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a publication with Honest, we feel that both of those things will open up new projects for us that we don’t even know yet. They could help us in ways that we can’t foresee.

Stella: But even if they didn’t, they keep us going so it doesn’t really matter. But we are launching the New Museum website, so that’s coming, we’re working on that. What else are we doing? The New Museum ad campaign is ongoing.

Cary: Doing that we acted like an advertising agency.

Stella: We did the copywriting. We did the design.

Cary: We had to pitch against a real ad agency. That was a big thing for the museum to get over. We had been doing their identity the whole time, and when it came to do their ad campaign they said, "Oh, can you do that?"

Stella: They didn’t think we could.

Cary: They didn’t think we could.

Stella: They didn’t think we were capable.

Cary: We were like: "Yeah, we can do an ad campaign."

Helen: How did you persuade them?

Stella: We had to pitch against other agencies.

Helen: With what?

Stella: Three resolved solutions.

Cary: We thought, "We’ll just do everything for them."

Helen: It made perfect sense, of course!

Gelman: Yeah, it never happens. Advertising is changing, but still, to let a design company take on...

Stella: It was a real coup because we got to do the copywriting.

Gelman: Are you going to buy the media too?

Stella: No.

Gelman: Are you going to outsource it?

Stella: They’re doing it in-house.

Cary: It’s not a huge campaign, which is why we were able to do it. The museum is a small museum so it’s not a huge endeavor, and they have in-house PR to take care of things. Hopefully now that we’ve done this—

Stella: We saw it as no big deal at all. Maybe that’s offensive to ad agencies and people who like to keep those categories really strict. But we thought "of course we can write copy," "of course we can do an ad." It didn’t phase us at all so we did the pitch. And we got it.

Jonathan: They had a marketing research guy. We don’t know exactly what happened but after we did the pitch, he said, "Are those guys from an ad agency? How did they do that?" He was just so blown away that we could do it.

Cary: If a good campaign comes along we want to at least be in the running for it. This is something that will help us when the next chance comes along.

Stella: We are creative people... I don’t see it as a barrier. If you can do one thing... There are some things you can do better than others and that shows over time, but it didn’t seem that we were incapable of making an ad campaign for a museum that we’d been doing everything else for.

Helen: You can really understand it…

Cary: We’re passionate for it. And if we are passionate about a certain subject I think we can work on it.

Jonathan: And considering we were pretty much their target audience too. We were the ones they were trying to attract so we know exactly what we would want to see in an advertisement.

Helen: Do you think the barriers between advertising and design are breaking down?

Cary: Definitely. Many agencies don’t even have in-house creatives. They hire out to companies like us. And that’s good. We love that. We love that position.

Helen: So how did you find the live action shoot?

Jonathan: Oh, it was awesome. We haven’t edited it together yet, so we haven’t seen a lot of the footage, but doing it was a lot of fun. And it’s our first one.

Helen: And what was it for? What was the whole thing?

Jonathan: It was a video for the cover of a Rolling Stones song, ‘Miss You.’

Cary: Mirwais had done this sample that a friend of ours, Craig Wedren, took and made a song out of. It did really well in Europe and then they wanted to release it as a single in America. He wanted to do an American video for it because the one they had was very European.

Helen: So you came up with everything?

Cary: We did the treatment. We did many storyboards..

Jonathan: Many many storyboards. Which I think was a huge help given that we were directing for the first time. You get on set and you think, "Ahh!" but then you look at the story boards and-

Helen: You can keep calm?

Jonathan: You keep calm.

Stella: But then in the midst of all that we’re going to be doing a couple of monographs, a couple of books. We keep our hand in physical design projects as well.

Helen: What happens if one of you is working on a personal project that really takes over your life?

Stella: We don’t let that happen.

Helen: You’re quite strict about that?

Stella: Oh, definitely. We don’t let personal projects get in the way of work. Ever. There is a hierarchy to how we handle our jobs.

Gelman: So if one of you is approached, you always bring the whole team?

Stella: Yeah.

Cary: Like the video, we did it on a weekend and are going to edit it mostly...

Stella: On the weekend.

Cary: After work and on the weekend. Because it was completely for free. And that’s the way we are going to do it, and hopefully that will lead to other things. And this magazine that we are doing...

