Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
In design there's a lot of unexplored territory just in general
and especially with the new media and digital technology.
I mean, there's so many more things that need to be designed now.
Pretty much everything is expected to be designed fairly well,
and so all of a sudden, this very quick time has passed,
and the same career of a graphic designer has expanded tremendously
to all of these different avenues.
[Dan Covert] We were kind of right on the cusp of the industry changing around us,
especially being in San Francisco in the early 2000s.
It was right after the dotcom boom, and everything was animation
and computers and web.
[Andre Andreev] The way me and Dan met it's kind of a funny story because
he was literally the first person that I saw in design school in a design class.
[Dan Covert] We both knew from the beginning that we wanted to open our own company.
We'd worked for smaller shops ourselves and been inspired by
the type of work they were doing and the people who were working there.
[Andre Andreev] I think the first moment of realization that we had a design company
is when we first got the space, and we literally had
a desk and 2 chairs maybe, and we were like,
hey, we're still young, and we have clients,
and we could make something out of this, and why not try?
Design is as much of your taste as it is what you make.
A lot of what we do at our studios is we kind of try to put our personalities into the work.
It deals with who we hire, the clients that we work for.
We look at design books less and less and design websites less and less
and just try to find really weird and obscure references.
I feel like the more obscure and weird your references are
then the more original your work seems.
[Dan Covert] We're both constantly collecting reference,
whether it's photographs we've taken from a museum,
stuff we've grabbed off websites, scans from books,
but then sometimes you'll be working on a project and you'll go to the movies
or you'll see something on the street, and then that randomly inspires you then too.
To me the best inspiration comes out of real life, just real life experiences.
I play soccer. I watch soccer, huge fanatic.
Soccer is all about surprises, about doing things when people don't expect them.
That's what you expect design to do.
A good design is supposed to surprise you in an unexpected time.
[Dan Covert] We like the idea of working in a project that crosses multiple mediums,
so it might start in print, or it might start in motion, or it might start on the Web
and can kind of travel across all those mediums.
And what's cool is that it could be the screen on your phone,
the screen on your computer, the screen on your television or a billboard
but it's still the same concept of graphic design just applied in a different medium.
[Dan Covert] It's a really exciting time in our profession right now because
everything is kind of changing constantly and refocusing and re-morphing,
like bigger studios are getting smaller.
Everyone is kind of working in multiple areas and especially for video for the Web.
It's kind of like the wild Wild West at this point, like there's people who do it
but not a lot of people who do it, and it's like are they directors, or are they designers?
Some of them will be a web developer, but then they also write music on the side,
and we use that music in one of our spots, and all these things are kind of cross-pollinating,
and it makes the office a lot better place to be in.
To me what's exciting about this new frontier of design possibilities
is you can really write your own path.
Us as a small design company, if you rewind this 20 or 30 years
we'd be predominantly doing print work, right?
But now we're doing video production, animation,
website development and print work.
[Dan Covert] I think if someone could get overwhelmed at the amount
of possibilities, the amount of choices in our industry right now
it's almost better to just kind of get started, and then you kind of learn as you go.
You learn what you like and what you don't like, and the tools keep getting better and better.
Cameras keep getting cheaper. Software keeps getting better.
It's almost up to us at a certain point, like what can we bring to the table?
How can we one-up somebody who just did something a little bit better?
When I wake up, I never think about "Oh, my God, I have to go to work today."
I think that being a designer is not just designing something on the computer.
It's the way you live your life and the way you think about the world,
and that's the great part about what we do is you never have to stop
learning or only focus on one thing.
You can constantly keep evolving and keep morphing what you do.
I think that's a lot of what we try to do with our company
is just make sure that we're constantly loving what we do,
and we're challenged and excited about what we do on a daily basis.
[Behind the Design]
