See it here. - Eight Hour Day

photography by jonathan chapman photography www.jonathanchapman.com
first came
design.
Then came
marriage.
The husband-wife team at EightHourDay have it
all: an interactive business, an illustration portfolio,
an Etsy shop. What’s the secret to their success?
by m i c h e l l e Ta u t e
The first thing you notice about Katie Kirk and Nathan Strandberg is how
much they laugh. Whether they’re talking about the business plan for their
Minneapolis design firm EightHourDay or the latest antics of their chocolate
Lab, Eli, this husband-wife team always manages to hit on the lighter side of
things with their easy, back-and-forth banter. The pair clearly loves life and
design, and this joie de vivre shows through in their wide-ranging portfolio.
• m ay 2010 w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m
P e r f e c t Pa i r
Spouses and business partners Nathan Strandberg and
Katie Kirk run EightHourDay
from a roughly 850-squarefoot commercial condo they
own in the Minneapolis
warehouse district. It’s about
two blocks from the new
Minnesota Twins baseball
stadium and four miles from
their house.
w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m HO W • Every project that passes through the door of this two-person shop seems to have an extra spark of
energy or imagination that draws you in for closer inspection. You might fall in love with a plucky little
robot staring back at you from a sea of other well-drawn objects in an illustration for Wired magazine.
Or find that you’ve mysteriously lost three hours using Digg 365, an interactive timeline the firm created
with The Barbarian Group. This addictive application lets you pull up the most popular links from any
day in the ranking site’s history.
There’s definitely a secret behind all the firm’s design magic, and the official version goes like this:
“Work, life and inspiration are all equal and integrated organically.” Or in simpler terms, there’s no need
to build walls separating work, life and your relationship when they fuel one another naturally. Kirk and
Strandberg baked this mingling of the personal and professional into their business from the start. When
the pair launched EightHourDay in early 2005, they were still dating, and the lawyer who set them up
as a corporation found that scenario quite funny. “He wasn’t an optimist,” Strandberg says.
But this couple’s love story—both for design and each other—comes with a happy ending. After
quickly finding a rhythm as business partners, Kirk and Strandberg married in August 2006, and this
past February their firm reached its five-year anniversary. They’ve spent that time building up a client list
equally divided between large companies, such as Target and UnitedHealth Group, and smaller clients
ranging from the Minneapolis Opera to a local start-up restaurant. The bulk of the pair’s work falls under
the interactive umbrella, but they also take on print and illustration work, as well as a steady stream of
offbeat personal projects.
Tying the Business Knot
The birth of EightHourDay owes at least a small debt
to pro snowboarder and skateboarder Shaun White.
Before starting their business, Kirk and Strandberg
spent roughly a year and a half freelancing for Target, and during that gig, both designers worked on a
website featuring the popular athlete. The project’s
next phase called for travel to the X Games, but to the
pair’s disappointment, only full-timers were eligible for
the trip. “We actually said, ‘Well, what if we leave and
then you could hire us as a design firm to do that?’”
Strandberg says. “They were like, ‘Yes, that works.’”
So EightHourDay was born, and Strandberg got
the chance to shadow White and his family at the
X Games, gathering photos and general intel for an
interactive blog along the way. “I didn’t get to go,” Kirk
• m ay 2010 w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m
deadpans, then laughs. “I’m not bitter at all. I had to
see him on TV in the crowd.”
But more important than rubbing celebrity shoulders, the firm kicked off with a project in hand and a
Fortune 500 client that gave them a base to build on
those first few years. The pair had already been saving
money with an eye toward opening a business, but this
opportunity gave them a deadline and a final nudge.
Then things were off and running. “It seemed good
right away,” Strandberg says. “There have definitely
been times where paychecks haven’t been coming in
and you start sweating a little bit, but I think that’s just
normal until you figure out that structure.”
Another important early lesson: It’s not necessarily
smart to do everything yourself. The pair hired a bookkeeper, switched to a better tax preparer and slowly
figured out the ins and outs of payroll and tax law.
