Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988
Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.
Designer–Client relationships
From the awesome website Clients From Hell. Sadly, I’ve actually heard some of these things myself. This one, for example, is very similar to a situation I was experiencing quite recently.
Good: Jailbirds
A little data on the prison-industrial complex (link is a fascinating Atlantic article from 1998 by Eric Schlosser).
Sucker Love: Celebrating the naughty tentacle
Amanda Gannon answers the question, “Would you still do Antonio Banderas if he was an octopus from the waist down?” Needless to say, NSFW.
The Known Universe
This is really cool. Travel from Earth to the end of the known universe, in a scale-accurate animation.
Black Metal Cookies
How to bake the most grim and doom-laden of chocolate chip cookies. [via Jason]
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
Park Street Renovation
Slideshow of a Bernal Hill house that was renovated to modernize and double (!) its square footage. Here are some other Dwell slideshows.
Charlie Brown Christmas Performed by the Cast of Scrubs
The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Recent project: Poster for Tuolumne River Trust
Peter Drekmeier, Bay Area Program Director of Tuolumne River Trust, sent me the beautiful photo above and asked me a few months ago to design a poster. Peter, who is also Mayor of Palo Alto, is a longtime friend, and I’ve done many design projects for him over the past 15 years.
I did two designs and they liked this one best. I then tweaked photo a bit to bring out some detail in the shadows of the rocks. I had to crop it a bit so I had someplace to put the logo, with enough of the water emphasized in the frame. I wish that one barren treetop wasn’t spearing the typography, but I tried cropping it several other ways and it only worked like this.
I mentioned in April that I’d taken on some new contract work, and that was slowing the progress of redesigning enews.org. In May and June I started applying for full-time gigs again, despite the fact that the new portfolio was only about 80% done.
I had a couple interviews but none that were a spectacular fit, and then the job listings out there in my area seemed to dry up again (they seem to be going in spurts, every three or four months). Fortunately, at that exact same time a bunch of people started asking me to do contract jobs; so many requests that I had to turn several down, in fact.
I am presently working on two small projects and a larger one, all website designs for various companies. Progress is going well, I’m wrapping up the research and strategy phase for all three of them now and getting anxious to start putting pixels down. I’ve been sketching things on paper and assembling lots of moodboards and assets, and I have all kinds of ideas swirling around in my head. So I’m looking forward to hours and hours of Photoshop work in the coming weeks.
I’ll be engaged on these three client projects for the next couple months so unless you’re an existing client who simply needs a quick change to an existing design I’ve done for you in the past, please consider me too booked for new work right now.
I’m hoping to get back to working on my own site again in a couple months but I suspect it won’t be until after we return from Black Rock City in September.
Posted by espd at 5:05 PM |
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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Progress report on the portfolio and site redesign
Thought I’d give another sneak-peek at some of what I’ve been spending so much time on for the past couple months.
As my precious regular readers will know, I’m redesigning this site and also updating my portfolio for the first time in about three years. What I may not have mentioned before is how in-depth the update to the portfolio is going to be. I’m doing a more comprehensive update than I’ve ever done (by far), going back 20+ years to my very first professional projects. I’m not posting them all, of course, just going through my entire archive and picking out some things from back then that I’ve never had online before.
It’s quite a task, which is why it’s taking longer than I’d anticipated. Anyway, I thought I’d tease everyone with a few snaps of some of the stuff that’s done. You’ve probably not seen a couple of these before. One of the logos I just did last month.
Diane is a longtime friend whom I met through BAA, where she was the coordinator of the Schools Group for a year or so. These days she directs the documentary photography program at SF’s Academy of Art.
I bought Diane her first domain years ago as a gift, and put up a rather rudimentary gallery featuring some of her photos from her time in the Peace Corps in Niger. We’d both neglected the site ever since, but a few months ago we decided to do something about it.
While I’d been working on the designs here and there for a few months, we had a mad rush to finish this week as Diane was applying for a fellowship and had a deadline. So the site was built entirely in the last week and a half, using Photoshop, Lightroom, SlideShowPro, Soundslides, Dreamweaver, and W3C-compliant XHTML Strict and CSS.
