Akamai Design. Akamai in Hawaiian means smart. As if to say we know what we're doing. That hasn't always been the case, but after you do something a few times you pick up a trick or two. And then, when we consider that we became Akamai long before the programming languages we script in today were conceived, it's a bit of a juggling act. As it is there's always something new to learn, and more to know.

Our main claim to fame, Designer's Studio, was conceived in 1996 in a chat room discussing ways to modify the appearance of the Mac OS. As a photographer I spent a lot of time processing images in Photoshop and found the brightness of the menus to be hard on my eyes, and was looking for ways to modify the system's colors. Greg Landweber had released the Kaleidoscope plugin which allowed for such a change, but how to create one's own Color Scheme in Resedit (Apple's resource editor of the time) was a mystery to me.

It is there, in that chat room, that I met Tom and we began discussing ways to build a graphical editor that would allow anyone to make the same changes to the operating system's appearance. Early on Tom sent me this drawing from which we agreed I would design a GUI and he program the functionality behind it, and in late 1997 we released Designer's Studio 1.0. Initially designed to create, edit, and share individual Kaleidoscope Color Schemes, and distributed as shareware, D'Studio 1.0 was the first WYSIWYG Macintosh Resource Editor ever released to the general public.

Following its initial success we redesigned and greatly expanded its features, and within a year released D'Studio 1.5. With this release the interface was expanded to include a modular design with separate windows for each of the app's main functions. Considering our expanded list of features, and what was then a very limited amount of screen real estate (remember 640 x 480?), this became a more practical approach, and D'Studio became a graphical editor for all aspects of the MacOS GUI.

DS Group, Inc., Building on what we had accomplished with D'Studio, and being spurred on by the growing popularity of customized computer interfaces, we incorporated and began to explore ways to monetize a position in what we envisioned as an untapped mountain of real estate. Of course this proved to be naive, but with no resistance to Kaleidoscope, and until Apple declared their GUI off limits from third party manipulation, we were building relationships with both companies that would benefit from our technology, and the artists that were drawn to the unique and extremely demanding art of GUI design. Before Apple closed the door we had made presentations to several licensing and distribution concerns.

And then, while following other pursuits in the brick and mortar world, building a website or two on the side, and still wondering what kind of app we might create next, while rummaging around in some old boxes I came across an odd contraption I 'invented' to teach myself how to play guitar back in the early '80s, which sent our imaginations in another direction entirely. In other words, come back soon to see how that works out..

Dorian