Andrew Burgess-Vargas

“The best advice I've received is simply to relax,” says Andrew Burgess-Vargas, a multidisciplinary graphic designer building visual systems and identities for brands. In an environment of perfectionism and high-pressure, it’s important to remember that not every decision needs to define your career. Below, Andrew talks different types of inspiration, turning historical archives into type and making your portfolio stand out when you're starting out.

About my work

My creative practice
I’m a multidisciplinary graphic designer working across identity, print, digital, motion and spatial projects. Most of my work involves conceptualizing visual systems for brands and adapting them across formats and environments. In September, I’ll be joining the design team at Gretel, where I’m excited to collaborate and learn from new people and projects.

Influences and inspiration
I tend to think about inspiration as active or passive. Actively – when consciously gathering references for a project – I usually turn to Are.na, Instagram or whatever bookshelf happens to be nearest. Sometimes, if a project calls for deeper research, I’ll turn to libraries and archives. For a recent Type@Cooper project, I revived a typeface from a pre-World War II book, which took me into historical research I don’t usually encounter professionally.

The passive influences are just as important: walking around New York, going to museums, watching films or spending time with friends who grew up with different cultural backgrounds. Being half Puerto Rican meant growing up around traditions and perspectives that weren’t always shared by my peers.

My training
I developed my formal foundation in design at the Herberger Institute at Arizona State University. Most recently, I completed Type@Cooper at Cooper Union. Studying type design sharpened my understanding of how type is constructed and shaped by tools, history and culture. I’ve already applied some of that thinking professionally, including designing the masthead for the inaugural issue of dollop magazine, centering on agriculture.

Much of my development has come from the people I’ve worked with at studios. Collaborating with teammates, clients and others has taught me how differently people approach the same problem, and how much stronger the work becomes through that exchange.

Favorite recent project
I’ve been especially excited about a visual identity project for the Society for Experiential Graphic Design’s (SEGD) 2026 annual conference, which I led while at Studio Loutsis. The conference takes place in Kansas City under the theme “Meet Me in the Middle,” using the city’s location as a starting point for thinking about tensions between different people, priorities, constraints and perspectives.

I translated that idea into four distinct visual languages that work together without collapsing into a single voice. Three are assigned to individual conference days, while the fourth acts as the overarching system tying them together. Much of my experience has been in designing identity systems with longevity in mind, so this project pushed me in a different direction.

A day in the life
One day I might be typesetting editorial layouts, another I’m presenting concepts to a client, and occasionally I’ll be on set for a campaign shoot. In the evenings and on weekends, I usually move between personal work and whatever gets me out of my routine, whether that's going to a museum, seeing friends or spending time in a neighborhood I haven’t explored before. I’m going to visit Donald Judd’s house and studio later this month, which I am very excited about.

A starter pack for my job:

How I got here

Starting my creative journey
I came to design through making things. As a kid, I loved drawing, rearranging furniture and taking photos on my iPod. By high school, a few friends and I had started a visual arts club where we made clothes, organized photoshoots and designed posters together.

Design school was the first time my personal way of making contended with an established discipline and its ideas about what design should be. Once I started working professionally, those two ways of thinking began to meet.

What I learned in school remains important, but professional practice taught me that established norms can coexist with my own tastes. My strongest work tends to happen when neither my intuition nor logic overrides the other.

Landing my first few jobs, clients and/or commissions
My first opportunity came during my sophomore year of design school, when a professor told me Studio Loutsis was looking for an intern. I applied with a portfolio of both personal and school work, interviewed, and moved to Brooklyn for a summer internship there a few weeks later. That led to freelance work, then a Junior Designer role, and eventually a full-time Designer position after graduation.

Getting work is rarely as simple as being referred or applying cold. Connections can surface opportunities, but your preparation and the work itself are what demonstrate your potential.

Biggest challenges along the way
Learning the parts of studio life that are rarely taught explicitly. Design school prepared me to think about the work, but there were smaller things I had never practiced, like presenting to clients with confidence or remembering to offer someone coffee when they visit the studio. A lot of that came through experience: seeing how other people handled meetings, presentations and client relationships helped me understand that professional confidence is less about having every answer and more about knowing how to contribute clearly and constructively.

Everyday skills I’ve found helpful for my creative work:
Organization. I’m often thinking about how things relate and how something could be made clearer. That might mean structuring an idea in a presentation, laying out content for a website or even arranging furniture in my bedroom.

My social media and self-promotion vibe is…
I use social media much more for viewing than posting. Instagram is one of the main ways I keep up with designers and artists I admire, discover new work and stay loosely connected to others. As of now, I haven’t posted on my own Instagram profiles in about three years. Something I’ve started to reconsider is who the act of posting is actually for. By staying quiet online, a lot of my growth has also been invisible to loved ones. I plan to start sharing again, less as a promotional strategy and more as a way to let people know what I’m doing.

Three things I've found useful in my career:

My greatest learnings when it comes to making money and supporting myself as a creative:
I’ve occasionally taken on independent freelance work. I’ve found talking openly with peers about rates to be very helpful. Pricing can vary so much depending on experience, scope, timeline and the client, so those conversations have helped me understand what feels reasonable rather than guessing in isolation.

Freelancing has also made me more aware of the administrative side of a design practice. Quoting, invoicing, setting expectations and managing projects on my own are all skills I’m learning by doing.

Advice

My most useful career tips
The best advice I’ve received to date is simply to relax. Taking the work seriously doesn’t mean treating every decision as if it will define your entire career.

Where I go to feel connected as a creative
Most of my creative community comes from friends and the people I work with. Since moving to New York, Type@Cooper has added another circle of people who I’ve learned a lot from. I’ve also met more of the wider design community through events like Typographics, which has made the city feel a bit smaller.

What I'd say to someone looking to get into a similar role
If you’re in design school, be intentional about how you approach projects. They should build your skills, but over time, they could also become portfolio pieces that introduce you to the places you want to work. It helps to understand what kinds of work those studios or in-house teams value without shaping everything purely around getting hired.

It’s also good to make room for self-directed work. Student portfolios can naturally start to look similar because students are often responding to comparable briefs. Personal projects give you a chance to show what you’re curious about when nobody has assigned the subject or outcome.