It’s not completely finished. There are always some loose nails to be nailed down (although I’m just happy it validates and works in all the major browsers), Diane didn’t have time to finish some of the galleries yet, we need to tweak some little things in SlideShowPro, there’s a Discussion section to be added later, and the whole thing needs to be converted to Wordpress.
But it was done (enough) for her deadline, and all the pages but one validate. The one that doesn’t contains some poorly generated code from Soundslides, the Flash app she used to make her multimedia slideshow (their fault, not Diane’s), so I’ll have to fix that later.
Let me know what you think of DianeCholpin.com. Leave a comment.
I think this logo for the Palo Alto Golf Course might have been the first logo I ever designed. At least, it’s the first one that I actually still like enough that I keep it in my portfolio. I still consider it one of my best.
I made it around 1986 or so. I was a teenager still, and had a job working at the City of Palo Alto’s Parks & Recreation Department, making fliers and signs and newsletters.
I’ve created a lot more logos since then. Here’s a sampling of my favorites from the past 20 years or so. Click on “Next” to scroll through them all.
Posted by espd at 9:44 PM |
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Saturday, October 20, 2007
Introducing Milenkaya.org
I am pleased to announce the launch of Milenkaya.org, the professional website of Olya Milenkaya, graduate student at Virginia Tech.
I've been working on this simple, one-page site for Olya off and on over the past few months while she's been traveling around Eastern Europe. I worked out the last few kinks this week and put it up.
I registered the domain for Olya years ago, at the same time I registered Olya.net, but we'd never done anything with Milenkaya.org until now.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Introducing 42West.net
I'm proud to announce that my latest client project has gone live.
42West is one of the biggest PR firms in the entertainment industry, with clients including Woody Allen, Uma Thurman, Kate Winslet, Eminem, Sydney Pollack, and Steven Spielberg, not to mention numerous film studios, TV networks, and other companies.
I was contacted a couple months ago by 42West partner Allan Mayer, a founding editor of Buzz magazine, former senior editor of Newsweek, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He liked my work and needed a site for 42West, which had been operating for over a year with their new name but still didn't have a presence on the web.
The site features a relatively simple but striking design, playing their logo big and using soft-focus photos of nightlife lighting in the background.
The entire site conforms to web standards. It validates for xHTML 1.0 Strict, and the CSS validates too.
Doing freelance design for 20 years has enabled me to hone my client selection skills over time.
What does that mean? It means knowing how to spot whether a potential new client will be easy to work with or hard to work with.
When you're starting out as a freelancer you're often living month to month and it seems like you can't possibly turn any paying client away. But trust me, one of the best things I've done in my career is to hone my skills at determining what kind of client each new referral will be. It has saved me a lot of headaches over the years.
Of course, you don't always know if that person is going to be a micromanaging meddler, or a waffling mind-changer, or any of the other 379 types of clients, but with attention and experience you can learn how to get it mostly right most of the time, and pick clients who will both help you pay your bills and not drive you completely insane.
Perusing the stories at www.clientcopia.com made me think of this one time recently, though, that I slipped up and didn't let the signals and flags alert me to the fact that I had an asshat for a client.
About two and a half years ago, I had decided to take the plunge and look for a "real" job with a "real" company and to stop freelancing. I was sending out my résumé to lots of places and going on interviews and all that stuff. I applied for a Senior Designer or Art Director or something position at this interactive design firm in San Francisco that I'd never heard of, but they called me for an interview, and I drove up to meet them.
I'd looked at this company's site and the work was alright, but I wasn't all that impressed. However, it was a potential job. I was living off a couple small contracts and tiny side projects but was spending most of my time looking for full-time employment and working on my woefully outdated portfolio, so money was going to run out in a few months and I figured I'd better go to any interview that came along.
I probably should have been more selective and maybe put more weight into the fact that their site was not that impressive. Their client list was, however, so I decided what the hell.
I met with the CEO and we had a good interview and I thought it was going well. We talked about my online portfolio a bit and then he asked me for the URL again and I spelled it out for him as he typed it on his keyboard. He was using a Mac, I don't remember what model or anything, but I recall he had a rather old Apple large-screen CRT. I didn't think much about this at the time, until he said my site wasn't displaying right and I came around the side of his desk to see what the trouble was.
For starters, he was using System 9. By this time, System 9 was pretty much an antique OS, so I was a little surprised to say the least. The following flashed through my mind: "WTF is this CEO of an international design company doing using System 9?" but I was in the middle of an interview and didn't want to get distracted by what my mind was saying to me. Mistake #1.
Oh, did I mention that he was also using Internet Explorer on System 9? Okay, 'nuff said.
So the interview continues, I show him some of my print stuff and he likes it, but he says he's not quite ready to hire someone, he's got a few candidates he's considering, including me, and he kind of apologetically asks me if I'd do a contract job for him to sort of test the waters. Five hundred bucks or something, to do one design with three page mockups for one of his clients that needs a website redesign.
I thought this was actually a great idea, because I would get to test the waters too. And while I ordinarily would charge somewhere between $3,000 and $30,000 for such a project, he wasn't actually expecting all the research and associated work I'd normally do, just some quick mockups and only a single design. Plus it was a bit of cash, and I wasn't in a position to say no to any cash, no matter how little. Mistake #2.
He was probably having a couple of his other interviewees do the same thing; then he'd have three or four design directions to present to his client, and he'd only have to pay $1,500 or $2,000 to do them. Ordinarily, I'd frown on this sort of thing, but I made a compromise in this case, thinking, hey it might lead to a job. Mistake #3.
It turned out the client was one of the world's biggest manufacturers of Flash memory, but they had a totally non-impressive website considering this status. So I headed home, reviewed their site, and with basically no direction and no assets, I created three really good page designs. I delivered them via email to the design firm, and they really liked them, and told me they'd get back to me in a few days, after their meeting with the client.
I uploaded a tiny screenshot of the homepage mockup to my blog and wrote a brief post about it. I sent my bill to the design firm and went back to sending out résumés and working on my online portfolio.
A week or two later I get this angry email from the design firm's CEO, saying that "somehow" the client had come across my post on my blog, and they were angry and it was unprofessional of me to post it and implying that the client was threatening to sue him and demanding that I take it down right away. And oh, by the way, we haven't gotten your bill yet, can you send that right away? Thanks.
First off, I'm thinking, "They 'somehow' came across it? Have you ever heard of a keyword alert, dumbass? Like Google Alerts?"
Then I'm thinking, what exactly is this company worried about? I put a homepage design on the web. A homepage design. Not a product schematic. Not the plans for a nuclear device. Not their patents for the past ten years.
The homepage mockup contains absolutely no sensitive information. In fact it only contains text that's on their currently live homepage! Plus some improved copy that I wrote. And their logo. And a photo. A photo that I had to get from my collection, you asshats who didn't give me anything to work with.
I reread the email and I realized that he'd mentioned that my post was "insulting as hell," which must've been because I slandered them oh so mightily by describing the client as "the market leader in Flash memory, although you wouldn't believe it from their current website".
Which was, um, true. Their site was really bad. This was a multi-billion dollar international company. And their site barely functioned. Not just ugly. Barely worked.
I imagined the scenario that set this guy off. He's sitting in his office, in front of Internet Explorer running on System 9, and the client calls him up and says, "Who the hell is this designer writing about our company and our website all over the Internet and putting up the mockup you just showed us last Tuesday?!"
And the design firm CEO guy can only say, "Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about! What? Where? On a blog? What blog? How do I get to a blog? Can I see it on my Internet Explorer?"
And he goes and (with some difficulty, I'm guessing — probably by following a link in an email sent by the client, and certainly not by doing a search to find it, or, y'know, actually knowing I had a blog in the first place) finds my post, and reads it, and sees the tiny little mockup there, and fires off this angry email at me because he felt like a complete dope for being embarrassed in front of his client.
Which I can understand. I'd be embarrassed too.
But I mean, c'mon. Let's not overreact here.
A) I put up a tiny mockup. That I designed. For starters, that entire design, with the exception of the client's logo in the corner, is owned by me under U.S. copyright law until I get paid for it, buster. Which you haven't done yet. You are a professional in the graphic design industry, are you not? You do understand copyright law, do you not? Asshat?
B) My post was insulting? As hell? What, by implying that a huge company such as your client should by all accounts have a very professional website and it's surprising that they don't? Well excuse the hell out of me for being honest. I can see how they'd be rightfully ashamed, but insulted? Methinks you need to examine your emotions a little bit more closely, friends.
C) What exactly were you angriest about? That you looked like a fool in front of your client because you'd hired some contractor to do your work for you? Or that you looked like a fool in front of the client when you didn't know that it's pretty common for designers these days to actually have a blog, and *gasp* even discuss their work on their blogs! Or was it that you were embarrassed that you hadn't asked me to sign any sort of nondisclosure agreement or even implied in any way that this homepage mockup design was some ultra-secret project that had to be kept from the world at all costs?
Look pal, I could understand them and you being upset if I'd posted something important, but it's a damn homepage with a couple paragraphs of marketingese on it. Get a grip.
(Mistake #4: Not realizing that a guy who uses Internet Explorer on System 9 is probably a few years out of touch with the way the design community — and in fact, the world — operates these days. It's about transparency, pal. It's about sharing, and community, and writing about what you do.)
Okay, so I took the screenshot down, and I deleted the client's name from the post, but I'd be damned if I was going to censor my own (truthful) post. At that point, job be damned, it was pretty evident that I didn't want to work for this asshat if this was the way he did business.
Luckily, I never had to work with him again. Although it was many months before I finally got my measly $500 out of him.
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Sunday, March 04, 2007
Mark Bult Design master client list
I’ve been in business for 21 years (or more, depending on how you look at it), and I’ve had a lot of clients over those years. I think this list is pretty accurate, but every once in a while I come across some really old file on an archive disk that reminds me of yet another small company I worked with 15 years ago or something.
I’ve been trying to categorize the list, but I’m not sure these categories make the most sense. I may have to revise them soon.
Arts & Entertainment (Art, Design, Film, Photo, Music, & Dance)
3Sixty 42West African Odyssey Alice in Chains AML Rehearsal Studios Amsterdam Anthrax Atlantic Records Autographix beauty Big House Cactus Club California Concerts Caroline Records Columbia Records Diane Choplin, photographer The Dandy Warhols Elektra Records EMI Records Enigma Records Entercomm Flux51 Freewill Friday Night Films Funky Junction Gargoyle Records Gilbert Zapp’s Golden Poppy Productions Graphic Artists Guild Green Blues J.D. Wolfe Productions Island Records Chris Kinney, photographer Dave Lepori, photographer Magellan & Co. Main Event Mark Ritch / Mark’s Art Metal Blade Records Metallica Olya Milenkaya, artist Monét Music Management Moneytalk Productions Multiplex Studios Niles Hard Rock Station Noise International/BMG Dave Oneto, photographer One Step Beyond Ossum Possum Records Brad Owen, photographer Pop Life Studios Queensrÿche Rebeka Jaqua Rush Shur-Sound & Sight Sony Pictures Stiletto Studio 47 The Stone The Omni Thumper Studios Tony Alves Photography Tsunami Typemasters Vain Vicious Rumors Warner Bros. Records Wonderland World Peace Music Awards ZZ Top
Automotive
Ford
Communications & Media
KFJC FM KALX FM Women.com X-Rock
Construction & Manufacturing
GI Concrete Construction Kilgore Electric Polyethylene Industries Recycled Lumber Co. SmartAdhesives
Consulting & Misc.
