Hasta La Ideas

As you peruse the website for MGMT, Sarah Gephart and Alicia Cheng’s Brooklyn-based design studio, one thing that’s immediately obvious aside from the high quality of their work is their sense of humor. The text describing a series of illustrations they created for GOOD that features anthropomorphized fruit reads, “It’s a good day at work when you have to figure out how to put a sweater on a pineapple.” Though the opportunity has never come up for me personally, I’d agree.

Origins
Sarah studied photography and engineering at Oberlin and Alicia majored in English at Barnard. They met at Yale School of Art during the preliminary year program, aka “graphic design boot camp.” They made it through, however, and received their MFAs along with MGMT.’s founding partner Ariel Apte Carter, who has since moved to Minneapolis.

After school everyone went their separate ways—Alicia worked for Cooper-Hewitt and Sarah landed at 2×4 design—but they continued to collaborate on side projects. Soon, however, they grew tired of “working to the bone for other people and realized if we wanted to do good work we might as well do it for ourselves.” Starting in 2000, they gradually eased out of their day jobs and by 2003 had transitioned to working full time at MGMT.

(more…)