before

after

About

(Est. 2007) “UnderConsideration (UCllc) is a graphic design firm generating its own projects, initiatives, and content while taking on limited client work. Run by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit in Austin, TX. UCllc is responsible for the greatest blog on earth, Brand New.”

Design by

Script Logo: Mark Caneso (Beaverton, OR)
Wordmark (and everything else): UnderConsideration LLC (Austin, TX)

Related links

N/A

Relevant quote

Images (opinion after)

---

---

---

Opinion

I'm posting this on Brand New not to be self-serving and promote ourselves — although I have every right to! — but to open up this effort to the same kind of scrutiny I subject every project to. And because you are our peoples.

In a nutshell: We've had the same website and the same wordmark — typeset in some version of Garamond — for 9 years. For the last 3 years, "Redesign home page" has been on our to-do list and it always got pushed back. This Fall and Winter we finally got around to doing it, along with getting rid of the Garamond wordmark.

Our first step was the wordmark. We chose Druk Condensed, designed by Berton Hasebe for Commercial Type, because a) it's awesome, b) we wanted the complete opposite of the extended nature of Garamond's small caps and the generous letter-spacing we had given it and c) no one is using Druk Condensed XX Super, so it felt like a great anti-establishment choice. I modified Druk ever so slightly so that the proportions were pixel-perfect. Meaning: the counter-spaces are all exactly 1 pixel wide, the stems are all 5 pixels wide, etc. so when used at 100% size online, it's perfectly crisp; otherwise you get that fuzzy anti-aliasing effect.

Then we tapped Mark Caneso to see if he would like to do a shorthand UCllc logo. If you are not aware of who Mark is, get yourself to the nearest Instagram and follow him. His lettering work is out of control great. From the first round, Mark arrived at the idea of the same letter shapes being able to spell "UC" and "llc" and after 3 or 4 rounds of revisions we arrived at what you will see below, which is a great contrast to the wordmark. Not quite sure how we will handle both the wordmark and logo down the road but if our current state is any indication, we have 9 years to figure it out.

As a kind of amazing coincidence that makes the pairing of Druk and Mark's logo meant to be: Berton, who designed Druk, introduced Mark to our blogs over 10 years ago.

On the website, we deployed the Druk wordmark and chose to use the same font for headlines, despite its difficult legibility but, since our audience is a group of highly and visually educated designers, they should have no problem spending a little effort decoding what are remarkably readable letters condensed to Hell and back. As the supporting typeface, online and for all future in-house uses, we are going with Neue Haas Unica because it kicks Helvetica's ass. The site is responsive like mad and aims to bring sexy dark backgrounds back, which are not used often.

We realize, the website and type choice are unconventional — it's even outside of our comfort zone — but, hey, #YOLO, right?