As Lehigh professor and accomplished painter Deirdre Murphy planned her art exhibit at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove toward the end of 2025, she wanted to give a student the opportunity to design the exhibit’s corresponding art catalog. When design professor Maurizio Masi recommended junior Jua Kim, Murphy got more than she bargained for: a student whose work and work ethic were as good as a professional’s. 

“Jua Kim was top on Masi’s list, and I could instantly see why when I interviewed her. Not only did she have a solid portfolio, but she also possessed a strong work ethic, good communication skills, and the ability to meet deadlines,” she said. “Jua created a museum quality catalog, exhibition announcement and is working on a social media campaign to round out her portfolio.”

Murphy’s solo exhibit, “Home Making,” features 12 paintings portraying birds and the environments where they live in keeping with her career-long focus on art and ecology. It is one of four exhibits displayed at the Audubon Center in the spring and summer of 2026; Murphy’s work is also featured in a joint exhibit with Yvonne Love called Field Notes. The exhibit will be on display through August 16.

“Home Making” stands out because of its bright colors, realistic details, and unexpected patterns, and those are all reflected in the catalog as well. Working with Murphy and Audubon Center curator Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, Kim chose to use colors from the paintings in the exhibit rather than from the Audubon Center’s brand guidelines. The maroon text pops above the orange and purple of “Feathering the Nest,” the painting excerpted on the cover. 

“The end product is stunning,” Moqtaderi said. “She followed the vision I was trying to convey and went beyond by incorporating her own design flair.”

CREATING THE PRESENT

Having grown up in Oahu, Hawaii, Kim wanted to follow her older sister to the East Coast for college. She had not decided on a major when she arrived at Lehigh in the fall of 2023 but fell in love with design when she took professor Jason Travers’ two-dimensional design foundations class. She enjoyed trying physical handcrafts and learning programs including Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and PhotoShop. 

“I really enjoyed the studio type of class. It was small, and everyone became friends,” she recalled. “There were a lot of times where I would go up to the studio at night to work on projects, and it would be with the same people, forming a tight bond.”

Since then she has become a graphic design major and worked at the Health & Wellness Center and the College of Arts & Sciences. During her freshman year she started in a work-study role at the Health and Wellness Center, and in her sophomore year she became the digital media associate, designing flyers and promotional materials for social media and to display in the center. She got to design posters and Instagram posts explaining what a new well-being room in the Health & Wellness Center was available for and highlighting health awareness campaigns such as Sleep Awareness Week.  

This year she is working for Christopher Herrera, the art director for the College of Arts and Sciences. When she told Herrera she was interested in user experience and user interface, or designing websites to be easy for users to navigate, he assigned her to help redesign the Lehigh University Art Galleries’ website. She has learned how to research existing websites to identify layouts that work and began using the vocabulary and functions of UX, building on what she had already learned in a class. Each experience has helped build her portfolio. 

DESIGNING THE FUTURE

Before designing the catalog, Kim’s most significant publication design experience was making a booklet in Masi’s upper-level graphic design class. She created the catalog during the same semester she was taking his publication design class. She treated designing the catalog like a job. She started by meeting with Murphy and Moqtaderi over winter break to get a sense of their vision for this catalog and to look at past catalogs for ideas. Moqtaderi wanted a coffee table book with no more than 40 pages, 8 by 10 inches, with French flaps on the front and back cover to give more room to highlight the artist’s and curator’s professional experience. 

Kim continued to meet with them at least once a week via Zoom or in person, presenting ideas for colors, fonts, and page layouts in InDesign, and receiving feedback and revisions. Moqtaderi wrote the text for the catalog. Some ideas didn’t work: A page she designed with a collage of photos was stripped down to a simpler layout with just three photos. 

“As a seasoned art curator, this is one of the most beautiful catalogs I have produced, and probably the most precious,” Moqtaderi said. “It was fun to be able to incorporate French flaps, which is a special treat!”

The months of collaborating to carefully make choices to design a beautiful product added up to the kind of work Kim might want to do in the future. As she looks ahead to the summer, Kim is applying for internships in UX/UI in New York City, where her sister lives, and in California, where her parents live. She is keeping an open mind on career options following her expected graduation in 2027, and with her passion for graphic design, UX/UI, and social media there will be a lot of directions she could go. 

“I would definitely love to have this experience again,” Kim reflected. “I really enjoyed working as a little team with Heather, Deirdre, and me.”