A Day in the Life: Ayla Mortada

Designer

New York

8 am → 10 am

The one thing that will get me excited about the day is obviously breakfast. Chia seeds, fruits of your choice, sliced ginger, coco nibs, peanut butter and last but not least, coconut flakes.

Nothing pairs better to me than a quick family phone call to keep me grounded and sane in these coconut times. After that, a podcast or an awesome album to set the tone of the morning, depending on the mood. Which leads me to check up on the mood of the other residents in my home office: my real and fake plants.
10 am → 11 am

Working daily in your own bubble can be hard and alienating, so I check up on my fav sites to see what the cool kids of the design world are up to.

Dinamo: for typographic inspo
Awwwards: for website goodness
AIGA: for everything in between
And a few flips through some important design herstory.
1 pm → 2 pm

As you can see I’m no chef—and I don’t usually have much time to make a salivating dish. But I try my best with the abilities that I have to make a quick-not too boring-healthy sando—and a kickass salad on the side always.

This is the usual time of day that I get my visits from the Bushwick birds, who then remind me that the outside world exists and that I should take a walk.
3 pm → 6 pm

My favorite times at BUCK are when I get to collaborate with all the amazing people here, especially when we have different talents and merge our ideas to create really cool things together. Just like the Sandbox identity.
 (Pictures on the right of our modular logo, which you can mess with using your nose. Thanks to Jules Kris and Rozi Zhu for that magic code).

And when we have awesome guests like Junior Mintt that host our ERG Happy Hours (which I was late to).
7 pm → 8 pm

New York has some awesome sunsets, which I usually try to catch by going on my roof and enjoying 
(when it’s not freezing cold). (Also, this sunset picture was taken from the BUCK NY office and not my roof.)

By this time my roommate would have gotten home from work, and we talk through our day together. My day usually ends with some sketches or more reading.

And now that I have more time on my hands, I would proceed by constructing the sando of all sandoes.