Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Design, Books & Prints
Website: marcards.me
Maria Cardenas is a graphic designer and art director based in San Francisco, California. She completed a BA in Graphic Design from Azusa Pacific University and an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2021–2023). Her professional career has included work as an Art Director at Apple, where she applies a craft-driven visual sensibility to large-scale creative projects.
Cardenas maintains an independent creative practice alongside her commercial work, initiating projects that investigate the intersections of publication design, community, and artistic dialogue. Based in San Francisco, she participates actively in the Bay Area’s design and art communities, contributing to events and exhibitions that position design practice as a form of artistic inquiry.
Her self-initiated publications and community projects have been presented at venues including the San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project (2025), and she has created identity work for the AIA California Monterey Bay Design Conference (2024).
Cardenas works primarily in graphic design, with a strong focus on identity systems, publication design, print, editorial, and digital media. Her work is distinguished by a rigorous attention to craft and materials — her self-published works employ a hybrid of riso, laser jet, and ink jet printing, hand-bound using perfect binding. Typography functions as a primary expressive tool, and her layouts balance visual clarity with conceptual intention.
Her personal projects often serve as community-building platforms: creating editorial and physical spaces where artists and designers can share ideas and practices. Whether designing conference identities for architectural organizations or hand-producing intimate publication series, Cardenas consistently foregrounds collaboration, experimentation, and process as core values of her practice.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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