Joshua Distler		designobject is the culmination of enormous hours of hard work and planning: of visual design resolved, of code wrestled into multi-browser submission, and of billions of pixels pushed, processed and squeezed down to their closest selective-color equivalents. Before things get too dramatic, here's a little background. As a concept, designobject began in November of 1999. I wanted to create a forum for "showcasing" well-designed products. I had different notions of how this might work, but serious pieces were missing. For one, I didn't see how people in the design community could really benefit from another web site selling the "mystique" of design as a valuable shopping criteria. About two months later it became clear. I just needed to examine my situation, and the situations of most of my colleagues. There were so many of us working on self-initiated projects as sane distractions from the grind of our commercial work. Though we often found the means to produce these projects [usually by trading design work for production runs], distribution for these innovative "hard goods" was always terribly hard to come by.		If you couldn't stomach the "gift show" route, you went solo, and dropped three grand to put together a site to sell on your own. Typically, there were two possibilities: [1] you could be, at worst, never seen nor heard from again or [2] you could be battling with your colleagues for world-wide-web attention. Either way, it wasn't pretty, and the endeavor usually ended before it had really begun. More than a year later, designobject is what you see here: a central distribution point for innovative objects and content. Yes, we do have a retail component, and a very thorough one at that. Behind the white curtain lives inventory management, region filtering, order tracking, and all of those other big business, .com, Amazon-esque things for which the 'net serves very well. What I trust makes designobject different is that we're committed to using our powers [and dollars] to help channel and foster the brilliance of all of us who have more ideas and creativity than money or connections. Ultimately, our mission is to become the reason and the means for others to self-initiate.