A blog about logos, launched in 2006.

Brand New is a blog about corporate and brand identity, with many posts that set an old logo beside its replacement and then discuss the change. It is published by UnderConsideration, the graphic design firm of Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio, and UnderConsideration says on its About page that Brand New was launched in 2006. The firm describes itself as a graphic design business that generates its own projects, initiatives and content while taking on limited client work, and it lists its home as Bloomington, Indiana.

The two founders told their own story to Print magazine in an interview by Caitlin Dover published on 7 June 2010, part of a series on couples who work together in design. They said they first met in 1997 in Mexico City, where both are from, while each was studying graphic design. They told the magazine that they lived and worked in the same place, at what they called UnderConsideration headquarters, and that in 2007 they had decided to quit their respective jobs and give their time to their clients and their own ventures.

That 2007 decision matches the date the firm gives for itself. UnderConsideration’s About page says it was established in 2007, but that the pair had been publishing online since 2002, beginning with a design blog called Speak Up, which it says ran until 2009. Brand New came four years into that run. The firm’s biography of Vit says he was born and raised in Mexico City, worked at the New York office of Pentagram, and has a professional record going back to 1999; it describes him as a graphic designer and writer and says his writing on the blogs, particularly Brand New, is what he is recognised for.

The division of labour was set out in the 2010 interview. Gomez-Palacio, the couple told Print, wrote most of the entries on FPO, a sister blog about printed work, while Vit wrote all of the entries on Brand New and on Quipsologies, a third site in the network. They said every project leaving the studio had to be approved by both of them, and that decisions were discussed together.

One blog inside a small network.

Brand New has always sat inside a group of sites rather than standing alone. UnderConsideration’s About page lists the active blogs in its network as Brand New, Art of the Menu, FPO (short for For Print Only) and Quipsologies, and says that other blogs have come and gone over the years. Its biography of Gomez-Palacio says she manages the behind-the-scenes running of that online network. The firm stresses its size: it says everything that comes out of UnderConsideration is done by the two founders, from coding the websites to designing and specifying the books and booking flights for speakers.

Books have been a second line of work. The firm’s About page lists three titles produced with traditional publishers, The Word It Book, Women of Design and Graphic Design, Referenced. In the 2010 Print interview the couple named Graphic Design, Referenced as the project they were proudest of professionally, and said it had taken over their lives for the better part of a year and a half. The firm says it later turned to self-publishing, starting with Flaunt, a book about creating a portfolio, and that for two years it published UC.Quarterly, a small-run printed digest of material from its blogs.

The blog also gave its name to a competition. UnderConsideration says it self-published books of the winners of the Brand New Awards and the FPO Awards, competitions that it says ran from 2010 to 2013.

The studio has moved. UnderConsideration says Austin, Texas, was home to its headquarters from 2009 to 2017, and that from 2014 it organised smaller events there under the name Austin Initiative for Graphic Awesomeness. Its pages now give its location as Bloomington, Indiana. The 2010 Print interview described the headquarters as a house in which one bedroom had been turned into the office.

On its own site, UnderConsideration publishes a short colophon for its pages. It says its headlines and wordmark are set in Druk Condensed XX Super, a typeface by Berton Hasebe for Commercial Type, with body text in Neue Haas Unica by Toshi Omagari for Monotype, and that the UCLLC logo is custom lettering by Mark Caneso.

Old logo left, new logo right.

Design-media identities live under unusual pressure, because the people reading them are the same people who make logos, set type and judge layouts for a living. A masthead or wordmark on a design title is read twice: once as a name, and again as a statement of taste. That is one reason so many of these names are set in lowercase, compressed into a single word, or reduced to a short monogram that can sit in a browser tab, a social avatar and a printed cover without changing shape.

Online, the identity is rarely a fixed object. Site redesigns arrive every few years, and each one quietly rewrites the brand: the grid, the article template, the image ratios and the type pairing often say more than the logo does. Newsletters have become a second front page, where a sender name, a subject-line voice and a recurring header carry the identity into the inbox. Events, talks and award programmes add a third surface, turning a publication’s name into signage, lanyards, trophies and stage screens. Studying a design-media brand means looking at all of these together, not only at the mark.

Talks in rooms as well as posts on screens.

Events have been part of the founders’ work almost from the start. UnderConsideration says it has organised gatherings since 2003, when it hosted the designer Rick Valicenti in the couple’s small apartment in Chicago under the name seriouSeries, and that it later ran a short series called Opposites Attract with the Art Directors Club in New York.

The blog’s own event followed. The firm says the annual Brand New Conference began in 2010, as an event on corporate and brand identity with speakers drawn from practitioners around the world, and that it grew from one day to two. In 2018, it says, it launched First Round, a one-day event built around the original presentations designers make to clients when showing first explorations for a logo, identity or branding project, and that First Round has since been held in several cities. The firm’s biography of Vit names both the Brand New Conference and First Round among the events the couple organise.

The founders have also talked about how their background shapes the conference. On 15 October 2020 the Dallas–Fort Worth chapter of the professional association AIGA, working with AIGA Unidos, billed a virtual talk by the pair as the last of its Hispanic Heritage talks that year, describing them as originally from Mexico and based in Bloomington, and saying the talk would look at how Mexican do-it-yourself culture informs their work, in particular the identity and materials of the Brand New Conference.

In the 2010 Print interview the couple said one of the advantages of working together was having someone who understood immediately when either of them pointed to a design they admired or one they disliked. They also described the arrangement as a partnership in which each could be completely honest about the other’s work.

For a design guide, Brand New shows how a two-person firm can build a publication, an event series and a book list around one plain, descriptive name. Compare Dieline, which does the same for packaging, and Creative Boom, an online magazine about the creative industries. For this guide we use review red, proof stone and ink black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brand New’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.