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A Discussion with Armin Vit: Part 1

This post is a part of our weekly series of articles and interviews focusing on current issues in today's design industry. Be sure to check back often or subscribe to our RSS feed to the right so you can read the latest from our chapter.

During a recent trip to New York City, I was able to grab a cup of coffee with UnderConsideration's Armit Vit before his move to Austin, Texas. Born and raised in Mexico City, Armin and his wife/partner Bryony Gomez-Palacio started the UnderConsideration blog empire comprising of Speak Up, Brand New, Quipsologies, The Design Encyclopedia, and Word It in 2002. He has written for AIGA's VOICE, Emigre, Eye, Creative Review, HOW, and STEP magazines, among others. He has lectured on topics ranging from typography to branding in locations ranging from San Diego to Berlin and formerly worked at Pentagram. He now runs UnderConsideration's Department of Design. This is part one of our two part interview.




How will your move to Austin affect your clients? Are you pretty mobile?
For better or worse, we don't have many clients right now because we are wrapping up our book. We spent a year and a half working on that and just finished in February. So from August to February, we said, "Clients later: let's focus on the book." It was taking up too much time. So now we have 2 or 3 clients that we are finishing up work with. We told them we are going to Austin, and will just send the files. These days it doesn't really matter where you are...Even with clients that are in town, if I have had a relationship with them for, say, more than a year, then I'll see them maybe two or three times. Everything else is done by PDF and email. So it becomes increasingly less important to be where your clients are in that regard. It's pretty easy to move. I mean, we have had clients in Las Vegas,  San Francisco, Toronto and we've never seen them.

How do you balance your client work, the books that you have been writing lately, and home life?
It's hard. I mean, for me, it requires waking up at 5:30 and that's when my day starts. I stumble out of bed, go answer e-mails, and then do some blogging. So usually with Brand New, I blog those posts around 6 am. That's my daily routine: I do a little bit of email and by the time the coffee kicks in, I can write a post. Then, it just becomes a matter of what the deadlines are. If there are deadlines for the book, you know that will come first... If you have a deadline for client work, we'll put that first. We're always trying to work in all of the blogging in-between.

So it just becomes a matter of time management and making everything as fast as you can without sacrificing quality. It's hard: it's not easy. And now we have a daughter: she goes to daycare from 8 am to 1 pm. Then she comes home and my wife takes care of her for the rest of the afternoon while I keep working. But you know 6-6:30 pm is baby time: it's dinner; we read her books; it's bathing. Whereas before, when I was at Pentagram, I would get there at 8 am and leave at 11 pm just working straight through. Now you don't have that any more. So then there's a night shift where we have to work from 9 pm until 11 pm or 9 pm until midnight. You just make it work somehow, but there is no secret formula to making it all work. It just requires hard work all around.

So how did you guys come up with the idea to start this online community?
It started so long ago. It was in 2002 when the online community wasn't established yet. I mean, you had blogs that were run by individuals where people were talking about what they were doing, and slowly there were a few blogs that were more community based. There was Typographica, which was about typography. And then we thought, "Well if they can do it for type, then we can do it for graphic design in general." We just gave it a shot. We didn't know how to write. We didn't know how to blog. We didn't know anybody in the industry. But we just thought, "Blogging looks cool. We can do it. We don't have anything to lose. We'll just get it started and see what happens." All of a sudden it went from 0 visitors to a 100 and then 200, and then all of a sudden, we had 30,000 page views a day...and that was just for Brand New.

It just became a matter of leveling the playing field because we are not a magazine. We are not AIGA. We're just regular graphic designers putting up a blog and saying, "Everyone this is my idea and whatever you are saying is fair game, and we'll respect that." People really got into that idea. So it became a matter of realizing that people cared about being online and the people they met online. We just continued fostering that: whether it was Speak Up or Brand New or Quipsologies. It was never about "here's what we have to say and screw you: we don't care what you have to say." It's always about opening that channel of communication that allows people to feel their input makes it better. Without that, it would just be another magazine or a book. That back and forth is what really makes it come alive, and we always encourage that. Every now and then you get sort of mad at people and have to refuse their commenting privileges.

Yeah, you recently cut down on comment crime on Brand New.
And it worked like magic. Right away, the next 3 or 5 posts got rid of all of the "This sucks" comments. So every now and then you have to establish some boundaries. When you open it to the public, you also want to keep it useful so that people in the industry can learn something: that they aren't just inundated with comments that are useless. That takes away a lot of the overall experience. So [comments] are open to the extent to where they don't become too hurtful to others or not productive.

So have you seen any negative backlash from posting those guidelines?
Not really. Some comments [to the post] were  "You are insane" or "You can't do that," but other than that, the traffic is the same. Comments are down maybe 10 or 20 per post, but those were the comments that people were skipping anyways, so it doesn't really make any difference.

Stay tuned for next week's conclusion to our interview with Armin Vit where we'll be discussing his and Bryony's upcoming book, Graphic Design Referenced.

> Lorraine Reinsch, Social Networking Chair

Posted by Kansas in Interview Series  |  May 1, 2009