gotta love that polished concrete floor. it’s like a skating rink…

one of my favorite sites on the web is archive.org because of the large amount of old media that they have online. if you’ve never checked it out, you should. but one of the overlooked areas of the site is the ‘way back machine’. this cool tool has actually preserved, to the best of its ability (many links and flash files are missing), past versions of many site. it’s basically saved many html and graphics files for posterity.

well my piqued curiosity just had to search…and so all the way back from 2001 (drum roll please), here is visual mercenary group’s first site.

man oh man, what a trip…and although the quicktime movie that dave and i did has not been preserved in the archive, if you click on the anticon link, you will get a chuckle from the first line on the page. i guess, we were pushing bandwidth limits even then. we should really dig up that movie and post it again cause anticon’s a pretty wild set of guys and we had fun the 10 days we spent with them in their oakland, CA house.

about 2.5 years ago we launched our 2006 site… all proud that we had a hot flash site to showcase our work. but even back in 2006 - wow, we talk as if it was so long ago - the web was really only about 10 - 11 years. old. well technology has made leaps and bounds these past couple of years. now we’ve got web 2.0, facebook, cloud computing, google and wikipedia as our daily doses of knowledge and information…i could go on and on. and although we’ve designed and built a whole host of sites, produced a few dozen videos and animations and worked on a myriad of other projects. throughout this time, we were always like: gotta update the site, gotta update the site!!! but we never did…

and so, 2 years later, we’ve just launched our newest company site and with a bit of a change. first of all, although we’ve used the shortened name ‘visualmerc’ for a while now, we’re moving ahead and phasing out out our visualmercenary.com email addresses in lieu of the shorter url. plus, there’s whole bunch of people using the name ‘visual mercenary’ now. we’ll take that as a compliment. after all, it’s been our name for a long time now. second, our new site is a blog. besides our portfolio, we felt it was important to open up and share our thoughts, inspiration and work flow with the rest of the global village - and also showcase the wonderful talent of the individuals that make up our group.

to this end we invite our friends, colleagues, clients and the world at large to visit, comment and post. thanks… and now on to web 3.0