An interview with creative studio, Cypher13

Tell us about the studio - how did you three meet and start the company?

The studio has really evolved quite organically. Todd co-founded a two man web shop, called DogtailDesign back in 1999.  A few years later in 2002, Alex wandered in fresh out of film school looking for an internship.  He wanted an opp

ortunity to design and build websites, work with motion graphics, and to do some identity work.  Todd recognized Alex’s talent immediately and the two began to creatively influence one another.

Right about this time Todd and his partner were beginning to grow apart creatively.  Todd wanted to begin pursuing more progressive, smaller, non-corporate brand-based projects and Christian was looking for larger, more financially rewarding web development work.  Alex too was interested in pursuing more nontraditional creative work was ready to step up and play a more active role. Todd and Alex chose to split from Christian, continue working under the Dogtail moniker,

but head in their own direction, and Christian his.  The seeds of cypher13 were sewn.

In 2004 Todd met Lucian, a barely 16 year old aspiring graphic designer, out in the street in front of his dad’s house.  Lucian was familiar with the work Todd and Alex had been doing and asked to come by the studio.  At this time Todd and Alex had been just begun planning the rename, rebrand, design, and buildout of their first real studio, cypher13.  Lucian began interning immediately, took a brief foray into design school, dropped out, and joined the team full time.  So really, cypher13 design studio is a story of total intern happenstance. Uhh, and… no, we’re not currently looks for any interns.

It’s funny how life just sort of happens.  The studio is now the focal part of our lives, we’re the best of friends, and professionally we couldn’t be happier.

There’s a lot of exciting work coming out of Boulder right now. What is it about the place that nurtures creativity?

For starters, we consider ourselves very lucky to have found a way to work, live, and play in Boulder, Colorado.  It’s a beautiful place.  Geographically Boulder is located at the merger of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, and is bathed in 300+ days of total sunshine.  If you love the sun, love the mountains, and want to carve out a nice little creative niche for yourself, it’s a great place to do it.

And, yes, there is a lot of exciting work coming out of Boulder right now.  Denver too.  Boulder as a city, has always been a very free-thinking and open minded place.  It’s one of the most democratic cities in Colorado, boasts a youthful median age of 29 due to the university, and is exceptionally community centered.  The greater Boulder community is arguably the impetus for all of the work pouring out of this place right now.

Boulder has sort of become the unofficial entrepreneurial tech hub of the center of the US.  There’s tons of startups here, many of which are in the natural foods and lifestyle space, but there’s arguably even more things happening in tech. And, due to the tech influence, the companies that aren’t even tech-centric have caught the tech-buzz and are all concerned with the latest and greatest technology when it comes to things like web and application development.  Subsequently, there’s lots of design and development work, and being a relatively small tight-knit city, there’s a lot of collaboration.

If there’s one thing though that really nurtures the creative thinking happening in Boulder, it would have to be a general feeling of acceptance.  People are really accepting here, and not just accepting but supportive.  There’s a spirit about Boulder, that’s something akin to, if you can dream it, you can do it.  People here want to see you do it. Once again, it all comes back to community.

It seems that you create your own internal digital projects. How important do you think this is and what are your plans for your next non-client project?

Yeah, we create a lot of our own internal projects, both analog and digital.  The creation cycle is central to our lifestyle.  The joy of creating is why we’ve chosen the careers we have.  It’s very important to us to communicate our ideas and visions.  When working purely for ourselves we have total freedom, and an opportunity to communicate in whatever manner and convey whatever message we so choose.  In the past some of the messaging we’ve chosen to present has been quite cryptic, and a component of our internal work will most likely always remain somewhat cryptic, but as of late we’ve been making an effort to communicate some of our ideas more directly, and more clearly.

We’re exceptionally concerned with the notion of sustainability and in particular efficiency.  You’ll be seeing a lot more personal work coming from us communicating ideas pertaining to the larger concept of sustainability in the near future.  As designers we believe we possess the potential and the tools to communicate on a level which most do not.  Subsequently, we feel it’s our responsibility to use that potential and those tools to express ourselves and ideas.

