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Helping new students feel at home with UAL Halls guides

An image of the UAL Halls flyers scattered in various orientations across the frame, creating a layered, patterned effect. Each flyer has a purple and black color scheme and features an artwork depicting an interior domestic scene. The headline on the flyers reads the Halls' names, such as Archwood House and Highline Building with the UAL logo and year 2025/26.
  • Written byAsia Domagalska, Junior Designer, UAL Creative
  • Published date 28 November 2025
An image of the UAL Halls flyers scattered in various orientations across the frame, creating a layered, patterned effect. Each flyer has a purple and black color scheme and features an artwork depicting an interior domestic scene. The headline on the flyers reads the Halls' names, such as Archwood House and Highline Building with the UAL logo and year 2025/26.
UAL Halls guides 2025/26 | Design direction: Creative, UAL; Photograph: Asia Domagalska

UAL Halls are the official student residences at University of the Arts London. Apart from being a place of residence, they also focus on building community, supporting wellbeing, and helping new students settle into university life.

As part of the resident's tenancy, UAL Halls are required to provide new students with a user guide for the home they are renting.

The brief

The Creative team were briefed to update, refresh and streamline the digital guides for the 2025/26 academic year.

The brief was very open and allowed for a lot of creative freedom from the start. The guide was to be user-friendly, informative, accessible and using a refreshed Halls identity. The challenge was to create one all-encompassing guide for all 12 halls, rather than a separate guide for each one.

A digital whiteboard showing layout developments for the digital UAL Halls Guide. It includes grid-based page designs in black, white, and purple, cover variations, notes on typography and accessibility, and print paper ideas.
UAL Halls guides design process Miro board

The creative process

For this project, we developed 2 distinct concepts which aim to explore and refresh the Halls visual identity.

Based on the feedback from the Halls team, we agreed on a concept featuring bold typography, simple, grid-based layouts and single-colour imagery. This creates a playful look and feel, while also offering a calming effect as moving into a new place can be overwhelming and involves processing a lot of information.

Additionally, we proposed an extra printed asset: a single-page A4 leaflet for each of the 12 halls. The front includes all essential information about each Hall, while the reverse is a poster with student work from the UAL Showcase collection Home (dis)Comforts, curated by Museum of the Home.

UAL Showcase is an online platform that highlights the work of graduating students and helps to connect them with industry professionals and employers. The work is curated into groups of projects that focus on a shared theme. The idea behind the poster was to give students something beautiful to display in their new space whilst at the same time offering a source of inspiration for what's possible to achieve throughout their journey studying at UAL.

Working with the UAL creative team on the updated Halls Guide was an absolute pleasure. From the outset, their professionalism and attention to detail stood out—they took the time to fully understand the brief before developing design concepts. We had complete confidence that the new guide would be on brand and meet the latest accessibility standards, which allowed our accommodation team to focus on perfecting the content. Feedback from our recent halls survey confirms that residents have found the new halls guides helpful. The experience was so positive that we’re already planning to collaborate with them on future accommodation projects.

— Anna Elliott, Marketing and Communications Manager, Accommodation Services, UAL
Two-page printed leaflet for UAL Halls with a pink, black, and white color scheme. The left page features the title “Home (dis)Comforts” at the bottom and showcases various art and design pieces from University of the Arts London (UAL) students, including photographs of sculptures, textiles, furniture, ceramics, and garments, each with captions naming the artist, year, and course. The right page is a housing information sheet for Emily Bowes Court. It provides practical details about accommodation, including sections on mail, tenancy, management team, travel information, facilities and services, communal spaces, accessibility, cleaning, fire safety, and security.
Halls guide 2025/26 | Design direction: Creative, UAL | Photograph: Asia Domagalska
A photograph of a printed leaflet for UAL Halls with a pink, black, and white color scheme. It features the title “Home (dis)Comforts” at the bottom and showcases various art and design pieces from University of the Arts London (UAL) students, including photographs of sculptures, textiles, furniture, ceramics, and garments, each with captions naming the artist, year, and course.
UAL Halls guides 2025/26 | Design direction: Creative, UAL | Photograph: Asia Domagalska
Four digital screenshots of the University of the Arts London (UAL) Halls’ Guide 2025/26 displayed on a grey background. The first shows a pink and white cover page titled “Halls’ guide 2025/26” with UAL branding. The second shows a contents page listing sections on arrival, facilities, wellbeing, and policies. The third shows a page titled “Arrival and move in,” with a black-and-white photo of students carrying belongings into a building. The fourth page is titled “Maintenance and repairs reporting,” with text explaining how to report issues and a pink box containing a resident’s quote about shared spaces being clean and well looked after.
UAL Halls guide 2025/26, digital PDF | Design direction: Creative, UAL

Roll out

Final deliverables included one digital guide and nearly 4,000 printed guides distributed across all 12 Halls buildings.

For the print production, we partnered with Ambrose Press known for providing the highest quality of print. We selected a quality 100% recycled, uncoated paper stock which gives a refined feel and finish and allows the identity colours to shine.

The feedback from both staff and students has been extremely positive throughout the process, from initial concept to final delivery.

Working with the Creative team on our new Halls' Guide was an absolute dream. We faced the challenge of consolidating 15 separate documents into one cohesive guide to support students across 12 halls. Not only did the team ease my anxieties about leading such a wide-reaching, student-facing project, they also made the process fun, engaging, and deeply fulfilling.

— Josh Trowbridge, Accommodation Projects Coordinator, Accommodation Services
An image of the UAL Halls flyers scattered in various orientations across the frame, creating a layered, patterned effect. Each flyer has a purple and black color scheme and features an artwork depicting an interior domestic scene. The headline on the flyers reads Home (dis)Comforts in bold black text on a purple banner. The printed text describes the exhibition’s theme of exploring feelings of comfort and discomfort within home spaces.
UAL Halls guides 2025/26 | Design direction: Creative, UAL | Photograph: Asia Domagalska

Meet the team

About UAL Creative

UAL Creative is University of the Arts London’s in-house design studio.

Since 2019 we have been building a team including alumni, recent graduates and occasionally students. We are a group of multi-disciplinary designers—freelance and permanent, Junior to Senior. Typically, you'll find the team working on: design strategy, design systems and campaign design including print, digital and animation for teams and projects across the University.

We are within the Communications Department in the Social Purpose Group and based at the High Holborn campus. We also work with designers through UAL Arts Temps, our university recruitment agency and jobs board, giving our students and alumni the opportunity to work freelance within our team.

Creative team

Asia Domagalska she/her/hers, Freelance Junior Designer, 2022 BA Graphic Media Design, London College of Communication, UAL

Lily Forbes she/her/hers, Midweight Designer, 2020 BA Graphic Design Communication, Chelsea College of Arts , UAL

Stephanie Feather she/her/hers, Head of Creative, 2008 BA Graphic Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL

Collaborators

Accommodation Services

Anna Elliott, Marketing and Communications Manager, Accommodation Services, UAL

Josh Trowbridge, Accommodation Projects Coordinator, Accommodation Services, UAL

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