CoinOp

Armin and Byrony are the brains behind UnderConsideration, a highly acclaimed network of graphic design focused sites pushing the bill on what’s up and coming in the community and taking notes on the giants of graphic history. Their sites include Brand New, Quipsologies, FPO (For Print Only ~one of our favs), Word It, The Design Encyclopedia, and Speak Up, all of which contain content to keep you busy for days. The UC crew has an enlightening way of uniting the design community through participation in design, thought, and theory. We had a chance to speak with them and are pleased to announce their Scout Book Sketchbooks went on sale this week! You can get them here. For more on UnderConsideration read on!

The UnderConsideration Office

 Five Sites, two people, time management? Favorites? Dunces? With all of the output of Under Consideration how do you develop and manage the new branches? 

Indeed, time management is critical. And add to the equation a 2-year-old daughter and things get even more complicated. We’ve become extremely efficient, or at least we think we have. I wake up at 5:30 and Bryony at 6:10 (somehow that extra :10 makes a huge difference). Maya (our daughter) goes to school in the morning and we work fiercely to get as much done in the morning. In the afternoon I keep working while Bryony takes on the mom role full time. After story time and when Maya’s asleep we usually do another hour or two of e-mails, maintenance, and stuff. In terms of the actual blogs, I take care of Brand New and Quipsologies, while Bryony takes care of Word It, and we both share responsibilities on FPO. Sadly, the Design Encyclopedia has suffered a little bit of neglect. But we are currently in the process of reviving.

1/0 Business Cards on Environment 120# Cover

How have your websites shaped your perception of design? Do you see it moving in a particular direction? How does the design community you have built alter your personal work?

It has mostly been a matter of being much more critical of the work done and seeing how people talk either about their work or that of someone else’s. Voicing all those opinions and reading them, really helps in making your work a bit more considerate. Another great side effect is that we are constantly seeing great work and using it as content for our sites, so all those great visuals, those great concepts and those great ideas are impossible to ignore we are always assimilating them whether we want to or not. And now that you can see work from all over the world, it’s really energizing to let those influences seep into our work.

1/0 Scout Books with a custom 32 page interior

In these tough economic times, how have you been affected? Are there areas that have fueled your business outside of your expectations? How do you think the market has changed for the design world?

Like most design firms, we’ve definitely been affected by a slower pace. To be honest, it’s a much more natural pace. We are used to being too busy, and work best when we have five deadlines piled on each other. We procrastinate less on Twitter and stuff. We are probably one project short of being at our comfort level. In terms of the blogs, we’ve had a really hard time selling advertising and it’s something that has happened to most creative blogs; companies just don’t want to spend their money on online advertising yet. What this lull has allowed us to do is to put focus on our ventures: We are in the process of redesigning (or launching, depending on when this interview airs) one of our blogs; we’ve started a self-published book; and we are looking into ways of monetizing other ideas. So, you can sit and pout about the economy or you can use that free time to innovate on your own capabilities.

What has been your favorite project to work on? And what projects are you looking forward to?

It’s probably not fair to pick favorites… But I will! Actually, I will admit that any given project that is hot and active at any given moment becomes our favorite. Right now we are a couple of weeks before the start of the TypeCon conference in Atlanta, and we did all of its identity and are currently finishing the poster, the program, the t-shirts, etc. At the same time, we are revitalizing an identity for a new client in New York, and that has been a great challenge too.

Are you scheming any new websites?

Sort of. I’m always thinking of new ones. Luckily, Bryony, who is more level-headed than I am can get to me think about whether we actually NEED another web site. We did want to find a replacement for the beloved Speak Up, but at the moment, we have our hands full with the sites we have. So, as fun as it is to expand, the price to pay might be our sanity.

In regards to Word It, I know that you explain on the site that the words are chosen at random. Are there words that have had surprising results? Any duds or designs from left field? How long does it take you to conjure up the right word for each month or do you pool from a list?

Over the years, it’s been amazing to see the response to words and what we have learned is that we just never know what to expect. Some of the most popular words are things like “Green” and “Hot” which everyone can interpret, and then we like to give harder challenges with words like “Serendipity” or “Bourgeois” just to keep people on their toes. And sometimes our participants keep US on our toes, like a recent entry under “Drought” that simply said “God is Dead” http://www.underconsideration.com/wordit/tag/god and sparked some reactions. I’ll say that one nice thing about Obama being President (aside from the fact that he is the President) is that we have seen a drop in Word Its featuring George W. Bush. In terms of how we come up with words… It’s embarrassingly unorganized. Usually on the 30th or the 31st of each month, we go “snap, we need a new word” and Bryony and I will just say things that come to mind at that moment. Every month we come up with 5 or 7 words and use one, and forget the others, and every month it’s the same thing. We should be keeping a list. 

Quipsology stays on top of the game for high-lighting great design output. How do you keep the quips hot and frequent? How much editing is involved with managing a multi-contributor site?  Are there star contributors?

Through RSS feeds I keep tabs on around 80 to 100 blogs. Some people will say that’s nothing at all. But I keep going back to the ones I know have the best content and they have it first. It’s typically a range of blogs just like Quipsologies that point to a bunch of cool stuff and I take the stuff that I think will be cool for Quipsologies. In terms of managing the open-ended aspect of it, yes, it can be hard. We have a lot of people that just want to link to their own blog or their product, and we delete those. Then there are times that people link to something that was fresh weeks ago, so I tend to remove those, specially if we already quip’d it. We do have our share of regular contributors who make our site so much better: Ricardo Cordoba, Plamen, Diane Faye Zerr, Doug Bartow, Sarah Koz, Josh Berta and so many more that I hate not naming but I can’t remember everyone’s name.

What is your readership? Have some sites done better or worse than you expected?

Brand New is a beast! It drives more than 60% of our whole traffic, which ends up being between 750,000 and 1,000,000 pageviews per month, depending on activity across the blogs. When we started Brand New we assumed it would do well, but we never expected it to be such a force, and everyone loves it too. FPO is doing very well too, given the geekiness of the print facts we post, it’s great to see people get so excited about the price of a letterpress business card, because no one has ever told us before. 

How has giving lectures played a role in your business? How have lectures impacted The Department of Design? 

They impact in that they take away office hours that I can’t work. So in terms of time spent to money earned ratio, they are the worst business tool. But the flipside is that they give us an air of authenticity and expertise that would otherwise be hard to achieve. Whenever I write back to a client saying that I will be replying in full to them later or sending them the designs later because I am giving a lecture, I sense that they think it’s kind of cool, so it does give me pride to share that with them. But, definitely, the best part about the lecture is getting to meet a bunch of designers that just want to know more about design.

Anything you would like to share?

Buy our new book! Graphic Design, Referenced. It’s 400 pages of design awesomeness.

http://www.underconsideration.com/graphicdesignreferenced/

Thanks so much for your time!