Curb-control, Ian Kilpatrick:
I don't get paid. Yes I do spend many hours designing and updating my site to keep it fresh. My goal is to enlighten designers who may be new to the scene and to bring quality content, tools, and design to the online design community. As far as the "why do I do this", it's something inside me. If it were up to my body I would probably sleep, eat, and listen to music. But there is something inside me that makes me want to be a part of this design community. Not only to take part, but to add to it, make my own little suburb.




www.computerlove.net (screen shot)


Computerlove, Christophe Martin:
Well... I always do things, and not always get paid for them. If you can share something with friends, it can be a better place. And if our crew share the same voluntary aspect to change the way things are, it's a pure pleasure to work. We learn a lot by joining our skills and points of view. It's a big challenge, and it's truly motivating for us. Computerlove is that sort of project.



Digital Thread, Filip Stoj:
Now that you put it that way; I AM insane for doing this for free. What keeps me going these days is the pure fear that the young web designers will take over the whole design scene and that therefore there will be no more Nike's or hair gel left to buy for us Americans, and also all 3-D programs will become obsolete. And then it will become passe to actually do graphic design... or did that already happen last year?






Digital-web, Nick Finck:
The goal of the site is to educate, communicate and share experiences with the web design and development community. What keeps me going? Let me tell you what I did on Saturday... in December we put out a reader survey, 220 readers responded, of them 90% said they loved the magazine and they want us to keep publishing it, if not publish it more often. We responded, we are moving from a monthly format to a weekly format. We love our readers and they love us, that's all that matters, isn't it?




www.designiskinky.com (screen shot)


Design is Kinky, Andrew Johnston:
For me the goal of Design is Kinky is pretty much the same as when I started it, just to be involved in the community and to put up some interesting content that hopefully people will enjoy and be educated by. It's as simple as that really. The site sort of has a life of it's own now... it seems to grow and take on new responsibilities and pressures without me knowing it. The pressures have come since the site has become so popular. Of course we want it to be popular but it is sometimes a burden, as it means that you have to be more careful with what you do and say on the site. Otherwise you end up getting blasted. But the site gives me so many awesome opportunities that I don't mind the pressures. The good certainly outweighs the bad. I have had the opportunity to meet and become friends with some great people whom without DiK, I probably would never have known. And I am not just talking about the "stars," I am talking about the average visitor to the site who says hello and appreciates what you do. I am constantly honoured and humbled by the generosity of people in their praise of what we do at DiK. It makes it all worth while and is what keep us going most of the time.



Experimental Magazine, Rares Dragan:
The main goal of Experimental Magazine is to provide the latest community news, articles, interviews, cutting-edge design, and photography techniques to people/companies involved in the visual culture. At the very beginning, the greatest challenge was to prove myself that I can produce original concepts and attractive content for a very pretentious audience, in a extremely competitive medium. Designing and producing the Experimental Magazine web site was the easy part. Keeping it updated daily by writing articles and developing new concepts based on a mass-target reaction is a constant challenge which requires as much creativity and inspiration as design work involves.



Halfproject, Drew Europeo:
Halfproject is a venue for collaborations, and artwork presentations. We aim to gather designers from all over the world to communicate with us though visual interpretations. At first, the site is designed to display/cater Filipino artists and designers, but while the site was developing, a lot of foreign designers got attracted with the concepts that we are presenting. So we decided to cater foreign designers as well.

As Asian designers, we would like to be accepted by the global audiences and be respected as well, 'cause not all races give us recognition. That's why we are working hard to produce quality works. What really keeps me going personally are those fan mails and recognitions that we are getting from the site. Its very nice to know how our audience reacts to the things we present them. It helps me identify the future developments that we should do to make the site a better place to interact with — and especially to know what we can offer to make the viewers happy.




www.inertia.hu (screen shot)


Inertia, Peter Hamza:
The main goal of Inertia is to provide a meeting place for Hungarian designers where they can exchange ideas, discuss problems, or simply have fun. Also, we are trying to get connected to the international design world by adding international sections to the site.

Why are we doing it? It's a lot of fun to build a community, and it's even bigger happiness to see that it's actually more or less working and people like to use the features we've developed through time.



INfront, Justin Fox:
In 1999, I had been running a small web design business for a few years here in Sydney. We had a hard time trying to find new talent to contract. I knew there were great young designers out there, but I had no real means of exactly how I was going to get to them. Along with this, in discussions with great designers I had met in Sydney, it always lead towards a mentality that "Australia is not embracing design enough," and that if you really want to make it in design you had to leave Australia and go overseas to work. Or perhaps on a more grounded level, "you needed to look outside of Australia for inspiration." Which is just not true as there is a massive wealth of talent and inspiration here.

Over the past few years, we were simply trying to expose online Australian design to the whole of Australia and the rest of the world. We were trying to put us on the map so to say. Design, art, and Australia are fundamental to myself and the INfront members. There's something about giving back to the community and the fight for recognition, respect and credit that is so challenging and worth while.



www.infourm.com (screen shot)


Infourm, JD hooge:
Well, I get to meet people from all over the world. I can't really think of another way to do this. I also get to introduce artists to people all over the world. It's a very simple concept really, and it seems to work, so I keep doing it.



K10k.net, Toke Nygaard:
The goal is to provide ourselves and others with up-to-the-minute information on the newest stuff happening in our line of work, and to keep us and others inspired. We call K10k "The Designer's Lunchbox," as it acts like a lunch break goodie for web designers around the world, sitting in boring corporate environments. The fact that people like what we do is a very strong factor that keeps us going.



