This year the Editorial Design Masters brought together 26 students from diverse backgrounds, and we were challenged to complete three main master projects: a digital platform, a book and three issues of a magazine. The briefs ranged from; love and hate, happiness and the truth.

After the first week of getting to know our peers, we picked partners to tackle each one of these projects with. We spent a few months researching, gathering content and information, which we later edited. Once our concepts starting taking form, we proceeded to take on the hardest yet most interesting phase: design. Making design decisions and finding a tone and visual line that best represented our ideas was the main challenge for many of us. Trial and error was the only way to find effective solutions and there were many of them.

These past nine months felt endless, but went by in the blink of an eye. Overall, we all agree that we have grown in many ways and learned inmensely from this year’s experience. We were able to fuse our voices with design and express our beliefs, loudly. We are more than pleased to share with you our final outcomes. Enjoy!

Each year, students in the Visual Design Masters are asked to tackle a specific topic that becomes central to their Master’s project. This year’s theme was about privilege.

We started off the year by building awareness around our own privilege in the world and converting our findings into data visualisations. After pairing up with teammates, we selected the topic that was most meaningful to us, which we’d become experts on over the course of the year. Topics ranged from gender bias, to the “male gaze”, privilege in the digital world, incarceration, and more.

Most students experienced the whirlwind of the design process, caught in what feels like the never-ending loop of ideating and redefining their projects over and over until that special “aha” moment, when all the hours, weeks, and months of research and exploration culminate into their final project. We invite you to discover the results here.

In the last 15 years, the digital universe has grown by a factor of 300, yet less than 1% of all existing data is analyzed. This year, seven mighty MADDsters tried to make sense of the chaos, using data to expose thievery going unnoticed all across the world. Each, with their own unique approach, uncovered heists of infrastructure, identity, labor, attention, care, memory, and time.

The students of the Data and Design Masters each conceived, narrated, designed, and produced exhibitions that showcased these heists and allowed visitors to experience and interact with their stories. The exhibitions took place in Mutuo Gallery, but here you can see the results.