A horse that tills the "land fed with chaff, an idle jade have provender in abundance; him that makes shoes go barefoot himself, him that sells meat almost pined; a toiling drudge starve, a drone flourish. To see men buy smoke for wares, castles built with fools' heads, men like apes follow the fashions in tires, gestures, actions : if the king laugh, all laugh.

-- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Over the last year I have learned a valuable lessen.

Be your own client!

Work that is for myself and not for a client always seems to end up on the bottom of the pile. That work will never get done unless you treat it the same as if a client requested it.

I hear you saying "But I don't get paid for that work, so it is not as important." The truth is though that keeping up on your own work is just as important if not more important than work for your clients.

Your own work reflects on you. Would you hire a maid that has a dirty house? Probably not. The same truth goes for your self esteem and your social life. If you are a positive influence on yourself other people will want to be your friend.

So what is the moral of this story? If you take the time to be your own client you will get more clients.

Well, now that the site is up, I guess some back story would be appropriate. When Alan and I decided to go into business, we agreed that I would handle the creative issues. He's a phenomenal programmer but you might not want him to decorate your apartment.

Initially we were just going to use Alan's existing business name "Styled Content", but somehow we decided we needed a fresh identity. I wanted something that would be easily recognizable and simple, with as few letters as possible. It also needed to be something imaginative and interesting.

I had been playing with words like "vital" and "vivid" (vivd?) without much success, then one night, my wife and I went to Japanese restaurant. We stopped to look at the koi pond at the entrance.
That's when it hit me...

• 3 letters
• bold, solid letter forms
• horizontal symmetry (turned on it's side it resembles kanji which reinforces the theme)
• evocative

Researching koi, I learned about the cultural significance they have in Japan. Koi swim upstream and therefore represent strength and perseverance. There is a legend about them turning into dragons if they reach the mouth of the Yangtze river. Because of this, young boys are given koi as presents to remind them to persevere to become men.

We liked the idea of perseverance in the web industry and the fish is just plain cool.