Linkdup, Rob Corradi:
Linkdup is a labour of love, but aren't they all? Sometimes we do ask ourselves why we do it. Why we sift through hundreds of sites a week to find a few to pass on to our visitors. It can be hard to be polite when replying to people's email who think we didn't list their site because we're part of some designer-elite conspiracy, or that we list sites only of our fellow design conspirators. Why would we want to do that? In fact, we know we've ruffled a few feathers for doing just the opposite.

www.moluv.com (screen shot)

Moluv, Maurice Wright:
It's true that I don't get paid to do what I do, but it would be nice to have the site eventually generate some income without alienating current visitors. If I could just work on Moluv.com stuff day in and day out that would be an ideal job for me. But of course that's not going to happen until I can sell some books, or some research, or even something at the site. Maybe something like that based on the site could fly? Even without making money, though, I'll still continue updating it. It was made first and foremost as a resource for me to use to keep up with all the good stuff that's out there. Browser book marking is really cumbersome when you're constantly using different computers, different browsers, and different operating systems. Moluv.com keeps everything centralized for me, and on top of that it keeps regular visitors updated on talented (new and old) designers, while giving me a creative outlet for my design and programming. I luv doing this stuff.



Media Inspiration, Phil De Paulis:
I started the site because there was nothing like it out there; it was meant to be a place where designers could share and communicate their work to fellow designers. The idea of building a community where others of like mind could collaborate was the driving factor for Media Inspiration. Media Inspiration allows us to get out of the box we may be stuck in at the moment and see the types of things our peers may be doing, hence the name Media Inspiration. What keeps me going, are users e-mails. Nothing can make you drive harder at something then hearing positive feedback. Even negative feedback makes you drive harder; it's the greatest thing to hear from users who visit your site. After all they are the people you are out to please.



Netdiver, Carole Guevin:
Netdiver mission is to promote, empower, inspire, and tutor in generating excellent new media projects. The idea for the portal came from wanting to display my "bookmarks" which were organized in different directories. I realized that since I am constantly doing research, why not share my findings. As I push the envelope for myself — I am aware everybody else needs to do so. Yet, I've just barely scratch the surface of what's out there — it's fascinating.





Pixelsurgeon, Richard May:
We kind of cruise along, doing what we want to do, seeing what sticks, improving this, removing that. It's one huge process of elimination that should eventually level out as we really hit our stride next year. The interviews page is proving to be massively popular, so we're pushing that forward at a rate of knots, and you'll see big improvements to currently comatose sections such as the icons page and the games page. We're trimming the fat, but we carry quite a hefty load, so it will take time. Growing up and slimming down in public, I guess. What keeps us going? Free stuff.



Surfstation.lu, Thomas Brodahl:
I'm always tired. Running a site like surfstation will never be a walk in the park. There are so many things that need to be taken care of, and there is never enough time. Sometimes I feel that we are not entirely on top of things, but that mostly has to do with our lack of updates, not our lack of direction. We keep changing the site, but the message pretty much stays the same.



Superbe, Stefano Mazza:
To tell you the truth, I realized there's only one thing that pays me back. That is the users feedback. I'm glad to be useful.




www.thebestdesigns.com (screen shot)


The Best Designs, Angela Rohner:
The main goal of The Best Designs is to recognize unique, artistic web sites on the Internet for inspiration and recognition, and to also recognize the most influential designers of those works.

The art inside of me keeps me going. I have been an artist since I was 4 years old. (My first work of art was a Crayola Crayon mural on the wall of my mother and father's bedroom.) Ever since I can remember, I have loved art and design. I enjoy viewing art and design as much as I love creating it, and I wanted to give something to the art and design community that would provide enjoyment and inspiration for all artists and designers. I also wanted to recognize those individuals with outstanding talent.





The Designers Network, Gavin Laking:
The original goal of The Designers Network was to provide a resource for clients and businesses to locate designers and design related agencies. As time has gone by, TDN has evolved to not only providing that service, but also to help artists and designers find inspiration. There are hundreds of web sites that do that now on the internet, but I think that people come to TDN because of the non-intrusive layout and the daily updates. Providing others with links to great web sites, IS what keeps me going. Sounds soppy doesn't it? But that's why I do it. Strange to say, but I just enjoy knowing that my web site is being used by hundreds of people everyday — and if I could increase that number then I guess the web site is getting better and I'm helping more people find what they are looking for. Before you ask, I wasn't the kid at school that nobody talked to; so it's not just about the popularity thing for me.




The ZINE, Cassiano Saldanha:
I think this paralel work give much more pleasure than commercial work. This is the first thing. This amount of time spent, gives us the possibility to try, to test, to experiment and to risk... And associating with the existence of "publication easiness" that the web provides, work can reach much people around the globe.

Three.oh, James Widegren:
I think everyone, or at least many would write: "To enrich the design community and promote great design ..etc." That's part of the concept, but it has a lot to do with self-appreciation, evolving personally, making your mark and to see if you have the ability to pull it off. What keeps, or kept me going was that I was evolving doing it, and received good feedback, which made me feel responsible. You come to a certain end of doing it because it takes up almost all your time, you miss out on other interesting things such as motion graphics, etc. ..which I'm doing now. Thus the current lack of motivation for 3.0. It's still interesting, especially user interface design.




www.yeahbabe.org (screen shot)


Yeahbabe.org, Paulo Lemos:
Well, first of all, Yeahbabe is a experimental web site, always changing. This keeps me going, and it is the goal of the site. I don't care if people like it or not. Maybe I'm care, no, no, I really care! If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email.