Written by Katie Chiou

IN CONVERSATION WITH is a series from Archetype where we interview artists in/at the edges of crypto across music, visual art, design, curation, and more.

Eric Hu is a multidisciplinary graphic designer and art director based in New York City. He is the founder of Eric Hu Studio, a design and creative direction practice working across fashion, music, architecture, and technology. Eric has garnered an international reputation for creating genre-defining visual identities and artwork for clients such as Nike, Google, and Chanel. 

Previously, he served as Global Design Director at Nike Sportswear and Director of Design at SSENSE, where he formed its inaugural design team. He is also co-creative director of Mold Magazine, a publication focusing on the future and science of food.

In 2021, he launched Monarchs, a limited edition series of generative NFTs with procedural animation by Roy Tatum. Each artwork features a unique one-of-a-kind butterfly with varying wing shapes, colors, bodies, and patterns.

Over a call, I chatted with Eric about attribution and monetization for artists, AI tooling, the role of institutions in art education, forming the design team at SSENSE, and more.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Katie Chiou: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share more about your background/journey as a designer and artist? And for that matter, how do you think about the difference between designer and artist if at all?

Eric Hu: I'm a designer, technologist, and artist—all three and none at the same time. I started making websites when I was 12, and at first, it was just a way for me to find a community. Over time, it's one of those things where you’re never really sure if a hobby you pick up as a kid will end up being able to sustain you or form your livelihood. But I think I got lucky with that. I came up at the right time on the internet.

I have formal training in graphic design, growing up with a love for logos, lettering, and typography. As a kid, I got into trouble doing graffiti, so my outlet for this fascination wasn’t always productive. Art school helped nurture it in a positive direction, which led me to graduate school. There, I took computer science classes, which felt more challenging than my art classes but taught me valuable skills. After graduating, I worked for Ryder Ripps at his digital technology agency. While we had our differences, his idea of merging culture and technology inspired me during the start of my own studio in 2014.

As my career progressed, people started to notice that my background in lettering and print design was unique. For a few years, I emphasized that aspect of my work. While I love making websites and programming, the web space during the 2010s felt stagnated, and I couldn’t quite articulate my frustration with it until web3 came along. When I first started learning about web3, I became engrossed in it. It reignited my love for programming and interaction design.

KC: You’ve said in past interviews that Trevor (Friends with Benefits) and Dee (Zora) essentially onboarded you to crypto… but I’m curious how you all even came together in the first place?

EH: I've been following Trevor since I was in college. I grew up in LA, and Trevor was a really successful DJ and producer in the LA club scene. A few years later, after I moved to New York—around 2014 or 2015—he actually reached out because he had an idea for an app.

Around the same time, I was doing a lot of work for musicians, especially known for album covers and interactive experiences. I was also talking to someone else in the music space, Jesse Walden. He described how, at the time, platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr were filled with shared images and visual culture, but there was an attribution problem. Jesse wanted to create something like Shazam for images, using Bitcoin as the underlying technology. This idea was radical back then—Ethereum was barely on anyone’s radar. 

By 2021, I started noticing more of my friends getting involved in NFTs. One day, I tweeted, asking if anyone could tell me more about NFTs, and Dee from Zora personally messaged me and set up a 30-minute video chat with me and Jacob. That’s when everything Jesse had talked about years earlier suddenly clicked. It felt like one of those "Chekhov’s gun" moments in life, where something that once seemed esoteric now made perfect sense.

So much of the internet is built on platforms where we upload our content, but we don’t own it anymore. NFTs flipped that model, and it resonated deeply with me. I’ve always loved print design and traditional media, but I also love technology’s ability to share, connect, and build communities. There was never a real bridge between those worlds, but NFTs felt like the closest thing to one. It was a time when I found a community of like-minded people trying to discover something new, and I fully committed to it. In many ways, it was what I’d been searching for my entire life.

Whether crypto has fully lived up to my expectations is something I have mixed feelings about, but we can get into that later. 

KC: On the note of attribution, something I’ve been reasoning about for a long time is the tradeoffs of attribution and how it’s usually advocated for in the context of monetization. On the other side of that coin though, paid usage/attribution kills off a lot of creative work and distribution like remixing, etc. Is that a thought that resonates with you?

EH: Attribution is one of those things where user behaviors on the internet slowly build over time, and then one day you blink and realize, "Wait, what happened? Why are people acting so differently?" For me, it’s been interesting to see how people care about provenance and attribution, but we’re so collectively addicted to dopamine rushes and instant gratification.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, culture has become more transactional. People used to have hobbies for the sake of enjoyment, but now there’s pressure, especially on younger generations, to turn everything into a "side hustle." The idea that a hobby could become a career if made public is a strong incentive. This has given rise to content creators and influencers, but it can also make things feel less worthwhile.

