Broad-spectrum creative services
External Design conceives, develops and manages the content and creative assets of businesses, organizations and individuals. Inquiries welcome.
“…good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming — or buying software — on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.”
A supporting cast of thousands!
We have been advocates of quality free* and open-source software for 30 years. Not all good software is either free or open source, but free software can be used transparently by a large pool of talented experts who are free to modify, adapt and improve upon it as needed. Typically, the technical work we deliver can be supported by programmers-developers who are reasonably competent with commonly available, widely used tools.
There are, of course exceptions. External Design sometimes develops for proprietary platforms, including user interfaces for custom electronics and devices.
*To quote the Free Software Foundation, "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'" Thus, licensing and support for open-source software may be less costly than for more-proprietary systems, though not necessarily.
Relevant sites
When it comes to web development work, we usually can work with your preferred web hosting choice or can recommend powerful, affordable solutions. For example, for web-deployed projects we prefer to work with Linux and Apache — the typical "LAMP stack" — but we can accommodate other platforms. Ask us!