People
Andy Barbera
Director of Branding
As Senior Brand Designer, Andy facilitates collaboration and design innovation, and builds trusted client relationships. Andy leads the brand design team in developing programs that merge physical and digital elements to translate brands into experiences, often spanning spatial branding, experiential design, signage and wayfinding, and environmental graphics. He brings 20 years of brand strategy, graphic design, and marketing experience within the built environment to deliver comprehensive, award-winning solutions that drive value for his client’s businesses. Andy’s expertise at distilling the complex and giving form to the perplexing has helped him achieve creative solutions for both client-facing design initiatives as well as internal marketing strategy. Andy partners with clients ranging from financial, media, and technology brands to education and not-for-profit institutions.
About Andy
Music and design bookend my creative life and I’ve come to see they share many similar characteristics. Color, texture, rhythm, harmony, tone, and more all combine as composition in both realms and one of the most meaningful aspects they share is the use of space. While space in music and space in built environments are quite different perceptually, it is the placement of things and their absence that creates form, experience and feeling in both. Like punctuation, space contextualizes the things it contains, creates rhythm and melody, and helps tell the story. We call this absence of things “negative space” in art and design and in notated music we call them “rests”. Essentially, negative space in art and design is the audible silence of the visual world, and this concept of space is the foundational consideration at the root of both the music I make and the designs I create. It is the artistic element I place as most important to produce meaningful human experience whether creating sounds or physical environments. I believe what we leave out is sometimes more important than what we include and I’m continually delighted by the meaning that is found in these between spaces, in the absence of things, and how this influences what we actually see and hear.
Favorite Quote
“In music, silence is more important than sound.”
– Miles Davis
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