an interesting place to be: on both sides of the equation.
It's funny, you were talking a few moments ago about how your style wouldn't read as directly compatible with a kids' section but, looking at your website and Instagram, there is a sense of play in a lot of your illustration and design that isn't precious. I think that's what I was originally drawn to in your work. And I was fascinated by the handmade quality of it. So much of design takes itself so seriously that as a consumer I kind of roll my eyes at it, whereas your work looks like you had fun making it. In your collages there's a found-object feeling to both the materials you choose and the composition, like I could have stumbled upon the arrangement out in the world. But then there’s a tension between that spirit of chance and the very deliberate and sophisticated formal quality of each piece. I’m curious about how you source the images you use.
In the beginning, I was just using newspapers and magazines. I was really drawn to images that showed people in movement, so a lot of the magazines that I ended up buying were old LIFE magazines or old dance or theater magazines. I especially loved the dance and theater ones because there's something about the way people's bodies are on stage that creates a very dramatic effect. That's why the collages were originally very people-centric and figure-centric. Over time, I started to explore just working with people's faces.
I used to photograph my more sculptural collages in my old apartment, which had much better lighting, and I liked the way the shadows would interplay with the object and the paper. It created another world for this thing to come alive in. There was a melodrama — or just a drama — that I found exciting and compelling. Since I’m doing more commissions now, I use more contemporary imagery and a lot of stock photos, which I think modernizes the work. A lot of the magazines I was using for my own collages are very outdated and they had their own limitations. Now I am being more thoughtful about my image selections and also exploring doing things that are non-figurative.
What is the difference (and I know this sounds so simplistic and obvious) between making stuff with your hands and making things on the computer?
Because I do all of my collages by hand, in the beginning it was hard to figure out how to sketch ideas. With traditional illustration, most people can roughly draw their idea in advance to show an art director. I had to learn to draw my shapes on screen and sketch out digitally what I was going to do by hand, especially if I was using wire or thread, because I realized very quickly that if I cut up the paper and cut up the images, I'm wasting resources and spending too much energy on something that hasn't been approved yet. I had to figure out a system of sketching and introduce that into my process so that if someone was like, “Can you change this photo? Can you try this here or try that bigger?” I could do that very quickly and then either produce it by hand or a mixture of by hand and digitally. Eventually I started to play around with keeping the whole process digital. Sketching and learning how to work with other people has become an interesting place of discovery for me.
The art director, Annie Jen, who I work with on illustrations for the Screenland column in The New York Times Magazine explained to me recently how what I'm actually doing for those pieces is collage-as-design. I’m using space and images to design art to go with the text, rather than collaging as freely and abstractly as I do with my personal stuff. Because those illustrations are so different from what I make for myself, I was like, "I don't know what I'm doing." Her explanation unlocked something for me and made me more comfortable exploring and not forcing all of my work to look similar. Now I can see that all of the work all naturally fits together, even if my style varies.
I think it takes a lot of confidence to feel like, even as your format or your subject changes, there's an essential thread of “you” running through it all. I struggle with that: how far can I get away from my usual habits before I'm doing something contrived or acting like someone I'm not? You really embody that question and tension in your different roles. You have your personal collage work, you have your commissioned illustrations, and then you have this third layer that is your design work apart from illustration. Because you share all of it publicly, getting to see the relationship between what all different kinds of “Najeebah pieces” look like (in their constrained and freer iterations) is very cool. Honestly, it is so hard to wrap my head around how you maintain the confidence and the intuition to create so many different kinds of things. My brain would become scrambled.
With my design stuff, I don't think as much about it because I don't feel as attached to it emotionally. In the beginning, when I did commissions I worried that they weren't in line with how my personal work looked. Working with an editor or art director meant that sometimes my idea would be changed or the subject matter wasn’t necessarily something that I was drawn to. I questioned how good the piece could be when it didn't make me feel an emotion — most of the time my work is really about containing an emotion or mood.
My conversation with Claudia Rubín, who you worked with at The Times, got me thinking about how design can be perceived as emotionless or motiveless or a neutral thing, which it really doesn't seem to be most of the time. Anything that humans touch we get our fingerprints (and baggage) all over. When I was looking at your work I was really intrigued by the naked emotion you communicate. Your perspective seems to infiltrate and affect and color whatever you've been commissioned to illustrate or be a part of. I’m intrigued by that art-design intersection that doesn't refuse the idea that we're all actually people making stuff, not just inputing information into computers. Could you talk about your different experiences expressing yourself as an artist within the confines of design?
