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Veer:

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Armin:

I’m originally from Mexico City. I moved to Atlanta in 1999 - when I first moved to the US - and I’ve stayed here ever since. I started studying graphic design in Mexico, taking a four-year program that was all graphic design all the time. When I moved to Atlanta, I was working at MarchFIRST, one of the largest Internet consulting companies that took over the world for that brief period of time.

After it went bankrupt, and my girlfriend (now my wife) finished school - she’s also a designer - we decided to move to Chicago. I worked at a small firm called Norman Design. A year into being in Chicago I started Speak Up because I thought there should be a place for traditional graphic designers online.

Eventually we thought, ‘Okay, it’s time to move to New York.’ There was nothing else to do. Our job in Chicago was done. I moved here in September of 2004 and started working at Decker Design, a small firm.

Veer:

How long were you at Decker?

Armin:

I was there for six months, and then Michael Beirut at Pentagram said, ‘Do you want to work with me?’ and I said, ‘Well, let me think about it,’ for, like, half a second.

Veer:

‘You had me at hello.’

Armin:

Yeah, pretty much. I’ve been here for a year and a month, and that’s the story.

Veer:

You’ve already mentioned Speak Up, and you’re also working on The Design Encyclopedia. What are you hoping to accomplish with these?

Armin:

I think Speak Up has accomplished its goal - to bring graphic design online and be the first design blog. Now we’re trying to figure out how to move on from just being a blog. Within that, who knows what will happen.

The concept for the Design Encyclopedia is really simple. We’re creating a reference source where everything can be explained through its design implications. On Wikipedia, you’ll have an entry on Kleenex, but then we’ll also have an entry on Kleenex that shows all the previous packaging and information on who designed the logos.

Veer:

What drew you to design?

Armin:

Throughout high school, I was a horrible, horrible student. Every year they would threaten my parents, saying they were going to kick me out or hold me back a year. I had no idea what I wanted to do because I didn’t want anything to do with tests or doing papers.

My dad has always been a computer fan, and when the first Mac came out, he bought it. He began using Illustrator ’88, or whatever it was called back then, and was like, ‘Holy shit, this is really cool. I can do stuff!’ He started upgrading and buying design magazines because he loved posters. He thought, ‘What if I go back to school and study graphic design?’

So at 50 years old he went back to school. I looked at what he did and thought, ‘Well, I can do that. I can cut some stuff, paste some other stuff.’ I didn’t think I was going to get too much into it. I just figured, ‘Well, it’s not biology, it’s not math, it’s not something I have to take tests on. I like to doodle as much as anyone else,’ and I went with that. Probably two years into the program, I realized this was something really cool and that I had a knack for it.

Veer:

When did you first realize what a designer did?

Armin:

When we moved to Chicago, we realized that when you’re dealing with clients one on one, there’s a lot more you can do as a graphic designer beyond moving pixels around. There’s a lot of hand-holding, and there’s a lot of things you can bring - not just to their business, but to the way they present themselves. It’s more like being a shrink who has good taste in graphics.

At Pentagram, you say jump and they jump really high. They take your word for it. It’s a nice feeling - not that it always goes - they understand that the council we’re giving them has a certain value, and I think very few design firms achieve that. It’s impressive to see how design thinking, when it comes from a respected source, can have an effect.

 

Veer:

Are there any influential past figures that have had a specific effect on you and your work? Do you have any design heroes?

Armin:

Oh yeah, a lot. After those first two years of college when I realized that I really wanted to do this, I discovered The End of Print by David Carson. The first time I opened up the Carson book I went, ‘Holy shit, what the hell is going on here? Why is all of this unreadable? Why can’t I make sense of it but I still feel really attracted to it?’

What was really good about David Carson was his whole theory about following your gut. You don’t need to go to design school, you can go with what feels right and what you believe in and go for it regardless of what people think. That was good inspiration early on.

Then there’s people like Tibor Kalman, who’s always great. Who can argue with that? Just being a smart ass but doing it in a nice way. In a way that clients can deal with.

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