Twobecomeone

‘We’re not typical,’ Cina explains. ‘WWFT was started to do client work, but we also wanted it to be just as much about our personal work.’

WWFT’s on-line entity allows Cina and Young to create and sell their own personal work, and also the work of other young designers and artists who otherwise may never be presented with the opportunity to get their creativity seen by the wider world. Visitors to www.youworkforthem.com can buy Cina’s typefaces (a passion of his since he worked with radical font designer, Chank, in the late 1990s), or Young’s prints and artwork.

You can also purchase work by other creatives such as Web designer Joshua Davis’ Praystation Hardrive CD-Rom and Australian digital design collective Rinzen, among others.

There are clothes with original graphics for sale, stock EPS files, and books by Tomato Interactive, Josef Müller-Brockman and typography legend, Willi Kunz. The most recent addition to the duo’s on-line store has been One, a self-published book and CD-Rom.

The book is edited by Curt Cloninger of New York design consultancy Lab404, while the interactive CD-Rom allows readers to revisit the ten various incarnations of the sites for themselves. Something they are not able to do on-line, since the work has been removed to make way for new eye candy. Finishing off the package are four small prints by the duo, unavailable elsewhere, and adding a feeling of exclusivity to this neat little bundle.

But is this departure into a more retail oriented practice of making and selling their own work and that of others, something that is going to become increasingly common as consultancies struggle to turn a profit from design work alone? It seems like a good idea, but it’s something that the two Mikes wouldn’t know, as they have suffered little from the economic downturn, and have been so focussed on their personal work that at times they have even turned down client jobs to concentrate on it.

‘This honestly isn’t about money, surviving, or worldly things,’ says Cina. ‘That’s not why we started WWFT. Really it’s because it has been our dream our whole life to produce our own work, and to bring other people with us.’

One is released in mid April, priced $26 (£16)