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Rafael
Esquer believes his first big break came the summer
before he turned 10. While most children played, he got a job
pushing an ice-cream cart through the streets of Huatabampo, a city
on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Under the hot Sonoran Desert sun,
he sold ice cream and popsicles every day that summer. His
grandmother saved his 10-percent sales commission for him so he
wouldn't spend the money right away. Esquer didn't want to stray
from his goal: a pair of tennis shoes he had seen other
neighborhood children wearing. He had asked his father for them,
but with six children and a civil servant's income, his father
refused. Esquer would have to earn the shoes on his own.
"At end of the summer, when I had enough
money and went to buy
them, I felt so empowered," Esquer recalls. "I felt, my God, I
could do anything I want if I were disciplined and had vision. It
was one of my most powerful moments of clarity."
With that lesson as the foundation, Esquer
has built a
successful career in communication design. His imaginative designs
have graced the bodies of Olympic athletes and album covers of
renowned musicians. Millions would come across his work for the
City of New York in their daily lives. But first, he had to find
the discipline and vision to become a designer.
On his early aspirations:
When I saw Picasso's work, it just looked like something fun—I
wanted to do that. I knew for sure that I wanted to travel, learn
from other cultures, be challenged and have friends from all over
the world.
Esquer grew up
a son of a teacher who moved his family wherever
schools needed to be built. He remembers how hard his father worked
to convince rural Mexicans of the need for education. A Spanish
speaker, his father would go door to door in far-flung villages
with small populations that often only spoke in obscure, indigenous
dialects. Once his father had helped them build schools and hire
teachers, the Esquer family would pack up and move to the next
town. In these formative years, Esquer lived in no fewer than 20
houses. He began drawing to entertain himself, and for a boy who
was always the new kid, drawing also became an instrument of social
survival. He drew as a way of reaching out to the new children he
met. He found that if his classmates liked what he drew, they
generally liked him, too. Art and design, however, were not yet a
part of the future he saw for himself. He always thought he would
teach, like his father. Then, his father had a stroke when Esquer
was in his teens, and his mother not only took control of the
household but gave him permission to pursue his own path. "My
mother then told me, you don't have to be a teacher. You can be
anything you want."
After being
"freed" from what felt like the family business,
Esquer latched on to the idea of becoming an architect. In 1986, he
took a 36-hour train to Mexico City to take his entrance exam. But
there would be no young architect-in-the-making. On the way, Esquer
got lost and didn't arrive at the right examination center in time.
To avoid returning to Sonora, he enrolled briefly at a photography
school. The next year, his fascination with typography drew him to
study graphic design at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana.
What he collected as a child:
Rocks. I was mesmerized by their colors, textures… their
uniqueness.
Esquer might
have continued to live in Mexico City and study
design there, but then two new Macintosh computers arrived at his
university's design lab. Those machines opened his eyes to what
computers could do—only problem was that he barely understood the
words on the screen. In 1989, he moved to Los Angeles, intending to
stay there just for a year to improve his English. One year turned
into many more. To support himself he worked the graveyard shift at
the 7-Eleven on the intersection of La Brea and Sunset Boulevard.
Esquer has no regrets. "It was a great learning experience. Working
at night, you just see all kinds of characters. I became friends
with prostitutes and lost actors coming in to look at magazines in
the middle of the night. It gave me an understanding of people I'd
never have been exposed to otherwise," he says.
He took graphic design classes at Los
Angeles Trade-Technical
College and got a job as a designer at a Hispanic alternative
weekly; within two months he was promoted to art director. In 1993,
he got into the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. In 1996,
while finishing his degree, he won a student typography competition
and flew to New York for the award show. There, he ran into a
former Art Center classmate whose referral helped Esquer to land a
job offer. Thrilled by his first taste of the city, Esquer
accepted. "New York felt like home," he says. "It felt like
revolution was in the air all the time."
On
diversity in design:
It amazes me, everywhere I go—whether to give a lecture or judge,
in any city in the country—young Latin designers (students or young
professionals) come to thank me. There is a lack of role models for
minority designers.
That
stint at interactive advertising agency Poppe Tyson got him
to New York, but it was his work at @radical.media that won him
accolades, including a National Design Award from the
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in 2004. Impressed by
Esquer's ability to help win pitches, @radical.media's CEO and
chairman Jon Kamen gave him carte blanche to step in and elevate
the design group's work. "[Kamen] told me he wanted to make the
best design studio in New York. So I hired people and made my team.
They gave me a lot of freedom." Esquer's projects included the art
directing the packaging for Bjork's single Cocoon and a TV
spot for George Harrison's album All Things Must Pass.
Collaborating with Oscar-winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka, he
created racing suits and uniforms for the 2002 Winter Olympics. New
Yorkers who've dialed the municipal information hotline will
recognize his logo for 311, and his versatile Made in NY logo has
helped to brand the city's industriousness. The work that he's most
proud of from that time may be lower in profile, but greater in
meaning. Esquer designed canvas laundry bags that @radical.media
sent to clients and friends of the company so they could be
returned, filled with clothes for charity. The response was so
overwhelming it became an annual holiday project that spanned six
cities internationally.
The laundry
project reminded Esquer of how much he missed actual
hands-on design and projects that were truly his. In 2004, he left
@radical.media and founded alfalfa studio. "One
of the
reasons I work on my own is to be able to really work on those
things I want to do. Real design comes out of problems and finding
solutions for them," says Esquer. "We [designers] are so privileged
as to have the power to communicate to the masses and affect the
world." Among Esquer's many projects is alfalfa-seeds.com, a
web-based
graphic T-shirt line with profits going towards scholarships for
minority design students. "When I go to give lectures, I find I'm
usually the only Latino there. All these minority kids would come
up and thank me. It made me wonder why more people like me are not
doing this." It's not surprising then that Esquer now also teaches
design classes for Spanish-speakers at the School of Visual Arts.
The son of a teacher has achieved success as a designer in New
York, but despite how far he's come, the influence of the family
business—of civil service and education—is still intact. "I'm
optimistic," says Esquer. "It's hard to be a business owner and run
your own studio. I could be very comfortable somewhere else, but I
believe in what I do. I believe it can make a little
difference."
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