Design history · Studio
UnderConsideration
The design-blog network that turned online commentary into the field's common room.
UnderConsideration is a graphic-design enterprise run by Armin Vit and Bryony Gómez-Palacio, a married team originally from Mexico City. It started in August 2002 as a single blog called Speak Up — then one of only a handful of design sites online — and grew into the most-read network of design commentary of the 2000s. Speak Up ran for seven years, accumulating nearly 43,000 reader comments and becoming the only blog selected for the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Triennial 2006. Brand New, spun off from Speak Up in October 2006, took the specific question of logo and identity redesign and made it a daily obsession; it grew to over 1.25 million page views a month and was the only blog included in Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt in 2011. In 2010 the team launched the Brand New Conference, an annual two-day event on corporate and brand identity that has grown from 450 to 1,000 attendees. The enterprise has published several books through Rockport, including Graphic Design, Referenced (2009), a 400-page visual guide to the language and history of the discipline.
Design history · Studio
UnderConsideration
The design-blog network that turned online commentary into the field's common room.
UnderConsideration is a graphic-design enterprise run by Armin Vit and Bryony Gómez-Palacio, a married team originally from Mexico City. It started in August 2002 as a single blog called Speak Up — then one of only a handful of design sites online — and grew into the most-read network of design commentary of the 2000s. Speak Up ran for seven years, accumulating nearly 43,000 reader comments and becoming the only blog selected for the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Triennial 2006. Brand New, spun off from Speak Up in October 2006, took the specific question of logo and identity redesign and made it a daily obsession; it grew to over 1.25 million page views a month and was the only blog included in Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt in 2011. In 2010 the team launched the Brand New Conference, an annual two-day event on corporate and brand identity that has grown from 450 to 1,000 attendees. The enterprise has published several books through Rockport, including Graphic Design, Referenced (2009), a 400-page visual guide to the language and history of the discipline.
Key facts
- Founded
- August 2002, Chicago (as Speak Up); LLC incorporated 2007
- Founders
- Armin Vit and Bryony Gómez-Palacio
- Based
- Bloomington, Indiana (from 2017); previously Austin TX (2009–2017), New York (2005–2009), Chicago (2002–2005)
- Network
- Speak Up (2002–2009) · Brand New (2006–) · FPO (2009–) · Quipsologies (2009–) · Art of the Menu (active)
- Conference
- Brand New Conference — annual, since 2010
- Recognition
- Speak Up in Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial 2006 · Brand New in Graphic Design — Now in Production, Walker Art Center / Cooper-Hewitt 2011
Key works & examples
Speak Up — design-criticism blog
2002
Speak Up launched in August 2002, when graphic design had little presence online beyond portfolio sites and software forums. Armin Vit started it during a stint at a Chicago design firm, looking for somewhere to discuss design ideas rather than just display them. The blog became the field's main text-based forum: it published over 1,600 articles and accumulated nearly 43,000 comments before closing in April 2009. In 2006 the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum selected it for the Design Life Now: National Design Triennial — the only blog in the exhibition. The UPS logo redesign thread of 2003 turned it into the destination for identity discourse, a momentum that led directly to the Brand New spinoff three years later.
Brand New Conference — inaugural identity, New York 2010
2010
The Brand New Conference held its first event on 5 November 2010 in New York City, growing out of the Brand New blog's sustained discussion of corporate identity work. The inaugural identity used speaker portraits masked into large letterforms — purple, orange, and gold — across the conference poster. The event was two days and eight sessions, focused entirely on corporate and brand identity; it has run annually since, growing from around 450 attendees in 2010 to 1,000. Each year UnderConsideration designs a new conference identity, giving the event a distinctive visual history of its own. The 2010 conference was held in New York; subsequent editions have moved between New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Austin.
Graphic Design, Referenced (Rockport, 2009)
2009
Published by Rockport in 2009, Graphic Design, Referenced is a 400-page visual guide covering more than 400 entries and 2,000 projects across the language, history, and practice of graphic design. Designed by Vit and Gómez-Palacio, its cover is itself a demonstration of the material inside: the title set in large bold type, the letterforms filled with photographic samples of design work, the whole thing stacked on black. The book is organised into four sections: principles, knowledge, representatives, and practice. Typeset in Mercury Text (Hoefler & Frere-Jones) and Stag Sans (Christian Schwartz).
Brand New in Graphic Design: Now in Production (Walker / Cooper-Hewitt, 2011)
2011
In 2011, Andrew Blauvelt at the Walker Art Center and Ellen Lupton at the Cooper-Hewitt co-curated Graphic Design: Now in Production, a survey of contemporary graphic design conceived in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand New was the only blog in the exhibition. The curators treated Brand New as a designed artefact alongside print, identity, and typeface work — not a commentary channel but a form of publishing with its own editorial and visual logic. The 240-page catalog won the Core77 Visual Communications Award in 2012. The exhibition later travelled to the Cooper-Hewitt's Governors Island venue.
Brand New — rebrand critique publication
2006
Brand New launched in October 2006 as a spinoff from Speak Up, taking one question — what do you think of this logo change? — and making it the basis for daily, structured critique. The focus was narrow: before and after; context; opinion. That constraint attracted readers who wanted argument rather than news. By the mid-2010s it was running over 1.25 million page views a month and had become the field's primary record of corporate identity change. The current identity uses a bold wordmark with custom ligatures, developed with Rob Clarke; set in the same register as the corporate display lettering the site has been critiquing since 2006. The blog remains active; Wikidata entity Q98446317.