Fifteen

Message celebrated its fifteenth year in business. Here's a brief history of the company, with added historical context, just for fun…

1995

Message was founded with a borrowed suit and a £1,500 bank loan, spent on the 'pizza box' Macintosh computer. At that time Message comprised just one person, Jamie, working as a sole trader.

The first job was a gift catalogue for Greenpeace, and other work that year included much for Tower Records, where Jamie had just been employed as Creative Manager. Terrence Higgins Trust also made up a large amount of our work and we created the first of several special Christmas mailers for them.

Tower didn't really understand the proposal for a website Jamie put together. Richard Paul Jones taught Jamie HTML, and he set about building Message's first website. It wasn't very good.

Pop songs were still sold on cassette, OJ walked free, the DVD format was announced and Yahoo! was founded this year.

1996

Having attempted to bankrupt himself by spending the first year's profits on a laptop, Jamie was joined part-time by Jo Acres, turning Message from a sole trader to a Partnership. A tighter ship would be run from this point on!

Later that year, Tobie Kerridge joined us as our first employee.

Around this time our work mostly seemed to consist of playing 'Marathon' (a network shoot-em-up game) with fellow lease-holders Tony and Simon. Somehow we also managed to pay the rent!

Federal judges in the US blocked a 'decency' law, thus saving the future of the Internet!

1997

We produced the last of the Christmas specials for Terrence Higgins Trust, creating a complex interactive piece stretching the print medium as far as we could go.

We were creating games and screen-savers at this time, using Director. Flash was pretty much the young upstart at this point.

We worked on an early website for Mitsubishi in the UK and designed Sussex Enterprise's first website.

Diana died, as did old Labour.

1998

At this time we were still predominantly a print design company, and one of our major works was producing a BP card collection of the England world cup squad. Still available on eBay. Bid now!

3D modelling and Photoshop illustration was our forte, but the technical limits of print design were proving too limited and 'new media' beckoned ever more strongly.

According to the WayBack web archive our website featured a 3D model of a desk on the home page… eek.

Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with 'that woman' and Jamie got the 10th iMac to arrive in Brighton.

1999

Our website at this time was declared the best designed business website by the 'Internet Business Magazine'. In fairness, the competition wasn't that high back then!

We had four free screensavers on our site, which clocked up over 10,000 downloads within a year. Screensavers had become a staple of our offering to clients by this time, now built using Flash.

Andy Budd joined us following Tobie's departure to Orange.

Napster arrived, killing music, again. Apple released the 'toilet seat'. Boo.com launched, briefly.

2000

In this year we changed from being a general design company to working exclusively on the web. Our re-built website was entirely Flash-based and included possibly the world?s one and only client list presented as a ferris wheel!

We also re-branded, creating the tiled 'M' logo which would remain our mark for ten years. Tricia Gill joined us as a part-time junior designer.

A client of ours, Internet Marketing Programs, went to the wall as part of the bigger dot.com crash. We rode out the storm.

Things started well, with the Y2K virus not bringing the world to an end, but ended badly, with George W Bush illegally stealing the US election…

2001

It was around this time that our love affair with Flash, screensavers, games and animation was giving way to a more considered view of the web. Accessibility was now at the centre of our ethos. No more 'click here for text-only version' from us.

We'd been working with a certain Katie Price for a year or so at this point, which was one positive relationship forged in the fallout of the dot-com crash; her brother Danny and I were both owed money by the same failed Internet company!

September 11th happened. Douglas Adams said 'so long'. Wikipedia launched, making shoddy homework a lot easier. Oh, iTunes.

2002

Message turned from a partnership into a limited company; Message Digital Design Ltd. The name 'Message Ltd' was taken, leading to a tedious succession of misunderstandings!

In this year we built the first version of SPiN - Strutt & Parker's intranet, conceived and commissioned by a certain Melita Ogden. Who'd have thought she'd work for us one day?

We also produced a major website for East Sussex, supporting 'learners' (or 'schoolkids', as we used to call them) which also included an extranet for 'learning providers' (or 'teachers', as we used to call them). Highlight was a rather super map, upon which 'learning providers' could place their 'centres of excellence' (or 'church halls'…). Google Maps didn't exist, so it was pretty cool.

