The shefa school
Status: Completed
Team: Eileen Moore, Radnyee Joshi, Shraddha Bedmuttha
Awards:
Graphis Design Annual Gold Award, Environmental
The Shefa School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side serves students with language-based learning differences in a warm, supportive environment that celebrates both education and Jewish culture. Spanning twelve vertical floors, the campus presented a unique challenge: creating a wayfinding system that allowed student to intuitively navigate classes on different floors while reflecting fun, engaging design that spoke to school’s mission and identity.
To address this challenge, each floor has its own character, organized around different art and science levels. To bring cohesion and clarity to the vertical layout, we designed a bold, color-driven system that ties into the building’s architectural color story. The palette transitions from greens at the lower levels to blues at the top, an intentional gradient that symbolizes growth, learning, and upward movement.
In alignment with the school’s mission, identity, and the needs of students, we created bilingual signage in English, Hebrew, and Transliteration. This choice celebrates the school’s Jewish identity while welcoming a diverse community of students and families. To make navigation even more inclusive, we also designed custom symbols to accompany the text.
Exterior Glass Graphic
One of the main components of the signage program is the exterior glass graphic, which identifies the building without relying on a traditional name or logo. The organic vine concept was inspired by the school’s logo and the building’s architectural idea of a sprout growing from the earth toward the sky. The graphic style takes inspiration from traditional Judaic paper cutting, reflecting cultural heritage through intricate patterns and layered detail. Hidden within the design are symbolic Jewish motifs such as doves, bees, olives, and pomegranates, offering moments of discovery for those who look closely.
Donor Wall
The lobby’s donor walls continues the exterior vine graphic and features Jerusalem Stone, a material used in ancient and modern-day Jerusalem. Colorful acrylic donor panels are applied to the stone wall at different depths to indicate the donor tiers. The design uses the non-engraved panels to create an opportunity for future donor additions through a flexible graphic layout.
