I'm Andrew Steger

— artist, illustrator, and designer, and the one person behind Maple Key Studio.

For 20+ years I've worked as a designer and illustrator — the last 10 under the name Maple Key Studio — building things for national brands (Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Walmart, Tide, and others, through the agencies SaatchiX and ThinkMotive) and for people and places closer to home: churches, musicians, coffee roasters, a public radio station, a folk school. The studio's center of gravity has shifted toward laser-cut wood and acrylic sculpture, wall pieces, and gallery work that lets me sit with harder questions instead of resolving them for a client by Friday. But I haven't set commercial work aside — I've narrowed what kind I want. Less general branding, more of what I got to do for Onyx Coffee Lab, New Belgium, and bands like St. Paul and the Broken Bones: work where a brand wants an actual artistic voice on the can, the label, the poster — not just a design service.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, which gave me language for a sensitivity and a way of thinking I'd spent most of my life apologizing for. It's part of why the work looks the way it does now — precision cut against imperfection, warm wood against cold acrylic, certainty and uncertainty held in the same object.

After a life spent mostly in digital spaces, making something that can't be meaningfully made by AI feels like its own kind of protest — a stake in the ground of my broken, beautiful, contradictory humanity. I think that matters for brands too: when anyone can generate something that looks fine, hiring an actual artist with an actual point of view is how you stand out instead of blending in.

I'm a person of faith, though it shows up in the work less as a message and more as material — doubt, the body, denial, mystery, the parts of being human that don't resolve. I'm also progressive, Ozark-rooted, married to Virginia, and usually thinking about four things at once. When something won't fit into a picture, I write about it on Substack. None of these are separate rooms. They're one seam, and the studio is where it shows.

If you're a brand, a band, a nonprofit, or someone with a wall, a home, or a sacred space that needs something made with real thought — not generated, made — I'd love to hear from you.