If you were to meet Luis Blanco and Michael Uman, INTERspectacular co-founders and co-creative directors, you’d probably soon guess that their main mission in life is to have fun. You’d be right. Consider these facts: Their first project in 2003 was the redesign of Comedy Central’s station ID; they dressed as hot dogs for their primary publicity photo; they feel they stand apart from their competition because they’re all "incredibly handsome." Their sense of humor has carried them far.
All kidding aside, the two have been running a seriously successful business in New York City for the past four years, working on a number of award-winning projects that range from broadcast design packages and mobile video to character animation, station IDs and narrative work. An impressive list of clients includes Comedy Central, Fuel TV, Volkswagon and Nickelodeon.
What’s Their Gig?
The Cool Factor
What’s no laughing matter is the company’s success in another area— large-scale digital signage design. INTERspectacular, one of the few local studios that’s generating a good amount of work in this area, recently finished a series of high-profile, "super sign" projects for Target, right in the heart of New York’s Times Square.
Blanco explains, "It’s a completely different platform and a different way of thinking. We had to look around to see how the signs were placed and what people were running on them. We noticed that a lot of people just sort of throw stuff up like,‘Oh, we did this commercial, so let’s just run that.’ But that doesn’t always work. It just looks noisy and busy. We recommended to Target that we should keep it simple and run a basic graphic design. There’s already so much going on up there that to try and make it more active would have been a mistake. What we did worked out beautifully and Target loved it."
"In the end," adds Uman, "these are nothing more than billboards. People don’t want to watch a commercial, they want to cross the street."
The Geek Factor
Toys, video games, the full Adobe arsenal and Power Macs fill the INTERspectacular atmosphere. "It’s our clubhouse, really," says Uman. "We spend a lot of time here, so it needs to be fun. It’s set up so we can do our work and then play video games."
Though the team started out as a traditional broadcast design shop, they soon discovered they had a lot of other interests. "When we did the Comedy Central stuff, we decided that we like doing comedy," says Uman. "And since we spend our days sitting in the office cracking jokes and laughing, we thought,‘How can we get work that’s going to pay us to sit in our office and crack jokes and laugh?’ It’s sort of slowly changed the direction of the ship. We certainly do enough packaging and design, but now we’re probably getting about as many calls for animation and character development and we’re moving further in that direction."
Adds Blanco, right on cue: "We’ve all seen Bladerunner; we know what the future brings."
Recent INTERspectacular projects include (clockwise from top left) Comedy Central mobile,Target digital signage, Volkswagon and Fuel TV.Luis Blanco (left) and Michael Uman (right) at their INTERspectacular studio in New York.
