It didn't take long before the Internet started popping up everywhere. It was 1998, and suddenly corporations were taking the Web seriously. Everyone needed a website! The Web can make anything better! Fortunately for us, a never-ending series of Internet start-ups were emerging, and they couldn't wait to adapt their business model to those opportunities. Together, those two factors meant the economy would never go down, because now we're in an information age dot com boom! What's your exit strategy ... you planning a roll-up or an IPO? Can't you just hear the 21st century rushing towards us?

Conversely, when a fur-lined canoe maker called us about a website in 1998, we felt compelled to change our name from GlobalMedia Design to GMD Studios to help reduce the number of people who thought all web developers made corporate websites. As the maximum budget you could spend on the cheapest media in history continued to rise, we focused instead on how communities could tackle what used to be the domain of experts, and the new ways they could convert that attention to revenue. We were even shown more than our share of roll-up pitches that would culminate in IPOs, all of which we politely declined.

During that era, we had to remind ourselves The Bubble was a distraction from where we were aiming GMD Studios. You'd hear our resistence to the tempations in mantras like "longer fuse, bigger bang" or "it's about the people not the data" or "we aren't a commercial design firm." It ended up teaching us the value inherant in not following the crowd, because we didn't follow them over the cliff that this irrational exhuberance most certainly foreshadowed.

EXPLORE PROJECTS FROM 1998 - 2000: