http://www.betabeat.com/2012/01/04/the-brothers-mueller-kirk-mueller-nate-mueller-conde-nast-ipad-ebook/Tablet for Two:
The Brothers Mueller, Twin Maestros
of the iPad, Will Make You See Double
By Nitasha Tiku
January 4, 2012 10:00am Kirk (left) and Nate Mueller at the SPD Awards dinner.
Crushed velvet loafers not pictured.They're the toast of New York media. And yes, boys, they're gay.
Identical twins
Kirk and
Nate Mueller sat side-by-side in identical leather chairs wearing identical GANT gabardine suits fiddling with identical Le Pen pens. It was chilly December afternoon just before the New Year at the Fort Greene offices of
Studio Mercury, a boutique design firm made up entirely of alumni from the
Rhode Island School of Design’s hyper-exclusive
Digital + Media graduate program.
The Muellers’ similarities are more than superficial. The twins, who are 27 and stand 5’5″, share the same bank account. They share the same calendar. They share the same
curriculum vitae. The same sexual orientation (gay), brownstone (Prospect Heights) and taste in boyfriends (“over 30”). They share the same profession, and the same specialty (interactive design). They even, in a manner of speaking, share an identity. Email
the Brothers Mueller at their shared account, and the only way to tell which Mueller is responding is by whose name shows up first in the signature: Nate & Kirk versus Kirk & Nate.
“We have this little notation,” said Kirk.
“Some people figured it out,” chimed in Nate, who, along with his brother, seems unburdened by matters of selfhood.
One stutters trying to figure out how to address them. “The Brothers, the Brothers Mueller, or ‘the twins,’ or ‘the boys,’” Kirk said.
In the year and a half since the Brothers got their master degrees from RISD—sharing the podium as commencement speakers in 2010—and moved to New York, they have created iPad apps for
Martha Stewart and e-books for
Vanity Fair and
Bon Appetit. Coming soon are a political website for
The New Yorker and an iPad app for
Newsweek. Whereas most graphic and user-interface designers tend to hand off the technical work, the brothers do it all, relying on Nate’s speed in programming and Kirk’s facility with design.
Their first media world collaboration, a one-off iPad app for
Martha Stewart called
Boundless Beauty, won the
Society of Publication Designers “Tablet App of the Year” award. Shortly after,
Time magazine called it the
cover of the year for featuring an interactive time-lapse video of one of
Martha’s prize peonies, a 10-hour shoot compressed into 10 seconds. The
SPD Award dinner was on a Friday. (“We have these crushed velvet pumps,” said Nate. “Loafers,” Kirk corrected. “And it’s the only time you could wear something like that,” Nate finished.) The following Monday, they got a call from
Scott Dadich,
Condé Nast ’s vice president of digital magazine development, about revamping the company’s e-book operation.
The Boundless Beauty app from Martha Stewart Living. “At this point in media, they have a bit of a lore, like, ‘Oh, the Mueller Brothers are coming!” said
Melissa Lafsky, the launch editor for
Newsweek ’s updated iPad edition, which is slated to debut on Jan. 23, with the Brothers’ help. “When they come into the office, people love it because they’re so striking to look at. Everyone does a double-take because they’re so handsome and well-dressed and there are two of them. They’re a presence. They’re sort of the modern Jewish mother’s dream.”
“When Martha met them, her first question was whether they would appear on
The Martha Stewart Show,” seconded
Gael Towey, longtime chief creative and editorial director for
Martha Stewart Omnimedia.
Not everything about the duo is as identical as it first appears, however. After the first half hour, it comes into focus that Nate’s face is more of an oval. The bridge of Kirk’s nose is more narrow, his physique more slight. Nate’s voice is deeper and a few decibels more nasal—a blessed discovery you don’t make until the next day. “It’ll be hard to transcribe,” they warned, eyeing
The Observer ’s digital recorder.
“Our collective identity is what matters,” said Kirk.
“We don’t get offended if people can’t tell us apart,” added Nate.
“
Gilbert and George, the art duo, they call themselves ‘living sculptures.’ We like the idea of instead of being ‘living decorative objects,’” explained Kirk, gamely.
Before speaking, the twins tend to turn, birdlike, to face each other, often hesitating until they’ve reached some sort of wordless consensus before offering a response.
For all their attention-getting ensembles, the brothers retain a Midwestern equanimity from a youth spent in the suburbs of
Akron. “Because we were originally raised Catholic, we have this running joke that for these twin gay boys in Akron, Ohio, our outlet to ornamentation and beautiful things was going to Mass,” said Kirk, recalling that as altar boys they fought over who got to wear the gold sash.
As budding young artists, they read up on the
Aesthetics Movement and admired
Oscar Wilde and
Quentin Crisp.
They came out at different times—Nate first, Kirk years later, but never officially to each other. “I guess we always assumed that the other one was going through the same things,” they wrote in an email. “We would have been more surprised to find out the other one was straight.”
Even among unflappable New Yorkers, the Brothers Mueller tend to draw stares. In the subway or the elevator at
4 Times Square, “we get stopped once a week by people who say, ‘Have you been interviewed for a magazine or newspaper?’ and we just go, ‘Nooo,’” Kirk said, demurely shaking his head.
“That’s what’s fun. They see you maybe as objects? So we get people touching us,” said Nate, miming a hand on his arm, “saying, ‘Do you know that you’re twins?!’ It’s great.”
Indeed, the brothers are just as affable fielding questions about their interactive wallpaper, which was on exhibit at the
Chelsea Art Museum and featured stylized versions of a viral molecule, appearing and disappearing between delicate rows of damask (“They’re STD viruses!” explained Kirk), as they are entertaining questions about fetish play.
The Viral Wallpaper Identical twins tend to receive unsolicited queries of a sexual nature, and in 2010, when
Bel Ami, the gay porn production company, introduced the world to the
Peters twins, muscle-bound teenage Czechs who begat the word “twincest,” such interrogations took a turn for the lurid.
“It used to upset us a little at first,” Kirk said. “But now we’re very playful with it.”
“My favorite is using ambiguous language,” Nate added.
“They’ll ask questions about us, like do we date the same guy or do you sleep with the same guy,” explained Kirk. “So we’ll purposefully answer, like, ‘Not usually,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time. Nate will say, ‘Not really,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’ll explode their head.”
“And then we walk away,” finished Nate.
Later, they offered a less ambiguous answer by email: “We don’t think there is a need to experiment with something like that when there’s a whole city full of beautiful people.”
As for whether they would date the same man simultaneously, however, they added dryly, “I think it’s the German in us that seeks out efficiency, so what would be more efficient than the both of us dating one person?”
As is befitting a proper wunderkind, sorry wunderkinder, the outside world’s discovery of the Brothers was a matter of happenstance.
Martha Stewart was working to develop its first digital issue as part of the early development group for
Adobe’s new
InDesign for the iPad software, and Ms. Towey contacted RISD president
John Maeda.
“The director of the program calls us and says you should probably come down here since they’re looking for iPad people and you’re probably the best iPad people here,” Kirk recalled. The Muellers went to lunch with Ms. Towey and her husband, a fellow designer named
Stephen Doyle. “We had a great time and then we looked them up and we were so glad that we didn’t know exactly how big of design powerhouses they are because we would have been nervous wrecks,” Nate said.
“When the brothers walked into the room, I was immediately smitten,” Ms. Towey remembered. “They handed me one résumé, and that did it for me—one résumé. They were clearly smart at marketing themselves. I thought of the
Starn twins, and figured that these guys were on their way to stardom.”
Not only did the brothers prove adept at the technical side—finding bugs in the software before developers at Adobe even knew they were there, Ms. Towey said—they made a number of critical design suggestions. Along with other team members, they insisted the peony should be shuffled to the front of the issue.
“They were going to put it in one of the stories and we said, It should go on the cover,” whispered Nate.
“We should be the first to have an animated cover,” concurred Kirk, adding, “The tools were still being developed. The cover almost didn’t go out the door because of some technical difficulties. But we finally got it out.”
After the success of Boundless Beauty,
Condé tapped the brothers to make their e-book process more efficient and keep the branding more in line with their individual titles. “They always try and get us full-time,” said Kirk, who also mentioned helping Mr. Dadich with the beta version of Adobe’s software. “We bailed him out a few times.” The Brothers, however, prefer working under the Studio Mercury umbrella, where they also dabble in work for the
Guggenheim and the industrial design magazine
Core 77.
After setting up e-book production workflows at
Condé, “once a title wanted to launch a book, instead of taking a matter of weeks, it took a matter of a week,” said Kirk.
With the
New Yorker political website, which is slated to launch this week, the Brothers are employing a Studio Mercury specialty called a “liquid layout,” which easily adjusts from “very large monitors all the way down to the iPad, so it scales seamlessly,” as Nate put it.
It’s easy to see how duo’s cooperative spirit is embraced by publishing design teams, but the world isn’t really built for two separate bodies who want to perceived as one unit. “Our accountant hates us,” Nate admitted.
“If we could, we would get one tax ID number,” Kirk added, wistfully. “And one Social Security number.”
Then he volunteered a mid-century cautionary tale of parents who bucked the standard practice of separating twins to foster individual growth. “The story was that because these twins weren’t separated, they didn’t develop separate identities so they became murderers … and gay,” Kirk said. “Society was saying if you don’t have separate identities—”
“—all this bad stuff can happen,” said Nate.
Although the Brothers have shared a wardrobe since high school, they didn’t start dressing alike until grad school, when, they explained, “we merged our working identity under one name.” That meant a combined Facebook profile and Twitter account, in addition to the email. In their old apartment in Park Slope, they had to institute a morning check-in about what they’d be wearing, to avoid showing up in the exact same ensemble instead of slight variations. The problem was solved with a shared “dressing area” in their Prospect Heights brownstone.
“We often wonder if throughout the majority of the day we think the exact same thoughts,” said Kirk. Or maybe it was Nate.
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