“Who doesn’t like a close-up photograph of letterpress? I’ll tell you who: People that hate puppies, kittens and baby seals!” –Armin Vit.

There are a select few in our graphic design community who seem to launch too many kites, yet seem miraculously able to keep them all flying at the same time and make them fly higher with each launch. Armin Vit of UnderConsideration is such a design entrepreneur. Since arriving in the United States from Mexico in 1999 (following his then girlfriend and now wife and UnderConsideration business partner Bryony Gomez-Palacio) he has worked for digital pioneer MarchFIRST, legendary graphic design firm Pentagram, written for Emigre, Eye, Creative Review, HOW magazines, launched numerous influential design websites and has published several books on the profession. Their latest effort is a staggering 400 page book titled Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design, published by Rockport Publishers.

Arjen Noordeman: 1. Do you think that being a non-citizen in the United States might have given you an increased fire in your belly to make things happen for yourself?

Armin Vit: In a somewhat funny way, yes. When I was first going through the process of obtaining a green card, I was told there were three ways: Marry a citizen, have an employer willing to give you a job until the process is done, or get one based on «exception abilities». I had just married my also Mexican wife, so that was not an option, and I had an employer committed to my process, but in the back of my mind I knew I had to have Plan Z. The «exceptional abilities» can be corroborated with mentions in industry sources by being published in books, magazines and journals, by winning awards, or by being invited to speak at conferences. So, in a way, a lot of what I have done is an effort to accrue «exceptional abilities». But the more philosophical answer is that, yes, I have to work harder to prove myself and be considered someone who has interesting things to say or work to show. It’s not an end in itself to why I do what I do, but the constant quest for betterment keeps things interesting.

AN: 2. Being the creator of highly influential design related websites “Speak Up”, ”Brand New”, ”Quipsologies”, ”Word It” and “FPO (For Print Only)” has helped increase your visibility, enabled you to make a lot of close friends in the field and provides both an outlet for your opinions as a launching pad for your writing, design and other projects.

What kind of role do you believe writing, opining, and community building should play in a designers career and how has this served you?

AV: I’ll speak to the personal effect it has had on me: I wouldn’t be where I’m at today without having all those things come together. Writing and giving my opinion gave me a voice that I, honestly, didn’t know I even had. With English as my second language and a very thick accent, writing gave me a confidence that I didn’t have. Building a community around those writings and those opinions, was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. There weren’t any design blogs at the time or any smart-ass punks like me that didn’t have much better to do, so I was able to gain some ground as a blogger. I can’t really imagine if I would have had the same success if I were just starting out, with so many well-informed designers who are blogging and are doing a great job.

In terms of what role it should play in others’ careers, I would say that it should be a kind of matter of fact practice: Write and opine. Repeat. Whether it’s on your own blog or on someone else’s purging those thoughts about graphic design in the form of writing with a small or big public can be very enriching.

AN: 3. You’ve mentioned that when you started building your career during the internet boom, the web was “Only flashy stuff and three-dimensional exploding polygons, which filled in for what graphic design was supposed to be in those years”. SpeakUp and UnderConsideration went on to do bridge that gap. It is also fairly rare for a designer to have worked both in the Interactive scene, at MarchFIRST, then then to go on to work for the godfather of respectable graphic design firms, Pentagram.

How instrumental was the combination of these experiences in becoming a leader in bringing traditional design principles to the interactive realm?

AV: Oh, it’s been imperative. I think it’s a little like being a jock (athlete) in high school but also being in the drama club. Being able to have feet in both fields and have a relative understanding of each has helped me tremendously in having the confidence to bring to life any weird idea I (or me and Bryony, my partner) might have. I must say though, that seeing the expertise that some people have in online matters makes mine pale in comparison, so I will always be a traditional graphic designer first, and web designer second. But the truth of the matter is that, in the end, it’s just applying design principles to one medium or another: If you understand that a layout is composed of a grid with typography and imagery on it and you grasp the principles of hierarchy, contrast and pacing and how to apply all these elements together, you can do whatever you want wherever you want.

What’s funny about this dichotomy is that when I first designed Speak Up back in 2002, people commented how much it looked like a printed publication. With the design of our latest book, Graphic Design, Referenced, some people have already commented how much it looks like a web site. So go figure!

AN: 4. This year, you decided to close the much celebrated “SpeakUp” design blog and forum. Did “Facebook kill the Forum Star”, or were you just making room for new endeavors?

AV: A combination of both. We did find that writing for Speak Up became more of a chore than something we were thrilled to do; and a big part of it was all the other blogs or ventures we were getting ourselves into that, at this point, were commanding more of our attention. And, yes, the preponderance not just of Facebook but of Twitter and a hundred other design blogs has really made the audience more fragile: People have more places to visit, more friends to follow, more updates to make that it leaves little time for reading 1,500 word posts or writing 500-word comments, which is what made Speak Up vibrant and exciting.

AN: 5. You’ve mentioned that some of your projects, such as SpeakUp and your recent book “Women of Design” just kind of happened to you. You and your partner Bryony Gomez-Palacio have an idea, and you execute it without too much strategic planning but armed with a lot of passion for graphic design.

Did you have a long term plan to form a company together and all your various intiatives were steps towards realizing that goal, or did this also happen organically?

AV: On behalf of Bryony, I’ll have to say that we do actually have a lot of strategic planning. She’s amazing at keeping things in course and making sure we get things done. She can make lists like no one can. We always had the feeling that we would work together and have our own firm, but the way it came to be was pretty organic. For the first seven or eight years we each worked for companies, since we needed to have work visas. I first started Speak Up by myself but as it was clear that it was taking a lot of my night and weekend time, Bryony started to get more involved and a couple of years in we were scheming together on The Design Encyclopedia, Brand New and Quipsologies and, above all, trying to figure out what this «UnderConsideration» entity could be. We had long chats at coffee shops and in subways about what we could do if we could do this full time. After our daughter was born (now she’s two years old) we decided we wanted to be with her as much as possible so starting our own business (now with our dear green cards!) made the most sense. And we finally said that everything we do, from online to print to client work, will be done under the umbrella of UnderConsideration. So, I would say it has been premeditatedly organic.

AN: 6. Your “Brand New” blog has become an authority on (re-)branding. It is the first website many turn to when rumors of a rebranding or a new product launch make their way through the industry.

The blog has also brought you invitations from the mainstream media such as the L.A. Times, who spoke with you about “Recovery, The Brand”.
(http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/image/la-ig-recovery22-2009mar22,0,701538.story)

Did you expect “Brand New” to become a successful brand itself, when you started out? And how do you feel about the real possibility of becoming a “Branding"pundit"?

AV: I did not imagine, at all, that Brand New would become the monster that it is today. I basically started it to get the logo discussions off of Speak Up, because they were driving some people crazy, they hated how bitchy people got on the logo discussions. So I thought, let’s have a place just for bitching about logos. Since October of 2006, every single month has seen an increase in traffic. The great thing about it is that it attracts non-designers: Whenever we have a post about a sports team we have sports blogs linking to us; whenever we have car logos, we have crazy traffic from automobile sites, same with airlines; etc. So, it brings in people that are passionate about a certain industry and it brings to light the fact that it’s graphic designers and brand strategists who are actually putting thought behind those brands.

In terms of my Brand Punditry… I have to say that I love it. Not because it makes me feel powerful or better than anyone, I just like the vision of me with some sort of gavel that, with my smashing, can trounce any logo. Kidding aside, I think it’s interesting that just by giving well-spoken opinions on a topic that I obsess about anyway, I can get some sort of unofficial «expert» label.

AN: 7. Print is not dead at all, and here’s the evidence: In your latest web project “For Print Only”, a.k.a. “FPO” you log projects that make innovative use of printing design & techniques. Besides the obvious inspirational function of the site, what were your other motives for becoming a bit of a print crusader?

