Tandem NYC

Happy New Year’s Eve. (This is a long post & link in bio) It’s been a wild one for us. It might take us the next decade to put it into perspective. Here’s to hoping the coming decade is marked by compassion and collective understanding! ... Thank you to @fastcompany for this outstanding honor, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t recognize that good design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If people didn’t enjoy drinking Budweiser, Google didn’t produce helpful search results, and MTV didn’t make content that spoke to young people (side note: 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom led to a substantial decline in teenage birth rates), we wouldn’t be talking about the success of these brand designs. If AOC (@ocasio2018 @repocasiocortez) weren’t speaking truth to power every single day, chances are you wouldn’t know about our identity design at all. We are saying this first and foremost to pay respect to the woman that is leading the way. We’ve been filled with admiration and inspiration at every turn, watching Alexandria become a beacon of hope and national figure at the same time. As we enter 2020, and commit ourselves each day more thoroughly than the next to an attention-based economy in which your time is money in someone else’s pocket, we want to encourage everyone to think critically about the holistic nature of a brand. A brand isn’t simply the style or mannerisms imbued on Instagram nor is it font selections and color ways. We like to think about the relationship between design and objective, to evaluate the ethics and values of a company based on actions. Brand identity systems are shortcuts to the ethos and values of an entity, but a good brand is so much more complex than the visible sum of its parts. (Continued in comments...)

Check out Enemy magazine, a new pub dedicated to reporting abuses of power across the United States. We're proud to have worked with @enemymagazine founder, Jake Heller (@hellerjake) on the web design. There’s still one week to support the kickstarter. Get a copy at EnemyMagazine.com. Special thanks to @tahneepantig for the fantastic identity design.

@Ocasio2018 just launched the first two in a series of #GreenNewDeal City Parks Posters on behalf of the vital movement she's leading to create a sustainable future for everyone. This artwork pays homage to the WPA era National Parks Posters developed for the Federal Art Project (beginning in 1936) while promoting an appreciation for our public spaces and the public art that occupies those spaces. Ultimately we hope this series encourages each of us to imagine what's possible for our future if we're willing to invest in everyone's well-being. We collaborated with our friend and local NY artist @gavindedraw on the Queens Unisphere poster, and we've got more collaborations with Gavin and other artists depicting different parks in different cities on the way.

Knock Down the House is finally on Netflix! It’s hard to believe a year ago we were making buttons for @ocasio2018 and today we’re telling you that YOU HAVE TO WATCH the documentary about how @ocasio2018 became @repocasiocortez and changed the course of history. We designed the film’s titles and created some of the artwork used on Netflix. It’s humbling to have contributed in our own small way. Thanks to @racheliplears, @coreytorpiephotography, @netflix, and of course the ev...er-inspiring @ocasio2018 #knockdownthehouse #KDTH #AOC #ocasio #ocasio2020 #politicaldesign #netflix