Rafael Esquer

Rafael Esquer is Creative Director and CEO at Alfalfa New York. He received his BFA in graphic design from Art Center College of Design and has lived in Manhattan since 1996.

A native of the Sonora desert of Mexico, Esquer established Alfalfa New York on November 1 (Day of the Dead) to emphasize its connection to the rich tradition of Mexican graphic arts.

In 2004 Esquer opened Alfalfa Studio, his own interdisciplinary design firm located in the historic district of Sugar Hill in Harlem, the birthplace of the 1920s Harlem renaissance movement. Fueled by curiosity and a relentless desire to make the world a more beautiful place, in art and design, Esquer adheres to his own creative philosophy, “Make the idea clear and simple, the design surprising and beautiful.”

Esquer’s clients at Alfalfa Studio have included the New York City Football Club, the Houston Rockets, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Philip Johnson Glass House, the Center for Architecture, the New York Times Magazine, Nike, Bjork, AIGA, Tommy Boy Records, Target, Scholastic, the City of New York, and MTV.

In 2018, the Iconic New York Illuminated and the Iconic London Maps were acquired by the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection at Stanford University Library. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York and is included in the collections of several other museums, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Denver Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Poster Museum in Poland, and the Olympic Museum in Switzerland.

Before opening Alfalfa Studio, Esquer was Creative Director at Radical Media in New York, where his group’s work in communication design received the National Design Award in 2004 from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In 2007, Taschen named Esquer one of the world’s 100 most influential graphic designers working today (Charlotte and Peter Field, eds. “Contemporary Graphic Design”)