New Student Workers Union, 2025
Designers: Aarya Kini and Emily Keren Li
Conceptualizing, designing, and producing the socials, print, and merchandise of the New Student Workers Union (NewSWU), the wall-to-wall student worker union effort I was apart of forming that aims to represent over 1,000 student workers at The New School.
In the aftermath of the historic part-time faculty strike at The New School in 2022, NewSWU was founded by undergraduate student workers like myself who were emboldened by the power in a union. These types of unions comprised of young workers were relatively new at the time, and even less so the wall-to-wall formation we were seeking to represent the largest unit of student workers that the country could ever see. Visual solutions were key to our campaign: we needed a bold, bright, and memorable visual identity to even begin.
We decided on “The New Student Workers Union,” partly for its catchy abbreviation, but also for the progressive idealism our union reflected at a low point in the American labor movement: a radically all-encompassing unit of young workers that would petition the National Labor Relations Board to overturn national precedent.
From the beginning, the NewSWU identity needed to be visible, wearable, and taggable.
Aarya first came up with our bold branding. The badge-like wordmark was designed with six different colors in mind across a wide palette, derived from the six different colleges at The New School. Using just the logo, we began getting the word out through hosting button-making parties, plenty of stickering, and, most importantly, canvassing student workers on campus.
After collecting questions and feedback from our first few rounds of canvassing, we made our first zine: a primer to our union for the average student, a functional, letter-sized FAQ that could be printed on any kind of bright construction paper.
The pink became one of my favorite colors in the palette to work with. Fittingly, my job as a student technician in our university’s print center equipped me with the tools, knowledge, and access to print production resources. I took a special affinity to developing vibrant event flyers, manifestos, and graphics that could stand out both as static pieces and in motion.
We ran a variety of campaigns, relying on straight messaging, simple copy lines, and appeals to the everyday issues that informed student workers.
These posters were often the loudest signifiers of what we were fighting for. For every practice picket, every rally on the street, and every tabling event, we made sure to have physical materials on hand that demonstrated to passerbys the quick facts of our situation.
While our original identity skewed bold, the supporting flair and finishing touches were added through the secondary typefaces used in the identity. The Freight Collection was chosen as the secondary typeface, a variable typeface family with a wide range of use-cases, flexing from formal to fighting.
As I helped build out our social media presence over the years, we adopted a voice that relied on rank-and-file worker testimony, spoke clearly with good humor, and took advantage of trends that helped bolster our campaign’s messaging.
Last but not least, pictured below are two good friends who built this creative, worker-led effort with me.