text: Isaac: I spent my first year of college majoring in biology and chemistry with the goal of becoming a naturalist or fisheries biologist. I basically wanted to con someone into paying me to hike, camp and fish out West. Unfortunately, chemistry isn’t my strong suit, and after a rough first year in school, I decided to go to Herron and become a designer. Somewhat impetuous, but I had grown up as the “artistic kid” and was just starting to notice beer packaging and gig posters on my own anyway, so I jumped in head first without much more thought than that.
  Cody: I just figured design was a way for me to draw, use computers and make money doing it. It was a decision I made when I was pretty young. It was a naive notion at the time, but it panned out to be true, more or less.
  Isaac: People seem to like our work. We’ve been very fortunate to work with some smart people and great companies—some high profile stuff and some not-so-high profile stuff, and people always seem to respond well to it. It’s gotten to the point where colleagues will text me and ask if CODO designed something they saw in the wild. More often than not, we didn’t, but they thought it looked great and that we must have done it. That’s a pretty soft metric, but we’ll take it as a sign that we have a positive reputation.
  As far as working in Indiana, Cody and I don’t believe we could’ve done this anywhere else in the world. So much of our business has been built on emailing someone out of the blue and asking to sit down over coffee or beer and talking shop. Whether they’re a popular local brewer or restaurateur, the VP of a 50+ million dollar per year company or a cool small business down the street, everyone in Indiana just defaults to yes. “Yes, I’ll meet with you.” It’s crazy because some of the people we meet with are so busy, they’ve got no business sitting down for what amounts to a sales meeting, but it’s still rare to hear a flat “no.”
  Cody: We kind of keep our heads down so it’s really bizarre when students have been stalking us a bit, or when designers we’ve respected for a long, long time compliment us on a project. But everyone has responded really well. It’s pretty encouraging.
  What was your graphic design training? Was it mostly through education, hands-on experience, or a mixture of both?
  Isaac: My primary education was through Herron School of Art and Design here in Indy. That was compounded with loads of freelance work and a lengthy internship experience while I was in school. I’ve also been reading design books ever since getting into Herron. Design and business books have helped a lot along the way.
  Cody: I went to Herron as well. School was huge for me. It helped me mature in a lot of ways. I know Isaac and I connected over our internships, where we got a chance to see how this industry works. We picked up a lot of our opinions on business structure and the design process there. Everything else has just been me doodling or thinking about the world in my free time. That is definitely stuff I would be doing whether I was involved with design or not.