Attribution is like the "eating your vegetables" of the internet. Wikipedia, despite no monetization, remains a backbone of self-reflection and consensus. It’s all about incentives.
What originally excited me about web3 was the promise that if you could measure something, you could assign value to it and someone could pay for it. This felt revolutionary compared to the days of torrents and altruistically seeding content. Now, if you run an Ethereum node, you get paid—that's a big shift. I was excited about this incentivization, thinking it could create a net positive for the internet by, for example, monetizing something like being a Wikipedia editor.

However, I failed to realize there’s a two-pronged issue with the internet: we want authentic community, but we also want discoverability. As a designer and artist creating content online, I want people to discover my work, but optimizing for discoverability often comes at the cost of real community. They seem diametrically opposed at times. For example, you may get fewer people interested in being a Wikipedia editor without incentives, but you end up with a stronger community of dedicated contributors. On the other hand, when there’s a stronger monetary incentive—like in web3—you don’t always get as much community, and it becomes more transactional.

I dealt with this for Monarchs. Suddenly, I had a lot of people discovering my work, but I struggled to build a community that genuinely supported what I wanted to do, instead of just focusing on prices. It's the classic issue where, when a measure becomes an incentive, it stops being a good measure. We're witnessing the effects of this in real time. My enthusiasm for web3 hasn’t waned, but it's tempered with the realization that solving one problem often creates two more.

When there’s no attribution, things travel outside their original context, and the creators who brought joy to others don’t get to see or share in that. We need to find a way to make creators whole. But when you incentivize attribution, it can create new problems, like attracting people who are more focused on being the first to comment than genuinely supporting the community. It’s not always clear if these dynamics are good for a community or the creator. It's something we’re still figuring out.

KC: If you did Monarchs over again, is there anything you would do differently–from the platforms and tools you used to the way you managed the community? I remember being in the Discord on launch day and being so impressed you had a community manager for the Discord.

EH: Yeah, Discord was a huge blind spot for me. I think I could have gone both ways in terms of managing the community. I could have not had a community at all and not promised anything and just said, like, “Hey, I’m just making art.” It probably would have resulted in a lot less sales but probably a lot more inner peace. Or I could have treated it as a job and said, “Okay, I need to really invest in community, have more than one community manager, have a plan.” I launched immediately when the artwork was done, but I didn’t realize that wasn’t even the first step. You almost had to think about community aspects from the beginning, pre-launch. 

If you were coming out with an NFT project in 2021, you almost had to think about community even more than in web2. You had to think about weekly giveaways and all the things people were doing. I saw friends, like David Rudnick and Ezra Miller, who managed it better because they were just more authentically themselves. They didn’t care about capitulating to some random stranger telling them to improve their share price. It’s not like they completely ignored it; they knew what to ignore and what to double down on. At the same time, they were also really disciplined in running their community. For me, the things I needed to double down on, I didn’t, and the things I shouldn’t have ignored, I completely ignored.

KC: The concept of an artist explicitly “managing a community” feels relatively new–it can feel almost inauthentic and transactional to use your point from earlier. At the same time, artists like David Rudnick or Ezra Miller or yourself attract very specific, niche audiences. Do you think it’s important for artists to deeply know who's engaging with their work and how to activate them?

EH: I think it’s really about knowing yourself. I think any kind of knowledge is power. The advice for everyone is to focus on your work first. No matter what, your work and point of view are what will motivate you and carry you through the situation. On the other hand, if you know your audience, it’s always good to get feedback. But knowing your audience and understanding what you can aim for can sometimes be a creative impetus.

Some people with a more puritanical view of art might scoff at the idea of knowing your audience, but to me, it’s just common sense. But speaking from personal experience, if you don’t have confidence in yourself and you’re almost looking to your audience as a kind of horoscope to tell you whether you’ll succeed, or if you let yourself be dictated by your audience, I can’t find a really good outcome from that. You might succeed in something, or make a lot of money, but it might come with expectations you didn’t sign up for, and it can always become a trap. 

I get designer brain, for better or worse, and I think too much about serving the audience. But there are cases where it’s not about serving them at all. With Monarchs, I wanted to learn how to make a generative art project, how to deploy it, and how to work with blockchains. The system for me was about being part of the internet at an interesting time and learning new tools and technology in a real way. That ended up paying off too.