Carolyn’s Cooking Castle Consulting Cavalli & Cribbs Fenton Communications Gentzsch.net Grass Roots Productions Laura Stec Innovative Cuisine Learning by Design Magellan & Co. MarkAndVelma.net Next Generation Storefront Political Media TechniQuest Velma.org
Crimson Finch Project De Anza College Northwestern University Palo Alto Adult School Stanford Centennial Stickney Flight School
Events
A16 African Odyssey Anne Frank Center Bay Area Earth Day Bay to Breakfast BikeWeek Black & White Ball Business Environmental Awards Deep Green Global Training Earth Circus Productions Eastern Front Day on the Dirt Friday Night Films Funky Junction Grass Roots Productions The Great Halloween Pumpkin Carving Massacre Green Blues Howling Halloween Northern California Masters Games Palo Alto Centennial Palo Alto Chili Cook-Off Peninsula Environmental Forum Rockin’ Relief for Costa Rica Silicon Valley Water Conservation Awards Stanford Centennial The Rodney Open TGIF Fun Run Western Front Benefit Showcase Western Front News Party! Western Front News Springtime Jam Wine 101 Wine, Women & Shoes World Peace Music Awards
Food, Health, Medical, Sports, & Fitness
50-Plus Fitness Association Adventurescapes.com Align Technology, Inc. Amstel Light Applebees Bay to Breakfast BikeWeek Blue Heron Health Center Carolyn's Cooking Chow.com Crest Whitestrips Decathlon Sports Club Dr. Claire Dupré ESPN Interplast Invisalign Laura Stec Innovative Cuisine Lotus Healing Arts Center Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital Northern California Masters Games Peninsula Healing Arts Center Rodney Open Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Stanford University (Center for Research in Disease Prevention) Willam T. Watkins DDS Women’s Outdoor Network
Government & Political
California Secretary of State Citizens for Alternative Planning, Yes on Measure R City of Palo Alto City of Palo Alto Arts & Culture City of Palo Alto City Manager’s Office City of Palo Alto Community Services City of Palo Alto Golf Course City of Palo Alto Human Resources City of Palo Alto Junior Museum City of Palo Alto Parks & Golf City of Palo Alto Police Department City of Palo Alto Public Works & Recycling City of Palo Alto Recreation, Open Space & Sciences City of Palo Alto Recycling Program City of Palo Alto Utilities City of Palo Alto Utilities, Resource Conservation City of Palo Alto Volunteer Graffiti Management Program Measure M: Santa Clara County Open Space Initiative Micki Schneider for Palo Alto City Council MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District paEnjoy.org Palo Alto Centennial Peter Drekmeier for Palo Alto City Council Regional Water Quality Control Plant Santa Clara County Open Space Initiative Sara Amir for CA State Assembly Storefront Political Media
Law & Finance
Bank of America Hanson Bridgett Marcus Vlahos Rudy LLP Greater Bay Bank RSF Social Finance Seiler & Company, LLP Visa
Environment
Acterra Animal Welfare Institute Arastradero Preserve Stewardship Project BAA+PCCF Bay Area Action Bay Area Earth Day BikeWeek Business Environmental Network & Awards Committee for Green Foothills Deep Green Global Training Earth Circus Productions EarthTeam.net EcoCalendar.org EcoGuide.org Eco Kids El Bosque Pumalin Foundation Friends of Huddart & Wunderlich Parks GreenCorps Green Foothills Foundation GreenTeam Project HeadwatersForest.org Headwaters Forest Coalition Headwaters Sanctuary Project MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District OneEarth ParkScan Peninsula Conservation Center Peninsula Environmental Forum People for Land and Nature PlantTrees.org Rainforest Action Network ReThink Paper San Francisquito Watershed Council Save the Redwoods League Sierra Club Silicon Valley EcoCampus Sustainable Mountain View SustainabilityCenter.net Trees Foundation YEA! (Youth Environmental Action)
Nonprofit, Misc.
50-Plus Fitness Association African Odyssey Amnesty International Animal Welfare Institute Anne Frank Center Bay to Breakfast Congregation Sherith Israel Direct Action Network Ginetta Sagan Fund Graphic Artists Guild Housing America ImpactOnline.org Indians for Collective Action International Committee for the Eritrean Blind Interplast Marin Center for Peace and Justice Midpeninsula Citizens for Fair Housing Neighbors Abroad of Palo Alto Palo Alto Downtown Marketing Committee Palo Alto Historical Association Palo Alto Jaycees Rudolf Steiner Foundation Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Stevenson House UAW Local 2865 Vernal Project The Virginia Thurston Healing Garden Women’s Outdoor Network World Peace Music Awards YMCA of San Francisco
Publishing & Printing
Broken Eagle Press The Citizen Columbia Printing Fellowship of the Blizzard Metro Newspapers In Palo Alto Prodigy Press Spring Forward Press Typemasters USA Today Western Front News
Retail
Bananas At Large Best Buy Blue Angel Compact Discs Buffalo Trading Co. CD Warehouse China Girl Dal Jeets Hollywood’s Rock, Inc. Leather Odyssey Niles Music Corner Shaska South Bay Music Works Vayne Winterland’s Rock Express
Technology
AllYouCanUpload.com American Greetings Interactive BonusTree.com BridgeStream.com CNET.com CNET Download.com Consumating.com dBpoweramp EcoGuide.org Gazelle Software Genetic-Programming.com Global Automation Google Headmaster Repair Inc. HeinleinArchives.com HP Iminta ImpactOnline.org Intel JBooks.com Lavasoft Medical Communication Systems Microsoft MSN NetAward.com Opera Panasonic PC Tools ReturnShopper.com Sehda Inc. Sony Sony Ericsson Software Xcellence Spansion Spider Technologies Spybot Search & Destroy Tamarack Associates TechniQuest Typemasters Upload.com UrbanBaby.com Verizon Webshots.com Windows Marketplace WinZip Yahoo! YieldUp International
Travel & Hospitality
Adventurescapes.com Garden Court Hotel Inn at Union Square
Here's a brief list of clients I need to add to my portfolio page soon. I also want to write up case studies for a couple of these, but that's going to take some time.