Stella: Weekends. Evenings.

Cary: Weekends and after work until it pays off somehow. If it justifies itself by making money, let’s say we sell advertising for it, then it can become something that can sustain the office. We are pretty happy with that so far.

Stella: Don’t let us give you the impression that we just sit around and do personal projects.

Helen: No, no!

Stella: It’s not that way. We have twenty active jobs at any time, for a variety of clients: galleries, the museum, other identities, all kinds of books, little projects that we have to work on all the time. And then we fit in these other personal projects on the side.

Cary: Stella’s making bags now, too.

Stella: [laughs] Sewing. I don’t see a huge separation between work and life. I see it that if you are into what you are doing you are going to want to do it on a Saturday. It doesn’t matter that it’s a Saturday. If you are really excited about doing something it’s irrelevant what day of the week it is, or what time of the day it is, or anything. It’s a creative outlet which is the reason we went into this profession in the first place. So that we would be so engaged with the work we were doing that we would want to do it all the time. And I would hope that that continues always.

Helen: So what is the creative process when a job comes in? You pick up the phone and someone says "I want you to do this." How do you then go about working out who’s going to do what?

Stella: Well we usually talk to the person who calls us extensively. We say, "Let’s meet, let’s see what you need. Are we the right company to do this?" That’s the first question. Sometimes the answer is "No," and so we say no.

Cary: It just doesn’t work out.

Stella: We’re not the right mix. But that doesn’t happen very often. Usually people come to us because they’ve seen something we’ve done. We aren’t very good about going out and getting work. We need to be better about that, actually. So we talk to them and find out what they need and then we talk to each other. It depends on the size of the job, but let’s say I’m obsessed and can’t wait to do this job, and Cary and Jon are busy, then I’ll do it. Then I’ll tell them and I’ll show them and they’ll give me feedback.

Helen: What happens if you are all busy and it’s an interesting project, but you have loads of other interesting projects on already and none of you grab it? Then what happens?

Cary: Give it to the intern. [laughs] Or we can’t do it. We used to take everything on, and either our social lives were dead, or we’d end up not doing a good job. So we’ve had times now where we’ve just had to say, "We’re too busy." Usually those kinds of projects that we are too busy to do are the smaller things. If it’s a huge project that we just love we can push other things aside.

Stella: We’ll just push our personal projects aside.

Cary: We have a bunch of little projects that we can push off for a little bit. But with the smaller projects that are on the same level, we’ll just have to say no. And that’s usually identities or small websites. But if we love the job...

Helen: You’ll find a way of doing it.

Stella: It helps to have the three of us, because there is a lot of, "Can you handle this while I do this? Can you handle this?"

Helen: And what do you make of the pitch process? I must say I’m always a little appalled by it.

Stella: It’s awful.

Helen: For the advertising pitch for the New Museum, did they pay for it?

Cary: They didn’t pay for the pitch.

Stella: They didn’t pay for the pitch or the identity either. So far, we’ve never done a paid pitch, have we?

Jonathan: Yeah, I got like a few hundred bucks. There was a streak of about five pitches that we lost. So when it came time to do the New Museum pitch I was fed up. I said, "I’m not going to have anything to do with it." Luckily we did. Maybe every five pitches you win one.

Gelman: What are the main reasons why you think you’ve lost pitches?

Cary: Other than that our idea didn’t fly? We’ve lost big broadcast work to bigger companies. We’re usually in the mix—we’re smaller but then there are other companies that have just done more work.

Gelman: Do you wear suits when you go to the presentation?

[laughter]

Jonathan: No, we try to look a little...

Stella: We try to wear nice clothes.

Cary: I wear a button down shirt, tuck it in. Never a suit though. We never had to do a suit meeting.

Jonathan: That’s part of the reason we’re designers. I never wanted to have to wear a suit. I just don’t like suits.

Cary: Maybe someday we’ll have some.

Stella: Well, if we ever got a client that warranted a suit, we’d wear a suit, but thus far our clients are in jeans.

Helen: They’d be freaked out if you were wearing suits.

Cary: They’d be, "Uhh, that’s uptight. We don’t want uptight designers."

[laughter]

Helen: Can we see some work?

Stella: Sure!