Armin Vit & Bryony Gomez-Palacio: The Designers Who Owned the Conversation
A blog about logos became two museum exhibitions, three annual conferences, five books, and a two-person business with zero client dependency. The muffin bag business plan that worked.
The Thesis: The Audience Is the Business
In 2007, Armin Vit left Pentagram — one of the most prestigious design firms in the world — four months after his son was born. He sat in the New York office, watching the clock, thinking only about getting home. It was not that Pentagram was wrong. It was that his attention had permanently shifted, and staying felt dishonest to both parties.
He and his wife Bryony Gomez-Palacio went to a coffee shop. They took the paper bag from their muffins and wrote down every way they could make money without client work. Bryony kept the income stream she already had, and they gave themselves six months to make it work. The bag became a business plan. UnderConsideration LLC was formally incorporated that year.
By then, they had already been publishing online for five years. They had built one of the most-read design blogs in the world — with no outside funding, no editorial board, no team, and no plan to sell. They had done it because there was nowhere else on the internet where designers could argue seriously about logos.
Twenty years later, they run three conferences that sell nearly 2,000 tickets each year. They have published five books, released nearly 250 conference videos for sale, and launched a podcast, two event formats, and a product line — all from Bloomington, Indiana, with no staff, no investors, and no clients they did not choose. The muffin bag worked.
We read three structures from the In Sequence library against UnderConsideration: a creator-as-platform model, diversified revenue streams, and self-published IP. Armin and Bryony did not build the firm from a deal-structure menu; they wrote a muffin bag and kept publishing. The structures are how we name what they built — and the fit between the two is what makes the case useful.
UnderConsideration's Evolution
Three eras: audience building, business formation, and full platform ownership.
Creator-as-Platform: From Blog to Infrastructure
In 2002, there was no venue online for serious design discourse. Design magazines were curated, slow, and one-directional. AIGA chapters were geographically siloed. Bars were ephemeral. Armin saw a gap and filled it — not with a business plan, but with opinions about logos.
The Speak Up to Brand New Sequence
| Property | Launched | Focus | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speak Up | 2002 | Graphic design discourse broadly | Cooper-Hewitt Triennial (2006); archived 2009 |
| Brand New | 2006 | Corporate identity redesigns specifically | 1.25M monthly views; Walker/Cooper-Hewitt (2012) |
| First Round | 2018 | Unreleased first-round client presentations | Multiple cities/year; process-focused discourse |
| In-house In-focus | 2021 | In-house design teams | Digital publication; grew into the In-House In-Focus conference |
Speak Up was for graphic designers. Brand New was specifically for opinions on corporate identity work. First Round specifically for unreleased first-round explorations. Every format was narrower than seemed commercially reasonable — and that narrowness was the asset. General design content is a commodity. Opinionated, daily, expert analysis of corporate identity is not.
Brand New is the most-read identity design blog in the world in part because designers trust it. That trust is inseparable from its independence. No advertiser relationships that compromise editorial positions. Armin reviews work from Pentagram — his former employer — the same way he reviews anyone else. Compromise the independence and the brand collapses. That independence is not just ethics — it is the core value proposition.
Most creative businesses start with client work and build a platform on the side. Armin and Bryony decided the blog network was the firm and structured everything else around sustaining it. Client work was positioned as secondary from day one — then eliminated entirely. This is the inversion most creative businesses never make.
Designers began making creative decisions with Brand New in mind. Clients asked agencies to ensure their work would not get blasted on Brand New. The blog had become infrastructure for the industry.
Diversified Revenue: The Two-Person Scale
Every dollar of revenue comes from assets they own outright. The conference is not licensed or franchised. It is designed, produced, and operated by Armin and Bryony — including the annual visual identity, which Armin designs as a design project in itself.
Revenue Architecture
| Stream | Scale | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Brand New Conference | 1,100 seats, 2-day event | Single largest annual revenue; flagship asset |
| First Round events | Multiple cities/year; sold-out | Second event format; lower overhead |
| In-House In-Focus | Annual; in-house design teams | Third conference format; grew from the In-house In-focus publication |
| Conference video library | Nearly 250 videos available | Passive revenue from existing content |
| Book sales | 5 books (trade + self-published) | Permanent IP; ongoing royalties + direct sales |
| Brand New blog | 1.25M+ monthly page views | Foundation asset; daily publication, 23 years |
| The Follow-Up podcast | Bi-weekly | Audio extension; additional sponsorship surface |
Every conventional growth narrative says: build a team, hire, delegate, scale. Armin and Bryony have run a 1,100-person conference for 15 years with no staff. The constraint forced operational clarity — they had to build systems that two people could execute. What looks like a limitation is the discipline that has sustained the enterprise for two decades.
They do not do client work. This is not a boast — it is a structural constraint imposed deliberately. Client work would have paid better short-term. It also would have competed for the time and attention that made Brand New worth anything. Most creative businesses try to do both indefinitely. Armin and Bryony made the decision to stop, then built revenue structures to make that decision sustainable.