KC: An interesting note about your background is that you’re classically trained at formal institutions—I think discussing the value of a formal education fits really nicely with what we were talking about earlier in regards to attribution and provenance. But at the same time, you also came up in your career at a time where the internet could really independently launch someone’s career. I’m curious how all those experiences affect how you think about the role and value of formal institutions now?

EH: Yeah, I think my thoughts on that have changed so much over the years. I think it was interesting being at a grad school institution from 2011 to 2013. It was a time when millennials were suddenly gaining a voice and consciousness. It felt like my whole life, I was being talked down to, or I had to defer to the previous generation. 

At that time, millennials were entering the workforce, and it was Gen X and boomers telling us how we should do things. I inherently figured out that the advice older people valued didn’t really apply to my generation anymore. When I finally got into a formal institution, for whatever reason, I didn’t feel like I fit in. I reacted loudly and badly in a way because I felt like, “Okay, I worked my whole life to get here, and something doesn’t feel right.” I found a lot of things to critique from the inside, and through voicing those critiques online, I found a community. I think the things I said resonated with a lot of people, but it was a very different time and place on the internet. Things have swung to the other side now.

I remember talking with my friends about gatekeeping and how much it harmed us. What we were thinking about then was getting into an institution and still not having obvious pathways to mentorship, or finding like-minded people, or dealing with the sexism and racism in hiring practices. When I was coming up, the institution had too much power over artistic communities. There was so much emphasis on getting a show at a certain gallery, going to a certain school, or having certain accolades. We did a lot to de-emphasize that, but as those conversations evolved over the years, people became more atomized. The internet shifted from community-building to discoverability, and now people are like islands. Now, gatekeeping means something completely different. It’s like, “Oh, you won’t tell me the name of the restaurant you went to.” A lot of those values have lost their contextual meaning.

What institutions sometimes afford is infrastructure for building communities. Simple things like how decisions are made, how we learn, and how we hold each other accountable are part of what institutions provide. Schools are now astronomically expensive, but a YouTube education isn’t really enough either. Free, self-directed learning teaches you the “how,” but institutions are good at teaching the “why” and the “what.” 

Now, instead of stronger centralized communities, you have a bunch of isolated people. I think we’ve ended up in a more confusing and harmful state, where people feel like they’ve replaced institutions with hustle culture, and I’m not sure if that’s better.

This isn’t an argument for exclusivity, but I feel like the role of institutions might be more relevant now as a countermeasure or a hedge against these things. Instead of giving 100 kids proper training and a roadmap, we’re giving 1,000 people tools but not really helping or supporting them. 

KC: You gave a talk in 2023 where the core question is “Are images created or discovered?” I just thought it was so powerful and relevant to the conversation around AI and art. Do you mind just giving us a speedrun on that talk for folks who aren’t familiar, and I’m curious if your thoughts on the question have evolved since you originally gave the talk?

EH: I’ve done a lot of exploring into the rise of AI image generation tools, and it’s really shaped how I question authorship and the role of meaning in how an image is made. When I’m working in Photoshop, computationally, that means I’m turning some pixels on and some pixels off. There’s more going on under the hood—some pixels are assigned a certain color, for example—but what’s actually happening is computationally fundamental. This allows for some amazing possibilities.

One of the biggest insights with AI image generation came when I realized how it works under the hood. Many of these models are diffusion-based, starting with using AI to “denoise” a noisy or grainy image and remove the grain. It got so good that you could give it an image full of pure noise, and if you nudged it toward a specific outcome, like “it’s a cat,” it would hallucinate a cat. I’m simplifying, but the breakthrough was, ”What if we could suggest that it’s anything?” It’s like when someone looks at clouds and you say, “That’s a rabbit.” Even if you didn’t initially see a rabbit, you might start to make one out of thin air. Learning how that works was fascinating.

It was especially interesting in the context of design, where my colleagues and I have been through a lot. In the 2010s, some of my colleagues became victims of their own success. Their work went viral on Tumblr, but they had no way to claim ownership. Some responded by making their designs more complex, hoping they’d be harder to copy. This led to an arms race in design, where minimalist, elegant work became overly detailed and turned into a macho show-off competition. It was the opposite of the clever, emotional design I loved growing up.

Now, with AI image generation tools, that arms race has come to a full stop. When I see a crazy illustration, I’m not sure if it was made by hand or generated by AI—or a combination of both, which happens in my own work. But the benefit is that it has lifted that illusion for me. For years, I struggled with insecurity, constantly second-guessing myself and adding layers of complexity to my work. But now, with AI, what was once scarce is now abundant, and I’ve decoupled the value I placed on how difficult something is to execute.