One of our more recent internal digital projects was the creation of a website called tweeeeet.com, created in collaboration with our development partners, Collin and Sam over at Quickleft.  Tweeeeet was an exercise in sustainable website design.  At the time of its creation twitter API integrations were all the rage, and while ours was fairly straight-forward it seemed to fill a void, and quite sustainably.  The premise was simple, hand pick approximately 100 design twitters and aggregate them onto one page that updates in real time.  Our aim was more design-driven twitter content and less noise.  We designed a simple site, marked it up, wired up the api integration atop our nevercould^TM platform (more on that in a bit) and let it rip.  We haven’t touched the site since we launched it.  Everyone featured on the site pretty much tweets their faces off so, the site’s content is continually updated, and hence sustainable.  We launched tweeeeet.com on March 13th, 2009.  It’s since had 465,000+ visits and is still averaging roughly 4,000 visits a day.

When is the next team photoshoot and what will be the theme?

The next team photoshoot is right around the corner.  Hopefully less than a few weeks out.  It’s kind of crazy considering we’ve yet to correct and drop the gist of the 250+ photos we shot during our “Going Bananas” shoot.  But, they’re just too fun.  For our next team shoot we’ll be shooting with our friend Justin Walker.  Justin is an amazing photographer, you can see some of his recent work at justinwalker.com.  Justin recently shot our studio for inclusion in the upcoming book, Where We Work from This Aint No Disco and Collin’s Design.  While shooting, Justin proposed a handful of concepts for our next shoot.  We’ve yet to totally nail it down, but it’s sounding something like, suits, art, cigars, and the like.  We’ll see.

It was about a year and half ago that we did the first shoot, sort of accidentally.  We’ve since decided it’s kind of become our “thing” and we’re trying to shoot at least once a quarter.  If not more.

In terms of self-promo, hmmm… Well, we work a lot.  That kind of makes it easy.  It’s important to us to always be producing.  We believe in our work quite strongly and subsequently it’s easy to promote.  We’ve recently reached a point where our clients are really asking us to just do our thing, execute our style, and strongly influence the work we create for them.  That’s helped a lot.  We’re quite particular about who we work with, and on what, as we aim to create lasting and mutually beneficial relationships.  So, all of our clients are entities and people we’re proud to support.  That helps too.

In terms of actual promotion, we keep our flickr stream freshly updated, hit up twitter during the day, drop a post or three on our community blog, joyengine.com each week, and do our best to keep our site updated.  We have an amazing group of designer/creative friends and peers here in Colorado as well as abroad and we all do our best to promote one anothers work and ideas.

Can you describe your ideal client, and do they exist?

Most definitely, and yes, they exist.  Our ideal client is civics-minded, community centered, concerned about the environment at large, prepared to speak their mind and ready to assume responsibility for their actions.  Most recently, our ideal client assumed the shape of close friend and collaborator, architect/artist/designer, Mike Moore of tres birds workshop.  Mike invited us to conceive and create a rather large mural for the facade of a building he’s in the midst of improving.  You can see all our concepts here.

Mike’s radically improving the energy efficiency and aesthetics of 3330 Larimer Street, in Denver’s Rhino District.  The end goal of the developer is to attract like minded creatives to the space.  Mike worked closely with us to bring some forward-thinking design to the building and embed a positive message at the same time.  We’re quite confident we accomplished our mission.  We can’t wait to see the building completed.

Do you handle all your web development in-house?

Yes, and no with a propensity for the latter.  We still do handle a small portion of our web development in-house, but that’s shifting and fairly rapidly. We’ve began morphing our we-dev process into a streamlined and highly collaborative activity with our development partners, Collin and Sam over at Quickleft who just happen to be right around the corner.  While we’re an interdisciplinary team we definitely have a focus on web design and development.  To remain as multi-dimensional as we desire we choose to collaborate often, with experts, and only when we find it advantageous to our projects.  This is where our partnership with Quickleft comes in.  It’s fun, rewarding, and packed with added value.

As of late we’ve been spending most of our web-dev time explicitly on concept, design, and user experience.  We then bring our front-end ideas to Quickleft where we open them up for review, address technology and craft a development strategy specific to each project.  Typically, we’ll complete a design, assess the technological necessities, all which are currently all being met and supported by our nevercloud^TM technology conceived and created in collaboration with Quickleft.  We then complete the markup, or a portion of it, depending on the project, and turn to Collin and Sam to move the site onto the nevercloud^TM core, handle the necessary database integration, custom application creation and provide the front-end scripting.  The process actually flows quite smoothly.

We’re currently transitioning to designing and building all of our new sites in tandem with Quickleft atop the nevercloud^TM.  The goal is to collectively continue to develop the nevercloud^TM, release it publicly in late winter of 2010 or next spring into private beta, and then roll it out on a number of levels, as an open source platform, for API integration, as a free EC2 hosted fully customizable portfolio builder and in a few other manners.

— Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Daniel in: Interview

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