Mark & Velma Mark & Velma's Hitchin' Party website, invitations, assorted collateral
Webshots.com website redesign
UrbanBaby.com website redesign (in progress)
Consumating.com website redesign (in progress)
People for Land and Nature (PLAN) Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative (Measure A) campaign materials, logo, stationery
Palo Alto Historical Association map for "Parks of Palo Alto" booklet
Animal Welfare Institute (with Fenton Communications) brochure (in progress)
Wine, Women & Shoes (with Virginia Thurston Healing Garden) event invitation, stationery, and assorted collateral
Posted by espd at 9:57 PM |
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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Eritrea
All the news coverage of the G8 meeting (on NPR and the BBC at least, since you won't hear anything about it on the US media) has meant that I've heard an unusual amount lately about African nations that one doesn't normally hear covered that much even on NPR and the Beeb. Within two hours today I heard two pieces on two different shows about Eritrea.
You've probably never heard of Eritrea. Neither had I in 1993 when I met a tall, lanky Eritrean named Teclu Tesfazghi. At that time, almost no one had heard of Eritrea, because it was the world's newest nation, after having just won independence after 30 years of war with Ethiopia.
Tec asked me to donate my design services to help fundraise for the International Committee for the Eritrean Blind (ICEB). Three decades of war had devastated the small North African country's population. Nearly everyone had been touched by the war; tens of thousands had lost limbs, eyes, and so on.
The ICEB was establishing itself in the U.S. through expatriots living and working here. Tec was doing some contract work with the City of Palo Alto, where I had worked until very recently, and he was volunteering to raise money for the ICEB.
I designed and wrote content for a calendar that was to be sold by local volunteers to raise funds to send back to Eritrea, in order to create skills-building programs that would allow the blind to go back to work.
We had almost no photos or other graphical assets for the project, and it's not as if you could go to a stock agency for photos of Eritrea, so I had to be very creative. I also had to do a lot of research on this country, in order to create some interesting text for the calendar. This was a bit of a challenge, since the country was brand new and encyclopedias still had it listed as a province of Ethiopia, if it was mentioned at all. This was, I might add, before the time that the Web made such research a lot easier.
In the years since the project I've followed the small nation's progress with interest, whenever I came across and information on it. While Eritrea's future was very bright in the mid-1990s, war with Ethiopia flared up again and the democratically elected head of Eritrea shifted towards dramatically totalitarian policies.
In one of the NPR pieces I heard today, I learned some new things about Eritrea I had never known, but which shouldn't surprise me. For example, I didn't know that the U.S. had poured money and weapons into the country for years and had maintained a strategic listening post there for use during Cold War spying on the U.S.S.R. and other nations. Terry Gross interviewed author Michela Wrong, whose new book, I Didn't Do It For You, is a history of Eritrea. I should very much like to read this book. I have strategically and un-subtly added it to my Amazon Wish List in case you would like to purchase for me as a belated birthday gift ;)
There are precious few books about Eritrea, but another one I enjoyed quite a bit was To Asmara by Thomas Keneally, who is most well known for having written Schindler's List (the book which the movie was based on). To Asmara is a novelized version Keneally's own travels in the land during the last years of the revolution that set Eritrea free from Ethiopia, and it was a very good book indeed.
Designer–Client relationships
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po