UnderConsideration will likely never be a $50M business. It was never designed to be. Two people, full creative control, no employees, no investors, no board, no acquisition pressure. The ceiling is also the freedom. Most creative entrepreneurs spend years trying to grow past a ceiling they could simply choose to design around.
Self-Published IP: Books, Videos, and Compounding Formats
Publishing allowed them to take the critical and curatorial authority built online and put it in a form that was permanent, purchasable, and distributed through channels the blog could not reach.
The Publishing Portfolio
| Title | Publisher | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Graphic Design, Referenced | Rockport Publishers | 400-page reference book |
| Flaunt | UnderConsideration (self-pub) | Portfolio design guide; design school staple |
| Brand New Awards compilations | UnderConsideration (self-pub) | Competition winner showcases |
| UC.Quarterly | UnderConsideration (self-pub) | Blog content in print form |
| Conference video library | UnderConsideration | Nearly 250 individual videos for sale |
Speak Up became Brand New. Brand New became the Brand New Conference. The conference generated video content that became a passive revenue product. First Round grew from the question Brand New raised: if we show finished identity work, what about the work that did not make it? Each format emerged organically from the previous one — not from a product roadmap, but from genuine curiosity about what was missing.
Graphic Design, Referenced went through Rockport — a trade publisher with distribution reach the blog could not match. Flaunt was self-published — direct margin, full control, no intermediary. The mix is deliberate: trade publishing for reach, self-publishing for margin. Both reinforce Brand New's position as the authoritative voice on design.
The Compounding Effect: How Three Structures Multiply
The three structures form a flywheel: the platform builds the audience, the diversified revenue converts that audience into sustainable income, and the self-published IP creates permanent assets that compound the platform's authority.
Authority compounds; revenue follows. Armin and Bryony spent years building authority before they formalized revenue. The Cooper-Hewitt inclusion happened before UCllc was an LLC. The audience was real before the business was structured. The sequence matters.
A conference ticket sold in 2010 to someone who became a Brand New devotee is a customer who returns for the 2011 conference, the 2015 book, the 2018 First Round event, and the 2025 conference. The compounding is not just audience growth — it is depth of relationship. Deep relationships are harder to acquire and harder to lose than transactional ones.
Transferable Lessons
In 2002, there was nowhere online to talk seriously about logos. That absence was the product idea. The question is not what can I build? It is what should exist that does not? The more specifically you can name the gap, the more defensible the thing you build to fill it.
Armin and Bryony spent five years building authority before they formalized revenue. The Cooper-Hewitt inclusion happened before UCllc was an LLC. Creative businesses often try to monetize before they have built anything worth monetizing. The audience was real before the business was structured. The sequence matters.
They eliminated client work deliberately, then built enough owned revenue to make the decision permanent. Client work would have competed for the time that made Brand New worth anything. Most creative businesses treat the platform as the side project. Armin and Bryony treated the platform as the firm.
Speak Up became Brand New. Brand New became the conference. The conference generated videos. First Round emerged from the question Brand New raised. Each format grew organically from genuine curiosity about what was missing — not from a product roadmap. The compounding is in the connections between formats, not in any single one.
Two people, full creative control, no employees, no investors, no board. UnderConsideration was never designed to be a $50M business. The ceiling is also the freedom. Most creative entrepreneurs spend years trying to grow past a ceiling they could simply choose to design around. Armin and Bryony designed around it — and have sustained a full livelihood for over two decades.
The 2002 founding-era window for design discourse online. Speak Up launched into a moment when AIGA chapters were geographically siloed, design magazines were slow, and there was nowhere on the internet to argue seriously about logos. That structural absence is what allowed the blog to compound into industry infrastructure rather than competing with thirty existing voices. The window has closed. 23 years of continuous daily publishing. Brand New's authority is partly a function of having posted opinionated logo analysis nearly every day since 2006. That length of sustained editorial rhythm cannot be back-built. The Cooper-Hewitt / Walker institutional inclusions. Being the only blog in a 2006 National Design Triennial and a 2012 Walker / Cooper-Hewitt exhibition produced a permanent institutional credential that drove subsequent conference and publishing decisions. Most independent design publications never reach that tier. Financial data is estimated. UnderConsideration is privately held and revenue figures are not disclosed; conference economics and book sales are inferred from industry comparables for two-person publishing operations at this scale.
But the platform-as-firm structure is universal. Name a specific gap — narrower than commercially reasonable, opinionated enough that only a few people could fill it. Build authority before formalizing revenue. Eliminate client work as a structural decision so the platform isn't perpetually competing with paid execution for attention. Let each format emerge from the previous one — events from the blog, video from the events, books from the editorial position. And design around the ceiling deliberately so it becomes freedom rather than failure. These principles work whether the audience is 1.25M monthly readers or twelve hundred.
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