Two fresh creative firms make their own mark in the world of graphic design: Wink, founded by Richard Boynton and Scott Thares, and Aesthetic Apparatus, founded by Micheal Byzewski and Dan Ibarra, both based in Minneapolis. find out how these two unpretentious firms started from the ground up with no clients and ended up succeeding in a saturated market, securing clients while having fun in the process.

ST: How did you guys get together and form Aesthetic Apparatus?

DI: We began working together as a side project beyond our day jobs as designers in Madison at Planet Propaganda. We were both music fans and we started going to shows together. When we started making posters, Michael was doing a zine called Ready, Set, Aesthetic, and I had access to a printmaking studio. We started designing posters for Planet principal Kevin Wade’s band, Elvis B’ Elvis. We thought we knew how to screenprint, but we really didn’t. So for the next year we made horribly printed posters for local shows until we finally got the hang of it. Then we started working with local bands, promoters, and clubs and decided to go online and make a little website. Although the web posters were kind of sanctioned by Planet, we got a little recognition and it boosted our confidence. So we decided to go out and start our own thing. We left Madison in 2002 and started our business in the basement of a house that we shared in St. Paul.

MB: So how’d you guys start?

ST: We met at Design Guys in 1996 and just hit it off. Richard went on to a couple other firms from there, and after a couple of years I started getting sick of working for other people. So we talked about the idea of starting our own design firm someday. At the time we were both still employed at different places, but we had all of these guerilla-marketing ideas. Ideas that we thought would be cool to kind of get out into the street, like having an unlisted phone number in the phonebook, and just put up stickers and posters around town of Wink so that you wouldn’t know if it was an ad agency, or a design firm, or a band, or what.

DI: Did you ever actually do any of this?

ST: No. We spent months talking about it, and finally we decided we should just give it a name and start doing it. So we had all of these names and none of them were really quite right. Then one day, we were at Uptown Bar and we were explaining this concept to my wife and she said, “Oh I get it, ‘wink-wink, nudge-nudge.’” And that was basically how the name came to be.

RB: Wink is sort of the response, when we do our work successfully. It makes a good descriptor for the reaction we’re going for, or the reaction that kind of work elicits. We want people to look at something and see that it has this sort of a subtext, or another layer of either humor or intelligence or wit—or whatever you want to call it—that they sort of get and feel like “Ohhhhhh!”

ST: Actually, Aesthetic Cowboys was one name we had on our list.

RB: We thought we weren’t talented enough to pull it off, though.