We all trooped to the seafront to watch the solar eclipse - made a change from the pier burning down. Joe Strummer died.

2003

By this time we were creating ever more complex websites, moving more towards the online applications that we build today. One such project started this year was a completely rebuilt intranet for Strutt & Parker, still in daily use by over 1,000 staff.

Jeremy Keith became our preferred PHP developer, following an hilarious 'interview' during which a heated argument ensued. Still, I liked his style and we get on famously now of course.

Remember SARS? We didn't all die of it. Bush optimistically declared 'Mission Accomplished', phew. Concorde landed for good.

2004

We completed our first all-International assignment, redesigning a website for US biker-leathers manufacturer Fox Creek. A testament to the work we did, the design is still in use to this day.

Message started it's long association with Rapha in this year, meeting two cyclists apparently bent on changing the face of cycling. They did it, and we helped them with some of our most ambitious projects to date.

Rapha continue to change the cycling world, and we are now up to Version 3 of their class-leading website.

In this year Facebook was founded. Little did we know!

2005

We designed a spate of websites for small celebrities. By small, I don't mean 'minor', I mean short. Like Warwick Davis, the only actor to have appeared in all six Star Wars movies, who came to fame for his 'Willow' character.

He then put me on to another 'short actor', Raymond Griffiths. Finally, we built a site for Warwick's successful short actors' agency 'Willow Management'.

The celebrity theme continued with a website for the official Oliver Reed fanclub.

We were joined by Usama Shehadeh following Andy's departure to form the wonderfully successful ClearLeft.

MySpace was sold for $580m, proving that being first to market is more important than actual, you know, quality!

2006

A fifteen year old schoolboy came for a week's work experience… We couldn't shake Joe off and he's still here to this day, having made the rank of Lead Developer.

Adam, our Head of Development, also joined in 2006, taking over from Jeremy Keith on our major projects for Strutt & Parker and Rapha.

Neil Gibb also joined for a stretch, helping us to develop the business and start a chain of events that lead right up to our current business plan.

So, it was a busy year for staff, it's amazing we had any time for work! We managed to find time to build a slew of sites, including one for Brighton's Rockinghorse Appeal amongst many others.

YouTube was founded last year. This year Google paid $1.6bn for it!

2007

We designed a Personnel system for S&P's intranet in this year, and created a completely redesigned website for Salisbury District council. The Personnel system is still in use; Salisbury on the other hand was merged into a unitary authority soon after so the site only lasted about a year!

Mark Hurrell joined the company, bringing a welcome boost to our graphic design portfolio. I expect that means 'Sama left'; we had a strict one in, one out policy at the time!

My favourite project this year was a website for Oyster Lingerie… I don't know why, it just was!

The iPhone launched.

2008

We carried out some pretty substantial projects in 2008, for English Heritage and BT amongst others. The English Heritage site was for home-owners to find out about climate change and how to reduce carbon emissions; for BT we were building all the templates for their intranet, plus a couple of other projects.

We also built our surveys application, SurveySoGood, this year, and deployed it for several clients, including Rapha, Katie Price, Nautilus and Stanton Consulting.

Lynda Thain, our Account Director, started with us in early 2008, having helped us out on several projects previously.

Obama, yay!

2009

A three month secondment to Rapha gave Jamie the opportunity to project manage the redesign of their entire website, including major backend systems in early 2009. Another notable project this year was a system for Amex to create travel money websites with a few button clicks… clever stuff.

We doubled our office space and undertook a total refurbishment which left no single piece of furniture, floor, wall or ceiling untouched! A job lot of Aeron chairs finally gave us that quintessential 'dot.com' look, ten years late, and we got ourselves a meeting room.

Melita joined us from Strutt & Parker to help run internal projects, including Sitefy, which is currently in beta phase.

Google Street View launches in the UK, Susan Boyle's star rose, Michael Jackson's fell, for good.

2010

"It's amazing to look back and see some of the things Message has done, and the people who've made it happen. Now, fifteen years after it all started, our team is the strongest it's ever been, we're expanding our offices, staff and business.
Yet the company feels more like a start-up than ever before; we've re-branded and expanded, written a new business plan and it's all very exciting!"