Ernie Agtarap
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Ernie Agtarap
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AboutTwenty-five years
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I make complex science and finance feel human.

Annual reports, brand campaigns, pavilions and digital design — for pharmaceutical companies, global banks, foundations and the United Nations. I have art-directed work for Bristol Myers Squibb for more than fifteen years — brands, campaigns, digital and the annual report — and I continue to lead the evolution of creative design at Bayer AG, pioneering new ways of integrating AI with human creativity to deliver innovative, high-impact visual solutions.

Areas of Practice
01 Brand systems
02 Annual reports
03 Campaign art direction
04 Data & information design
05 Executive presentations
06 Exhibits & environments
07 Editorial & print
08 Motion & video
09 AI-assisted workflows
Graphic Designer
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Nothing under that. Try a client — Bayer, Otsuka, CGAP — or a discipline like pavilion, infographic or annual report.
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Clients

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Logos & marks

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Twenty-five years in the room where hard things get explained.

I started at Apple, explaining technology to people across a counter. It turned out to be the right training for everything after: my job has always been to take something complicated — a clinical trial result, a development-economics finding, a regulatory code — and give it a form people actually trust.

I joined Bristol Myers Squibb in 2003 as a senior art director and stayed twelve years, leading creative across pharmaceutical brands inside one of the most regulated environments design gets to work in. I have continued with them as a creative consultant ever since — annual reports and executive communications, a global corporate advertising campaign, and a seat at the table on the enterprise brand initiative with Siegel+Gale. Today I am a creative manager at Bayer, working alongside medical writers and editors on communications for clinicians and patients.

In parallel I spent nine years as executive creative director at Anne Folan & Associates, serving global institutions and foundations. The high point was a climate conference pavilion built with the UNFCCC, Meta and the Open Earth Foundation — environmental graphics, multimedia, video and interactive work at architectural scale. Since 2012 I have also been art director for the Financial Alliance for Women, whose summits and research have taught me most of what I know about designing for an international audience.

I am as comfortable on a press check as I am in a stakeholder review, and I appreciate a real budget constraint—it is often where craft shows. Increasingly, I am incorporating generative AI into my workflow as a tool for exploration: accelerating concept development, opening up new visual directions, and supporting retouching and production. But I see AI as a creative instrument, not a substitute for design thinking. The ideas, visual judgment, composition, typography, brand discipline and final decisions remain human-led. I use AI to expand what I can explore, not to determine what the work should be. For me, the goal is not AI-generated design, but better human design made possible by thoughtfully integrating emerging technology into the creative process.

Aside

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Personal work, and the habit behind the photo art direction in everything above.

Index

Every project, alphabetically, by category.

A flat map of the whole archive. Projects that do more than one job are listed under each category they belong to.

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Industry Focus

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Let's talk about the work.

I lead creative at Bayer and consult independently. Always glad to talk about brand systems, annual reports, campaigns, and the occasional impossible deadline.

Based in New York Metropolitan Area
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