MANOJNA is a graphic designer based in New York. She builds visual systems that draw parallels between images, ideas, and objects across editorial, type, identity, and code.


Selected Work

It Was Night & I Felt Like Dancing



BOOK DESIGN, TYPE, PRINT
2026 For a few short years, a handful of clubs: Studio 54, Le Palace, Les Bains Douches and The Haćienda burned brighter than anything around them and changed clubbing culture before they closed. This book holds both sides of that light. On the surface, it’s pure glamor and spectacle, filled with all the flamboyant parties, crowds and heat. Underneath, firsthand accounts from the people who lived it tell the real story: the community and the lifelong friendships, the safe space to be queer and in love, the drugs and the raids, and the way the dancefloor pushed back against everything waiting outside its doors.

Full-bleed imagery of the club runs over the edges of the spread while a quote or memory of someone who was there lays over the scene.


First-hand accounts cut into the photographs, setting each scene against how the night actually felt.



I’ll Be With You, From Dawn to Dusk



BOOK DESIGN, TYPE, PRINT
2025 Inspired by Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), this book structures itself around thirteen films across thirteen hours, each spread holding a scene set precisely at that time of day. Read side by side this way, the films reveal how differently each one treats time, and how it works more as an anchor for storytelling and less as a backdrop. 
 

A sunrise-to-sunset gradient runs across the book, turning it into a clock you move through hour by hour.

Places as Shores


BOOK DESIGN, TYPE, PRINT
2026

Using the shore as a metaphor, this book encapsulates the research and experiments made to explore how places are shorelines, where debris of memory and presence accumulate. Structured as three tides (Shoreline, Memory and Presence)  the arguments are made of fragments of references and citations to build upon insights found. Information is treated in the same accumulative and shifitng way rather than declaring something outright and asks the reader to move through the book the way one would move along the shore.

Exhibited at Unfold Shanghai with Drawer Archive Publishing.


Spreads with debris of imagery and text come together as tides.



A spread discussing about Apartment 1A at the Tenement Museum and presenting fragments of memory and presence and how this space can be viewed as a shore.

Indexed Poster



RISOGRAPH, TYPE, PRINT
2025  
An indexed map that connects a group of active words to found images of objects on the internet. Placed in an orbital manner, this piece of work invites one to move around and explore what meaning emerges by connecting certain words to certain images, is it dynamic? does it reveal a new interpretation or does it create a rift?

Exhibited at Lost & Found: Mapping It Out, The Rubelle & Norman Schafler Gallery 

Details of the poster that give a glimpse of the texture and different layers that make the composition. 



The Shore Booklet



BOOK DESIGN, TYPE, PRINT
2025
A curated collection of images and key words that served as the north star to my thesis, this booklet is visual journey of creating meaning as you flip through each page. A collection of words acting as “pointers” are matched to fragments of images to highlight the markers of that image, and then shows the full story by revealing the entire image.  


A detailed set of images showcasing the word map and fragments of pictures that are matched to a set of words.

People’s Telescope 
EDITORIAL,TYPE,NEWSPAPER
2025 For the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary, this newspaper turns information into a system of orbits. The outer orbit carries images taken by the Hubble and offers the quick, surface-level story. Inside sits the inner orbit, giving a deeper look into the servicing missions, the engineering, and the people who got it up there and keep it running. The two depths are set differently, with the fast factual lists running vertically while the fuller story is horizontal, so a quick scan one way gives you the overview and reading the other way, when you have time, gives you the depth, oscillating between them the way the telescope oscillates around the Earth.
From the launch of the telescope in 1990 to 2025 - marking the 35th anniversary of the Hubble being in space, this project looks back at all the work it took to keep it running till present day alongside beautiful imagery captured with the help its pioneering technology.



Lost in Transliteration
CODE, INTERACTIVE
2025

A set of five prompts ask one to speak in their native language as it listens and attempts to translate.  The responses appear in a flattened way, as the sayings  and meanings end up misunderstood through the crossing into English. This piece uses that failure as its argument. English has been positioned as the default primary language and fluency in it is treated as a proxy for intelligence while other languages are quietly rendered to be lesser. Quite literally, lost in translation.

Try it out


Lipstick Theory 


CODE, DATA VISUALIZATION
2025

An interactive index of trends from 2005-2025 sourced from Google Trends’ database, comparing how they differ from when the economy is in recession. Referencing “The Lipstick Effect” where big luxury investments are replaced with smaller, more affordable luxury items like lipsticks,  trends during recession periods show up in hues of red. The more saturated a color is, the more prominent that trend keyword was.

Try it out

Aetheria 


BRAND IDENTITY, PACKAGING, 3D - SELF INITIATED
2023

Aetheria is a fragrance line that lifts you into another realm. Its name comes from aether, the classical fifth element that binds the other four into the atmosphere around us. The identity reveals the hidden concept by flipping the final letters of the name, ria, to spell air.

[Case Study under construction]

Leaf to Packaging
VISUAL IDENTITY, MATERIAL DESIGN,
PACKAGING
2024


 Loose tea-leaf is often packaged using plastics/non-biodegradeable materials, affecting the quality of tea stored in it while also contributing to the exisiting excessive waste crisis. Leaf to Packaging is a set of loose-leaf tea packages, designed to its flavor and made entirely from biodegradable bioplastic.

Featured In: Reimagining Packaging for a Sustainable Future,  Transmaterial Lab

A set of four different flavors - Mango & Moringa, Lavender, Green Tea and Black tea were made to demonstrate the versatility of the material by using different ingredients to let each flavor have a distinct apperance. 
The aim was to create packaging that is “part of the same story” by complementing tea’s agricultural origins while being fully compostable. 
This packaging system serves as an alternative to traditional plastics by reducing transportation weight and emissions while naturally integrating into the cycle of use and disposal, reflecting the regenerative processes of the natural world. 
©2026 Manojna V