Today we’d like to introduce you to Andres de la Casa Huertas.
Andres, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
Even though, I was born in San Sebastián, a beautiful city by the Cantabric Sea in the North of Spain, I’ve always called Logroño home. It’s a provincial kind of town, also in the north but inland, where my parents relocated when I was 8. My parents live there. My friends are from there. I guess I became a person there.
I studied Media and Film in Bilbao and started my professional career in Madrid. I started as a journalist, working for the Social Democrats in Congress. But that wasn’t for me, I’ve been a creative person all my life, and after studying an MFA, I started my career as a graphic designer and art director in 2003. Since then I’ve worked for international brands such as McDonald’s, Chevrolet, PlayStation or Apple, first in Madrid, then also in Dublin and London. I finally moved here to Dallas in 2015, after The Wild Detectives owners –my long-time friends Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique– offered me to be in charge of marketing and communication at the bookstore.
Designer, artist and thinker John Maeda said at SXSW in 2014 that brands are no longer about the way they look or want to look but about the way they are experienced, “Logotypes are just a haircut”, he said. I think that the role of advertising/branding has shifted. I personally don’t think it’s about what brands want to say about themselves anymore, but about what people say about those brands that is important. My goal at The Wild Detectives has always been about the experience, about how could we bring real tangible value to our customers. It feels like exciting times for the search of true meaning, valuable connection and real human interaction, doesn’t it?
I’ve always considered myself as a designer, a thinker and a maker, a creative problem solver. I’m a massive advocate for Human Centered Design processes, which re-evaluate the learnings from my beloved modernism at the light of what already looks like a new world. I think its time for Utopias, maybe not as a destination but as a plan for good.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
Well I don’t do art, I do creativity and design, which altogether is a different thing. I don’t use my craft to express myself, but I use it to communicate and express a brand’s personality. Once said that I love every minute behind a computer laying out, shapes, color and type together. I love even more those minutes inside my head figuring out how to say something and visualizing ideas. That’s me at my happiest, cracking a message through visual language.
The wide scope of work at The Wild Detectives has allowed me to explore others skills I haven’t used that much in my career. I had to design the books display system in the shop, for example, which involved some 3d and furniture design. I’ve also been writing a bit, some articles here, some reviews there.
But the work I’m most proud of is a comic series called Reading Quirks about those weird things readers do. We’ve counted with the help of an illustrator friend back home, Laura Pacheco, to materialize our ideas. It started as content for our social media channels, but it become its own animal. We’re now about to publish a proper book in Spain this fall, and hopefully here next year. If anybody is curious about how this looks like, the cartoons can be seen here: https://www.instagram.com/readingquirks/
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
Let your instincts answer the questions. Be one with the force, kind of thing.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
Follow the Wild Detectives social media channels, read our articles on our website and/or come to our events.
Contact Info:
- Address: The Wild Detectives
314 W Eighth St.
Dallas, TX 75208 - Website: http://thewilddetectives.com/
- Phone: 214-942-0108
- Email: andres@thewilddetecives.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewilddetectives/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewilddetectives/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/WildDetectives
Image Credit:
The Wild Detectives on all of them.
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