More recently, Strandberg gave up doing the firm’s
web-development work himself in favor of partnering
with outside programmers, and the move has helped
the pair keep their focus on design.
The duo has also gained the confidence to turn
down work when a job isn’t right for them. “At first,
I remember having a giant magnet board on our wall
with 20 projects posted up there just to keep track of
everything,” Strandberg says. “It was really intense,
because we felt like we had to take on all this stuff.
But now we’ve learned, ‘Alright, it’s OK to say no.’” At
this point, the pair knows how much work they can
take on comfortably, and they’ve developed an informal
checklist to help them figure out whether to say “yea”
or “nay” to a given project.
It’s a pretty basic set of questions that serves as a
quick gut check: Is the money right for the work? How
busy are we? And how much work will this be? Does
the job excite us? Is it worth less money if it’s a great
project that comes with freedom? Do we like the client
and connect with them right away? “I feel like that one
is probably one of the biggest things,” Kirk says. “We’ll
meet someone and we’re just not sure right away that
w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m HO W • Wedded Bliss
Kirk’s whimsical invitation
design for her sister’s wedding made a big splash in the
blogosphere.
we’ll get them or that they’ll even get us. And that’s
OK.”
In fall 2008, the business faced a big challenge
when Target shifted work from small design shops
to a handful of powerhouse agencies, leaving EightHourDay with significantly less work from the retailer.
Was it scary to experience such a big cutback from an
anchor client? “Oh yes, we drank that day for sure,”
Kirk says, laughing. “A lot of people were affected. It
really wasn’t just us.”
But the pair approached the situation as an opportunity, seizing the chance to spend more time on
personal projects and reach out to small businesses as
potential clients. Kirk in particular shifted more focus
to her illustration work, pursuing self-directed projects
that have led to more commercial work.
A Design Life for Two Now it’s time for the big question people always ask
• m ay 2010 Kirk and Strandberg: How do you work with your
spouse without killing him or her? “I feel like our
life and work life and relationship are really organic,”
Strandberg says. “There are definitely no hard lines.
For us, that really works. We’ve kind of set out to make
it that way.”
At times, he says, it can be tricky to turn off work
to focus on each other, especially if they’re in the
middle of an all-encompassing project. But for the
most part, their shared love of design strengthens the
relationship.
“We’ll go out for dinner and we’ll be talking about
design, and we’ll be talking about things that we’ve
seen or client work even, and we like talking about it,”
Kirk says. “When we started the business, it wasn’t a
career path as much as a lifestyle choice.”
Or perhaps more accurately, an ongoing series of
lifestyle choices. They’ve decided to work side-by-side
every day, giving themselves the freedom to pick and
choose projects and even call the shots on when and
where they work. On a nice summer day, you might
find them biking from their home on the south side of
Minneapolis to their studio on the cusp of downtown.
And when they drive, their dog, Eli, often makes the
trip into work, too.
The couple’s home and office show off their
knack for interior design, and both spaces landed on
Design*Sponge, the holy grail of design blogs, as a
Sneak Peek last year. A series of lush photos offered
a glimpse into the warm, dark paint colors in the
couple’s living and dining rooms and the bold yellow
wall that brings a little extra sunshine into their studio.
It’s also easy to see how much the couple loves graphic
art—both their own creations and other artists’—by
what hangs on their walls. Some of those objects come
from the couple’s outings to antique shops and flea
markets, where they might peruse retro cameras, old
books or kitschy, vintage artwork. “I think we really
try to surround ourselves with things that inspire us,
whether they’re for our actual design work or not,”
w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m
Ca n i n e Ca p e rs
“I’ve always wanted to do an
illustrated children’s book,” Kirk
says. And the couple’s chocolate
Lab, Eli, inspired this book
(far left) with his adventures
and misadventures. The fourlegged friend also contributed
his thoughts to this article by
periodically scratching in the
background.