That’s not to say there isn’t meaning in spending time on something, but in the realm of digital images, it’s been personally freeing to let go of that. AI image generation is fundamentally about denoising images through math, probability, and training data. It’s like the idea that if you had 1,000 monkeys in a room, they’d eventually write a novel. But does that mean it’s art? Does that mean it’s inspired? What I realized is that the emotional resonance I get from an image doesn’t come from the construction alone, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

As AI continues to evolve, it will challenge our cultural obsession with how hard something was to pull off. It’s like with pop stars who have teams of 50 people creating highly art-directed campaigns, or Marvel movies with massive production teams. These things are hard to pull off, but that doesn’t necessarily make them artistically interesting. We see this in web3 as well—big marketing teams, big names, big spectacles. It’s the logical extreme of what we chose to value, but I don’t think it’s a good measure of compelling art.

KC: Two rapid fire questions. 1) What do you hope the future of the intersection of art and technology looks like? 2) Do you care to comment on the taste and software discourse?

EH: If there’s one big dirty word from the past decade of the internet, it’s "scale." I think optimizing for scale has done irreparable damage to many, not just cultural institutions, but cultural frameworks. In terms of taste, I agree with the central premise that once your basic needs are met—like infrastructure and hard plumbing—you have more emotional space to think about self-actualization. 

But the bad word here is "scale." I don’t find conversations about taste in terms of tech interesting, not because of taste, but because of scale. Conversations about taste are always going to be interesting in style, but I’m just not interested in scaling up taste or styles, because the approach people take is like, “Oh, there’s value in being a weird artist; let's get this in front of a billion people.” These conversations end up being condescending, like, "Oh, now you realize weirdos have value after you fired them all, that's great."

But also, in many cases, you're still trying to exploit the weirdo after putting them through hell. I think the problem is, as long as you talk about operationalizing or scaling up taste, it’s like asking, "How can you take the stripes off a zebra?” Why would you do that? Taste is personal, and we don’t have a definition of art. It’s one of those things where you know it when you see it, but we don’t have a definition of taste. I hate conversations where taste is moralized—like "good taste" and "bad taste." To me, there’s no such thing as good or bad taste; it’s just taste. I think people should care about art, but I don’t want to be the person telling others what is good or bad art.

KC: There’s a whole other interesting thread to pull there given your work at SSENSE, which has become almost a beacon of scale in luxury fashion.

EH: I probably have to take a lot of thoughts about that to my grave; I have a lot of opinions behind the scenes. I'm really proud of the work I did at SSENSE. I'm really proud of the experiences I had there. I'm really proud of the people, and I'm grateful for everyone I worked with. But yeah, I definitely have my opinions on scale coming out of that experience. I think, for a lot of my younger 20s, I was really optimistic about scale. I believed in this abundance where you could be who you are and still find near-universal alignment with others, and you'd be able to export that.

So, a lot of my focus and career at that time was like, "Okay, I built a name for myself in these niche spaces, how do I get people to discover these things more?" Part of that journey was going to Nike, part of it was going to SSENSE. It was about scaling up really good design. I’m really glad for the cultural impact it had, but in a way, it’s also part of the problem. Now, a lot of people know designers, but they don’t really know the context in which they came up.

Instead of knowing 10 artists in a superficial way, if you just sit down and do a deep dive on one person's journey, I promise you, you’ll love it. I don’t mean this from a pretentious point at all; I just mean that a lot of things we love are getting discovered, which is great, but they’re not getting the attention they deserve. There’s this Mandarin proverb, “走马观花”, which means to look at wildflowers on horseback. That’s what we’re experiencing—we’re looking at so many beautiful things, but on a platform that zooms right by. You can’t enjoy how beautiful a rose is when you're riding a horse speeding past it. Similarly, you can’t engage with art by just scrolling past it. I think about that a lot, too.

I make this plea not as a case for hierarchy or to cement my own standing in some made-up boys’ club, but out of love and appreciation for things. There’s so much beauty, so much greatness, and so much profundity in the world, within ourselves, and within our friends. We’re getting just the tip of the iceberg from everybody, but there isn’t enough impetus to go deeper. So, what I hope for the next 10 years is that while we spent the last 10 years casting a really wide net, we spend the next 10 years casting really deep nets across different spaces.

Disclaimer:

This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment or legal matters. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Archetype. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Archetype or its affiliates and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Archetype, its affiliates or individuals associated with Archetype. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.