15 Artists Under 30: Andrew Herzog

Call for entries: HOW Logo Design Competition

Deadline for entry: November 20, 2017

This is the third year we’ve run our New Visual Artists: 15 under 30 issue. What was once a highly edited list of 20 of the best and brightest young designers is now a deeper exploration of 15 of the most original talents working in visual communications today.

This issue of Print comes at an interesting time. This new group of designers, while undeniably adroit, is part of a generation fully proficient in the art of self-promotion in a digital age. Getting the word out about one’s work is now de rigueur. But at a time when new work is relentlessly blasted out on platforms where seemingly everyone in the room is shouting, is it really possible to break through the volume of voices all vying to captivate and capture attention? Moreover, in the Insta-culture of the early 21st century, how does one navigate through the metadata to find the meteoric? As in years past, that’s exactly what we’ve sought to do here. We’ve gone in quest of craft and cunning ideas and ideals. We’ve looked for substance and style and star-power. The list of Print’s New Visual Artists has become a who’s who of the industry’s leaders, and includes Scott Dadich, Eddie Opara, Alan Dye, Jessica Walsh, Jessica Hische, Frank Chimero and, more recently, Zipeng Zhu, Joe Hollier and Joey Cofone. This year’s 15 New Visual Artists are bold in name and in voice, and are bravely making new work in a new world.

“This is a cover people can interact with.”

Meet New Visual Artist Andrew Herzog

Age: 26.

From: Coatesville, PA.

Current city: Brooklyn, NY.

Education: Savannah College of Art & Design; MA, graphic design.

Earliest creative memory: It’s more like an amalgamation of many memories—thinking that a signature was an entire drawing, drawing Free Willy, coloring people blue.

Path that led you to design: When I was growing up, my dad worked for a company that made labels. Labels that get slapped on all sorts of things. Ingredient labels for food, and stuff like that. Because I doodled and had an imagination, my dad insisted that I spend time with Jess, the “Graphic Artist” who worked there. I wasn’t even sure what being a graphic artist meant. His job consisted of setting type and graphics to create print-ready files that would go to the presses and become labels, but he was technically an artist and had a job. Meeting him cracked open a world of possibilities I otherwise might not have known. It also meant that later on, my parents would be OK with me going to art school because they knew there was at least one job out there for someone like me. Another contributing factor was a crush I had on an AP art student my junior year of high school. She was going to SCAD, so I did too.

Career thus far, in a nutshell: R/GA → Sagmeister & Walsh → Google Creative Lab → HAWRAF.

Motto/design philosophy: Make things that people want to interact with.

Work of which you’re most proud: Last fall, at HAWRAF—a studio I co-founded with Carly Ayres, Nicky Tesla and Pedro Sanches—we did the A-Z project. Every hour for 26 hours straight, we created something new, starting with a randomly chosen word from the dictionary. We live-streamed it to open our process to anyone who was curious how a design studio like ours functions. I’m also really proud of the Google Creative Lab 5 application site and AutoDraw, which sprang from that project. I’d love to see the tools that we designers use every day be made more readily available and free to everyone. Not all of us are born with Creative Suite installed on our home computers, and not everyone has any idea what we as creatives do on a day to day. These projects are two of my favorites because they begin to explore the possibilities of accessible creative tools when made by a company like Google. In my personal work, I’ve loved making Natural Navigation and the Ergonomics Studies. I find that we miss a lot as human beings. Through interactive interventions we can punctuate the mundane.

Biggest influence: People. There are so many of us. There are so many perspectives. Everyone is thinking, doing and valuing different things. That’s very interesting to me.

How you would classify your style: Medium-agnostic Interactive.

Design hero: Virgil Abloh.

Favorite typographer: George Arial.

Favorite writers: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kendrick, Meek Mill, Wale.

What defines you: Socks with slides.

Cause that means the most to you: Education. Education is a privilege, and it can be a barrier or a stepping-stone.

Biggest fear: Being on a list like this with 14 other white dudes.

What you want to accomplish before all is said and done: Create a body of work and a career path that is inspiring and accessible for anyone who might be interested in pursuing a career where they can use their creativity to survive.

The future of design is: Giving more control to the audience and users.

Websites: www.andrewherzog.com; www.hawraf.com

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