ST: Yeah, they always ask, “How many people work at Wink?” And I’m like, “Well, you’re looking at the company.” As far as starting your own business, I’d say find something you like to do and do it well.

RB: You can’t go into it with the expectation you’re going to make money. I mean, if you’re going into design as a business, think of it as getting paid to do art—that’s probably the best you can hope for. It is one of the only professions around in which you have a tangible, creative end product that comes from your imagination. So you’re winning in that sense, but you’re certainly not going to be buying houses on both coasts.

ST: Unless you’re a realtor on the side.

RB: How has being in business together affected your friendship?

DI: More annoyingly similar behavior.

MB: I think we’ve grown into the same person. It’s gone amazingly well as far as us not hating each other. For the first year we lived in the same house and worked out of the basement and still didn’t kill each other.

TOP: Poster for Day of Music, a free 24-hour musical event. DESIGN: Scott Thares, Wink. BOTTOM: “The band Modest Mouse was touring in support of their album GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD NEWS, so we tried to create a design that might feel a bit like that odd concept,” the designers at Aesthetic Apparatus explain.

RB: Well, Scott’s married.

DI: So it’s over?

ST: It’s really just a marriage of convenience though. We’re not all that attracted to one another anymore. Richard is like my best friend, seriously.

RB: Wait, like your best friend?

ST: I love him like a best friend.

RB: I’m godfather to your son, for God’s sake!

ST: From the time I met him at Design Guys we just hit it off from a humor standpoint, and also from a design perspective.

RB: It’s like the experience you were describing earlier, only when we’re talking to one another we rarely talk in complete sentences.

ST: And the thing is that I forget about it until we start having conversations like this. We’ve been together for so long, and we’ve seen so much design, and have such a history together that we can bring up old solutions from the past and its like, “Oh yeah!”

RB: We do our share of recycling good ideas that weren’t chosen.

DI: That’s the one secret of this industry: You’re paying for ideas that someone else is going to use down the road.

ST: Because there are so many good ideas that just never see the light of day. And you just keep them in the back of your head. Then with the right client, it’s like bam—here you go.

RB: How do you guys go about collecting resource material?

DI: A lot of old magazines or found art. We just found some old medical illustrations at a lawyer’s going-out-of-business sale. He had old presses and books and stuff like that.

RB: I’d assume that your approach to collecting stuff is similar to ours—it’s almost like the more lowbrow, the better. It just seems like it has a little bit more character in it, you can tell there’s a real human behind it.

DI: I can never figure out if that’s really how it is, or if that’s just our perception or reaction to everything that is so clean now.

RB: I think it’s the grocery store sign painted by the high-school kid who screws up the s and turns it into a dollar sign in the middle of a sentence for no particular reason. That’s more inspirational to me than going through and looking at annuals at something very polished that was done two years ago by a firm in San Francisco.

DI: We’re influenced by unnamed artists from the ’50s and ’60s who did trade ads—people who weren’t thinking about the beauty of it because they had very limited resources.