In book publishing, as a designer, you're responding to someone else's needs, usually the author’s. You're also getting feedback from the sales team, people whose motivations aren't necessarily, “I want this to look the way you want it to look,” but more, “I want this book to sell.” I realized very quickly that just thinking about how I might want the cover was too self-centered. In the book world you have to be very good at wearing different hats and executing different styles. Over time I realized that if a project requires a really different style from my own, I'd rather hire someone else who does that better than me, than create it myself. But budget can be an issue.
Design in editorial, like the work I did at The Times, is a completely different world. You react to an individual article or point of view or perspective and get to express ideas through your layout. When it comes to actually illustrating, you get to convey somebody else's emotion or thought. That really spoke to me quite clearly: I can do this, this is what I enjoy doing. Carin Goldberg, one of my teachers from school always encouraged exploring different types of design before you settle. You learn something from each experience and then you find what works for you.
So, as an editorial designer or an illustrator for hire, even though you aren’t able to purely express your own emotions like you would be able to in your personal work, you're a conduit for someone else’s? There’s more room to play? I would imagine the design world is very intimidating when you're fresh out of school. It seems like it would take real maturity to both have a strong, distinctive voice and the ability to be flexible and adaptable. It sounds like a hard place to be when you're in your early 20s in general.
For people to recognize your work, you have to have a lot of opportunities to show it. If you're designing covers that need to be a certain way, they don’t necessarily reflect what you want to do, and you don’t get to express your own abilities and interests. Since I left my book designer job, I've done a few book covers with different publishers that were situations where people came to me asking me to create my kind of collage. That felt to me like, “Yes, this is what I want to do. This is closer to what I want to express.” Maybe I can't do as many books because not all books can exist in that sort of style but this was a good start for me. I haven't figured out yet how, in my own process, to feel as connected to my design work as much as I do the more image- or collage-based work, but I find that maybe my curiosity about format or unconventional ways to communicate is a common thread—pacing.
When I graduated undergrad, I never thought I would ever be commissioned to illustrate anything for anybody. I would just post my collages on my Instagram — I continue to do that because it's the easiest way to archive anything — and then it just became a thing from there ... so it's the one part of my life that I don't try to plan. It just feels right and that feels special.
That is really special. And now I'm going to try to not kill that specialness by asking a million more questions. I want to know what it felt like once you got into that rhythm and people were asking you to do commissions and you were getting good feedback on the illustration work. Did you think, "Oh yeah, I was missing this form of expression when I was just doing design"?
I noticed that, in school, sometimes when I designed things I would insert an opinion. If I made a book cover, I might have inserted humor that was more a comment about the book than what the book was actually like, so my design would feel more editorial. One of my teachers called that out. I was designing book covers and she said, "Well, you're telling us what you think about the book. The book cover is supposed to tell us what the book is about." And I was like, "Oh, okay, she's right, I can't do that." Then years later, after doing commissions, I realized, "What I was doing then was trying to make an illustration about the book." I think what I'm attracted to is analyzing and understanding what something means and sharing an interpretation. That's the revelation that my design work gave me about collaging and illustrating. Knowing that’s my main interest now helps me understand how to control the impulse a bit.
Oh it would be so cool if you designed a book cover and then got commissioned to design the illustration for the review of the book, like in a New York Times Book Review sandwich, because then you could convey the “straight” information and offer commentary. That is a really cool insight by your professor and also a very cool double consciousness to have about your abilities. To me the illustration aspect sounds so much cooler because you get to put your perspective into the piece but I get that, functionally, the world cannot be all editorial illustration all the time. When you get stuck (on an illustration or layout or a project) what do you do to shake yourself loose?
I usually text my friends. I have two friends that I'll show my work to and I will text both of them and be like, "What am I doing wrong?" They both will give me very good advice. Annie, one of my friends who is an illustrator herself and an art director, has experienced this also and she can see things I can’t see myself. It’s sometimes hard to look at your own work objectively. So it's always valuable to get a second opinion from someone I trust and that helps shake me loose.
What are your dream projects right now?
I'd love to create an animated piece or create some sort of performance art. One of my dreams is to create an actual physical collage with dancers or create a performance piece to music. I don't dance but I love watching people dance and that's always a source of inspiration. A more accessible way of doing that is animating my own moving collages. I've been playing and exploring that a bit lately, figuring out how to build a timeline or storyline. I've been taking little films on my daily walks and then using them in my collages in different ways, adding them on top as an additional layer. I'd love to do more of that. But also … it's so much work.