N e w Yo r k S c e n e s
A month living in Brooklyn
inspired Kirk to create these illustrations of herself and Strandberg
taking in the sights (left). She
screen printed them with a
Yudu printer, and they’re on sale
for $25 in the EightHourDay
Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/shop/
|eighthourday).
Kirk says.
But despite such sweet spaces to call home and
work, the couple loves to travel, often taking off for
a month and working remotely without necessarily
telling their clients. Last year they packed up Eli, and
the trio spent a month subletting an apartment in
Brooklyn. “We were just able to be [in] another place
and have that energy and those inspirations around,”
Kirk says. “That helped fuel us not only from a design
inspiration way, from a creativity way, but also in a life
energy way.” The extended trip also inspired two prints
for the firm’s Etsy shop, one of Strandberg riding the
Staten Island Ferry and the other of Kirk at Coney
Island.
Etsy isn’t necessarily a big money-maker for the
pair, but Kirk enjoys doing illustration, making prints
and having an outlet to sell her work. She also appreciates the personal experience of sending one of her
prints directly to someone who liked it.
Another side project, an illustrated children’s book
called “Eli, no!”, started out as a gift to her nephew and
grew into something much bigger with a little serendipity and some help from the internet.
“When he was three, my nephew would come over
to our house, and our crazy dog Eli would be running
around,” Kirk says. “I’d always be going, ‘Eli, no. Eli,
sit. Eli, no.’ Of course, my nephew heard ‘Eli, no’
and he just loved to repeat that.” So she decided to
turn this funny phrase into a book full of charming
illustrations depicting her dog’s antics—from whining
and overeating to chasing a squirrel. She gave it to her
nephew for his birthday and put spreads up on Flickr.
The images quickly attracted attention on blogs, and
one fan who longed to buy the book connected Kirk
with a friend at Abrams Publishing, and now the company is slated to publish “Eli, no!” in spring 2011.
50/50. Typically, they both spend a couple of hours
on the administrative side of the business each morning before moving on to creative work. “If it’s a design
job that comes in, we’ll each do a concept or two,
then whoever’s concept is selected becomes the main
contact and carries that job,” Strandberg says. Kirk
handles any illustration, and if a job calls for video
editing, it goes on Strandberg’s to-do list.
Somewhere, there exists a written business plan for
EightHourDay, but the pair makes it sound more like
a formality than a document driving their decisions.
The firm largely evolved organically, with Strandberg
and Kirk reacting to opportunities and stopping to ask
themselves, What’s next? They’ve made some fairly
recent changes to the business with the launch of their
Etsy shop and taking on projects from other agencies,
an area they hope to expand on this year. The latter
gives them the chance to focus more on design.
So what else does the future hold? If you take a
closer look at the pair of Etsy prints inspired by the
couple’s time in New York, you’ll notice that Kirk and
Strandberg’s illustrated counterparts appear to be having a grand old time, taking in all the sights and sounds
in the world around them. And you can’t help but get
the feeling they’ll continue to approach work and life
with the same sense of adventure captured in those
images.
Delicious Design
EightHourDay connected
with the people behind the
Blackbird restaurant through
a friend of a friend and created the menu, stationery
and some branding. The
blackbirds on the menu were
printed with a UV spot varnish. “The idea is that this
blackbird really is kind of
coming out of the darkness
a little bit just through the
gloss,” Kirk says.
Michelle Taute is a freelance writer and editor in
Cincinnati. She’s the author of “Design Matters:
Brochures,” and creates copy for major consumer
product brands. Her work has also appeared in magazines ranging from Metropolis to Better Homes and
Gardens. www.michelletaute.com
E i g h tHo u r D ay M i n n e a p o l i s www.eighthourday.com www.etsy.com/shop/eighthourday
Happily Ever After
When it comes to day-to-day client work, Strandberg
and Kirk split the duties of running their business
w w w. h o w d e s i g n . c o m HO W •