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.

“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 Living 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.

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. 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 Conde, “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.

ntiku@observer.com

Mr. Subtraction himself.

For this week's cover story about Condé Nast's struggle developing for the iPad, Betabeat had the opportunity to talk to Khoi Vinh, former Design Director for NYTimes.com. On his widely-read design blog, Subtraction, Mr. Vinh has repeatedly expressed his skepticism toward publishers like Condé Nast and Hearst and software companies like Adobe for thinking that what iPad readers want is a magazine replica app that takes a print-centric approach to tablet design. But we didn't get the chance to include some really interesting predictions Mr. Vinh made about the direction he thinks consuming content on the iPad is heading (in short: back to the browser) and what readers really want.

Mr. Vinh, who recently released a book on web design, seem to have contracted that start-up fever making its way around the city and is currently working in stealth mode on an app of his own. He compared the bells-and-whistles of the current magazine app rush to the CD-ROM bubble and advised publishers to think more like Netflix.

Do you still believe Condé and Adobe are leading the industry in the wrong direction?

I do believe that in general, though I found that I’ve been using The New Yorker app a lot. I’m a lifetime subscriber to the print edition, so I get access to the app for free. I still find it frustrating, but I think its okay in that sometimes I’m traveling and can’t get my hands on the print edition, so it's nice to have that. It’s what I’d call a nice reader. I don’t think it taps into the potential of what you can do with that brand online. I have constant problems with it crashing.

Because of problems with the size?

I wouldn’t speculate as to a specific cause. My general guess would be they just tried to get too fancy. What I like about it is that it's just the text from the magazines presented very simply. I ignore all the other extras. I don’t think the stuff I care about is what's causing it to crash, which is just the text.

Do you think the replica approach is going to make it hard for publishers to get iPad subscribers?

To me the question is not what’s going to get them to subscribe but rather what’s going to get them to engage. I think trying to get readers to subscribe is a very difficult proposition that I think very few brands are going to be able to succeed at. Engagement is something else. I think there’s all kinds of great stuff on NewYorker.com [Ed note: Agreed!] blogs and extras and stuff. It’s bizarre to me that the app hasn’t tapped into that stuff. I guess it’s frustrating to me that so many of these Condé Nast apps address a problem that’s already been solved.

The website is a perfectly good delivery mechanism for the content and takes better advantage of the medium. These apps tend to set aside those benefits that users have already said that they want for this illusory benefit of being able to control the typography and the layout and being able to make things look more print-like.

So if you were in charge, you'd focus on optimizing the mobile web experience?

If it were up to me, I would focus on new technologies like HTML 5 that let a website cache inside of a browser more readily, so people can have better offline access to it. But there’s a finite amount of resources that any organization can spend on these projects and I would rather double down on the website because in my view in a couple of years most content delivery is going to go back to the browser anyway. I mean I love apps and I feel like there’s a real use for apps. But I feel like it’s mostly for things that require the horsepower of the device and take advantage of the specific capabilities that Apple built into the operating system. You don’t need that to deliver content, you just don’t.

Do you think it's possible to monetize a mobile website on the iPad?

I’m not privy to the numbers, but I would imagine there’s better long-term potential in a huge audience through a browser than a limited audience through an app. They could be making good money off the app, but my guess is they’re not. My guess is it's mostly people like me who are subscribing through print, right?

When does an tablet app make sense?

If I were to build an app, it would be because I found some piece of the functionality that made sense with the brand. Whether it's some video or multimedia or some utilitarian reason like a calculator or a productivity app or something--some feature set that really made a compelling case for building a new audience and was a complement to the brand. And if I found that feature set then I would build it with native tools, meaning on the iPad using Apple’s development environment, Xcode and so forth.

Are you skeptical about the future of the iPad adoption?

I’m bullish on the device in general. Apple sold 15 million last year, the projections are 55 million this year. I think that might be a conservative estimate. It's conceivable that we’ll have a 100 million of these devices by the middle of next year, which is a huge number, a tremendous adoption rate. I think within five years they are going to be an accepted norm for most computing tasks. So I think it’s a fantastic device to the point where I’ve started a new venture that is focused on an iPad app. I’m building an app that takes advantage of properties that are unique to the iPad. It's not that I’m a skeptic about the device, I’m a skeptical about the use of the device to deliver content that’s just as well delivered in a browser.

Do you think publishers need to use interactive designers to really get at the potential of the iPad?

Absolutely. Even in so far as all the extras that they put it, it’s not just that they’re centered around delivery of text from the print edition. It’s like things that they think are going to be interesting to people are very much in the mold of what somebody thinks is going to be interesting if they come from a print world. "Oh, we’ll have some video extras and be able to rotate the photo, you’ll be able to get extra audio clips." That stuff is fine. But it takes such tremendous amount of incremental labor and expense that there’s no upside to it. People want the core content. They’re not going to say no to the extras, but most of the time they’re not going to use them and most of the time they’re not going to care about them. Netflix is a company that totally gives you just the core content. They decided to do this after a decade of all this value-add in DVDs thinking that’s what sells stuff. Then Netflix demonstrates, people just don’t care about the extras. That to me is part of the print-centric approach.

There’s a clear precedent in the CD-ROM bubble from 20 years ago where they tried to deliver content in this very fancy value-add way and people just didn’t buy it. If you just at look at what it takes to put these magazines together, you come to grips with the fact that you’re not shipping content, you're shipping software and it costs you $10,000/month to produce an iPad edition. Let’s just say it only takes one incremental staffer to build an iPad app, they cost $120,000 to $150,000. Why would you spend that amount of money just getting the content out there? Why wouldn’t you invest that money in building better software around what users want? If you spend that much money to deliver the content, you’re not improving the content. To me it just doesn’t make sense.

When does it make sense to build an app?

I would build an app that has utility. I would build social features and sharing that really resonate with people and have longer shelf-life than just a month’s worth of content.