At long last: only a few days into ’007, and my new blog goes online. The itinerary is up-to-date and now has its own page. The contact page is also new, and for good reason: my design studio moved to a new address last year. As of this week, it has also changed its name. UDN | United Designers Network is now SpiekermannPartners. The button on the top of this page goes right to the new homepage. Which, however, will not be online for a few days yet. You know how that goes: deadlines in the online world are as flexible as CSS stylesheets.
The new name is our answer to a recurring problem. After more than five years, clients and colleagues alike still think that I am with MetaDesign, the company I founded back in 1979. The studio appearing under my own name should send a clear message to everybody that I am out of Meta.
The new blog runs under Movable Type. We haven’t found any software that runs two versions parallel with just the text part being different. Seems there aren’t many blogs in two languages, if any. So we have to run two entire blogs on the server and I have to edit everything twice. Spiekermann.com/mt is German, spiekermann.com/mten sends you straight to the English language site. Joely Hegarty, friend and colleague in London, built the templates, learning blogging as he went along. Piece of cake for a proper coder like him. Thanks anyway.