Alreis x Two Of Three
We sat down with Jake, Terry and Adam from Two Of Three, Perth’s most intuitive, creative and coolest design company! We have been chillin’ with these guys for a while, mainly because they’re so damn cool! We love hanging out and just being kids. They actually got the whole story how we met in their website, so if you want to know more about how we became friends. Visit their blog: http://twoofthree.com/portfolio/2011/10/03/alreis-x-two-of-three-summer-2012/
Only recently that we agreed to do a collaboration. It was mainly because we like their designs and artwork. I’m telling you, these guys are GENIUS! After the great work they’ve done with our website, we wanted to do more work with them. So then we decided to collaborate and give them the creative control to design 3 styles of tees for us.
Picture from left to right: Terry, Jake, and Adam.
Alreis sat down with the Two of Three boys for a quick interview. Here is how it goes.
- start interview -
A: How did you come up with the name Two of Three?
What’s the story behind it?
Terry: Well in short, Two Of Three references that two of the three names we’ve had were binned. Our first name conflicted with a recurring nightclub event, you know those ones where they ‘brand’ their nightclub night and take photos using wide angle lenses then Photoshop the shit out of them. The second name we came up with meant ‘art’ in another language – it just so happened to sound like an incredibly offensive English word. We thought we were pretty clever but our government benefactors didn’t really see it the same way, so we had to bin a few thousand business cards, get a new website and a business name. So yeah that’s the story.
Adam: It’ll work out better for us in the long run though because we could have potentially alienated some of our more prudish clients.
Jake: Yeah that is true, people kept telling us it was a little risky to have an offensive name but we were pretty hard headed and we’re going to resurrect it later because it’s still pretty clever. It’s worked really well though, because there are three of us; it’s the democratic system within the office. If two of us make a decision it over rules the third haha. We sometimes shut down the third person with “Two Of Three!”, it’s all fun and games.
There’s a tonne of other design decisions we made about the name before finally landing the pin on Two Of Three but we’d have to write an essay. I’ll give you an example though just so we can sound clever: the name can appear in various media which ends up being a subliminal reference to our company, free advertising. For example I sent a few texts the other day and my phone said “Two of three messages delivered”, we like being up in your daily business. It’s like the HBF slogan “I feel better now” and McDonalds “I’m lovin’ it”, it just comes up in your life sometimes. I guess we need a stupid little jingle for it now too haha. Terry wanted the slash in the ‘O’, that came out okay too I guess.
A: How did you meet each other? How did you get started?
Terry: I’ve known Jake for like 15 years, we used to live next door – and I went to both high school and university with Adam. A lot of my friends after highschool pursued careers in design; web, graphic etc – even I did Industrial Design. Everyone was quite talented but getting anywhere as a freelancer seemed to be pretty difficult. I figured I’d get a few people together and see if we could form a business – I made a few calls and named a time and place. Some people didn’t even show up to the initial meeting, those that did sat around for most of the night, we all got pretty excited at the idea of forming a business – I really wasn’t sure what to expect from that meeting – but it turned out great!
Jake: I was the only one that turned up on time, or brought paper. So now I’m basically the scribe at our meetings. But Terry’s the one that got this all going, we all serve our purpose. It all came together quite smoothly, maybe too smoothly.
