Business-class design and development
See how we've helped others… imagine how we can help you.
Targeted, custom solutions that work
External Design offers broad-spectrum creative services—in traditional and new media—to businesses, organizations and individuals.
We enjoy providing marketing, editorial and design services that are as traditional or as innovative as you need them to be. Each project begins with open minds and a clean slate, to ensure that the projects we produce for you will pinpoint your particular needs and be properly attuned to your audience.
"...I believe that 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 nearly 30 years. We build most of our projects using open-source tools that are widely known and respected in the industry. Not all good software is either free or open source, but free software typically can be supported by a large pool of talented, independent experts who are free to modify and adapt it as needed.
*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
External Design can develop for proprietary platforms, including user interfaces for custom electronics and devices, and we usually can work with your preferred web hosting choice. 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!
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