Hi there!

My name is Tobias Micko, I’m an Austrian graphic designer, brand strategist and anthropologist in New York City.

My work as a designer is unorthodox and direct: Through human-centered brand audits and carefully crafted strategies, I translate the essence of a project into bold and distinct visual languages. These resulting brands not only lean on the organization's founders, intentions, and ideals, but aim at strengthening a communal sense for all consumers, partners, and employees to gather around with pride.

This unique approach falls into the humanist design practice, celebrates both digital and analogue making processes, and incorporates the history and human essence of all macro-cultures at play within the organizations I choose to work with. Clients range from climate entrepreneurs to cultural institutions, NGOs and SDG initiatives, family businesses and design-specific agencies.

“I establish startups in their market, reposition corporates alongside shifting consumer demands, and help cultural institutions represent their living heritage.”

While maintaining my freelance practice for clients from all around the world,  I am currently engaged as a group resident at the L'AiR Arts Cité Falguiére Association in Paris, France. I am also associated with the department of Design & Technology at Parsons School of Design, where my research focuses on critical media theory and the political and socio-economic implications of modern technology and its power structures on the human.

Through an anthropological lens I hope to find insights as to how speculative work and a rediscovery of craftsmanship might be able to help us to progress from the excess of the enlightenment we find ourselves in—not back to the pre-rational, but towards a trans-rational; A synthesis: the reconciliation of science and soul. Away from the voluntary nihilism of a depressed, globalized society. Away from the neo-liberal fanaticism of independent authenticity. Away from the distant analysis of quantitative qualities, towards a genuine encounter with the spirit of the object, the spirit of the human, the spirit of ourselves.

“We are specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”  –Max Weber