Communication Design School of Design
Maya Chukwuma
I am a Scottish-Nigerian designer who uses colour, pattern and image to tell stories. This year my work has centred on togetherness across three projects. It begins with a playful ode to Glasgow nightlife then shifts to a visual study of Afro hair as politics and pride and culminates in a memorial that encodes my father’s legacy through symbolic motifs. These projects explore how personal stories can generate communal power. By weaving grief beauty belonging and joy into my process, I treat design as both an archive and an act of resistance.
Igbo Kwenu!
Threading images of my father into a pattern modelled after his wrapper, the project became a quiet negotiation between loss and lineage. The wrapper’s alternating stripes guided the grid, but what matters is what each motif carries. By translating these private codes into pattern I am rehearsing a future without him, storing memory inside colour and rhythm so it can be unfolded later like the wrapper itself. The piece is not a portrait but a contract, his courage for my belonging his stories for my stewardship. In weaving him into pattern, I affirm that absence can still wrap me like fabric, keeping both of us whole.
MY PAL’S A DJ
I wanted MY PAL’S A DJ to examine how club culture’s original spirit of risk has flattened into copy-paste cool. The project began with rows of near-identical fly-posters outside my local club this suggested to me that some DJs now chase trends instead of setting them. I answered with Degrees of DJ, a video collage of archival clips. I wanted the montage somewhat reflect todays culture of the infinite scroll. A follow-up T-shirt line with “My…’s a DJ” letting anyone wear the title and exposing how easily the badge is claimed. I wanted this to be humorous on the surface, the work asks a harder question beneath, does anyone still move the culture forward? Have we settled for loops of curated, forgettable noise instead?
Roots of Bias
I wanted this piece to somewhat translate the lived experience of Afro hair into pattern and colour. Starting with simple vector motifs such as braid paths, coil spirals, and the teeth of dressing combs. I layered, rotated, and scaled them to build a rhythmic surface that feels both intimate and ceremonial. Tight interlocking grids recall the precision of cornrows looser, sweeping curves evoke the freedom of untamed coils. Negative space becomes “scalp,” letting each form breathe like strands between partings.
The palette comes straight from the culture of care. Shea-brown, clay-red, palm-oil ochre, loc-gold and charcoal black. These pigments echo hair oils, wooden combs, earth dyes and the warmth of melanin. By repeating and gradating them across the cloth, I wanted to suggest the journey from rooted tradition to self-expression.
While my essay provides historical context, the tapestry is the argument made tangible. Its shift from dense order to open flow mirrors Black hair’s passage from regulation to reclamation. Every section asserts texture is heritage, motion is resilience, and adornment is power.
