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WE WORK FOR THEM

PEOPLEText: Sachiko Kurashina

WeWorkForThem is a design team of Michael Cina and Michael Young. They recently temporarily took down their sites Designgraphik, Trueistrue and Submethod and has released a book CD-ROM, called “ONE”, containing those sites. What is their intention? What will they do the next?

Please introduce yourself.

We are a design firm called WeWorkForThem, but we also run an online store and brand called YouWorkForThem. It is just the two of us, Michael Cina and Michael Young, that do all this. We design for clients like MTV, BestBuy, ESPN, under our company name WeWorkForThem, but we also handle all the service, shipping, packing the items for our store YouWorkForThem. We teamed up in 2001 to start all this madness and excitement. In other words, we work really hard, and that’s what we are about.

Please tell us about “YouWorkForThem” and “WeWorkForThem”. What sort of projects/activities you are doing in each site?

Client wise we have become a lot more selective due to there being so many bad budgets and bad clients. Basically we don’t take client work unless the client work is looking to truly work WITH us. This means, it’s a 50/50 team up, we both come to the table creatively and execute ideas. We were tired of clients trying to micromanage projects. This new method has helped us to make much better client work, not only for us but for them as well. We listen to what they want and are able to execute what they are looking for.

With YouWorkForThem there is always a lot in the lineup, and I am sure it will stay this way, since it is our baby. We have been putting out products of all shapes and sizes. We recently self published a book on our personal work called One as well as a project called Arba that features work by other artists. We have been working on projects to get more designers in the mix and invest in their talents. We admire so many artists and designers out there it is an honor being able to release their work and seeing them grow.

A book with a CD-ROM, called “One” is released in this March. What triggered you to produce “One”? Please tell us the contents of this as well.

We took all of our old personal web artwork down, to sort of progress our own ideas, but also we felt all things must come to some sort of an end. The contents were over 8+ years of online work dating back to 1998. The sites were Designgraphik, TrueisTrue and also Submethod. We didn’t want to totally kill the projects, and we had a good list of people always asking us to see it again. Just for the fact people showed all this appreciation for it, we felt the need to give back with a book explaining all this work for once and also a CD-ROM with all of the work for them to view once again.

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