AV: A big part of it is that nowadays you can get anything printed on demand: books, business cards, magazines, brochursers, whatever. The process of selecting paper, working with a printer on proofs and color correction, being on press to make sure things print just exactly right is all being slowly replaced. So we wanted to bring some attention to this engaging process. It was also a way for us to personally reconnect with print after spending so much time online. Printed graphic design is also infinitely more exciting to us than any web site will ever be; there is a certain way that typography and imagery hit that paper that pixels just can not achieve. Plus, who doesn’t like a close-up photograph of letterpress? I’ll tell you who: People that hate puppies, kittens and baby seals.

AN: 8. Let’s talk about “Graphic Design Referenced, a visual guide to the language, applications and history of graphics design”.  This massive 400 page book, showcasing some 2000 designers, sets out to “provide an intense overview of the varied elements that make up the graphic design profession”.

Please give us some background on how this immense undertaking came to be. To start, what did you and Bryony found to be missing from the landscape of graphic design compendia, anno 2009?

AV: Well, we were actually first approached by Rockport Publishers to do an A–Z Dictionary of visual terms, which was something we found intriguing. But the more we developed an outline and thought about the book it was clear that we needed more than an A–Z structure to get it all done, so we proposed to tackle it more as an encyclopedia or almanack. With a green light and 400 pages to fill, Bryony and I set out to do a book that felt more grounded with professional graphic designers or very eager design students than just seeing it as a reference or academic book. We wanted to translate all the things that we have learned from, all the designers that we have been influenced by, and all the things that make graphic design so interesting into a book that just packed as much information and visuals as possible. We love Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design and Hollis’ A Concise History so we wanted to build on them — not even attempt to replace them or be better than them — and provide a point of view from a pair of practicing graphic designers who are neither historians nor critics, but just passionate about the people and artifacts that make up graphic design. We found that the best way to add a new dimension to the field of historical design surveys was to come up with another way of looking at it. Not just by isms, chronology or location, but by the four chapters we eventually came up with: Principles, Knowledge, Representatives and Practice. The set-up basically says: Here is what graphic design is about, here is where and how you can learn about it, here are the people that are good at it, and here are the best examples of it.

AN: 9. When writing a book that aims to cover arguably pragmatic aspects of the profession, such as “Principles”, “Knowledge” and “Practice”, did you feel that there was more pressure on you to be as objective as humanly possible when selecting designers for the “Representatives” section of the book, that “gathers the designers who over the years have proven the most prominent”?

Did you and Bryony perhaps take pains to leave personal preference out of the selection criteria?

AV: Yes and no. No, because it is our book and we have to bring our point of view and if we simply go by the representatives that people expect to see we would just be repeating the same (hi)story. So, we’ve long admired the work of Erik Nitsche, Rick Valicenti, Brian Collins and Wolf Ollins, just to name some examples that we included that other surveys have not. And, yes, because you want to be as objective as possible and not let your whims get the best of you; you have to take a step back and assess your choices and make sure that you are telling the best and broadest story possible.

AN: 10. What were some of the most interesting and unexpected experiences you both had during the process of developing “Graphic Design Referenced”?
And was there anything you set out to do initially, but found out you had to approach differently because of something you learned while working on the book?

AV: The biggest surprise was how much we didn’t know. We assumed we knew things, but it’s not until you sit down and analyze everything that all the wonderful connections in our design history start to make sense.

Initially we had set out to do a more humorous and lighthearted book, with charts and diagrams and funny Spy-magazine-like layouts but the more we got into it the more serious we got and the more we realized we were doing something that would be referenced by others, so in the end, we had to go back and rewrite some of the earliest entries. That is not to say that the book is boring, we have references to Seinfeld and Wheel of Fortune plus a few zingers here and there, but they are delivered with a very straight face.

At the end of the project it just became silly how knee-deep we were in graphic design. Our desks were literally covered in design books, we had old copies of Playboy and The Face in our bookshelves, slides of work from the 1960s, dozens of used album covers and that’s all we were thinking about 24 hours a day. For most people that sounds lame, but we loved it.

Thanks for the interview Armin!

More images: http://www.cranbrookdesign.com/index.php/gallery/category/C78/