More than three decades of making things.

The Avenue 12 story began before the Avenue 12 name existed.

Around 1990, a small graphic design company called Bohemian Graphics was started at a time when the commercial Internet was still in its infancy.

The work was firmly rooted in traditional graphic design. There was no social media, no WordPress, no Bootstrap and no easy way to publish a website with a few clicks.

Design meant designing.

Typography, illustration, layout, colour, photography, logos, packaging and printed communications were the tools of the trade.

That foundation would become important later, because the Web eventually turned out to be another medium for the same fundamental discipline: communicating an idea visually and clearly.

In 1995, Avenue 12 Design was established.

The name has a personal origin.

Avenue 12 refers to 12th Avenue in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Vancouver General Hospital is located. It was the place where the founder was born, making the name more than simply a convenient business name.

Avenue 12 became the new identity for a design practice that was beginning to move toward a much larger technological shift.

At the time, nobody knew exactly how dramatically the Internet would change the design business. But the opportunity was obvious.

Avenue 12 was not born as a technology company.

Its foundation was visual communication and fine art, supported by formal studies at Grant MacEwan and the University of Alberta.

That background has remained part of the company's approach ever since.

Technology is a tool. Design is the discipline that determines what the tool is supposed to do.

Over the years, the tools changed from traditional media and early computer graphics to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and eventually to HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL and responsive frameworks.

The software changed. The underlying design principles did not.

The second half of the 1990s changed everything.

The Internet was moving from an obscure technical network into something businesses were beginning to take seriously.

Designing for the Web was still very different from designing for it today. Screen resolutions were limited. Connection speeds were slow. Browsers behaved differently. Images had to be carefully optimized because every additional kilobyte could mean another few seconds of waiting.

There were no modern page builders and very few of the tools that today's developers take for granted.

Avenue 12 began moving into this new medium, combining an established graphic design background with the emerging technologies of the Web.

By approximately 1999–2000, the company had moved online and was operating full-time around Web projects.

Today, almost every business has a website.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, simply having one could set a company apart.

Avenue 12 worked during the period when businesses were learning what a website actually was supposed to accomplish.

Some sites were essentially digital brochures. Others became early experiments in online communication, marketing, catalogues, databases and e-commerce.

The work required both sides of the equation: understanding visual communication while also understanding the increasingly technical requirements of the Web.

That combination would become one of Avenue 12's defining characteristics.

During the early 2000s, Avenue 12 lived and worked in Toronto, Ontario.

The city provided a very different environment from the earlier years and placed the business directly in the middle of a rapidly developing technology and communications market.

The Web was no longer simply an interesting new medium. Businesses were beginning to depend on it.

Avenue 12 continued developing websites and graphic communications while expanding further into the technical side of the business.

This was the period in which the distinction between "designer" and "Web developer" became increasingly blurred.

As the Web matured, so did the work.

Avenue 12 expanded beyond static websites into programming, databases, e-commerce, content management, custom applications, hosting and ongoing site maintenance.

PHP and MySQL became important parts of the technical toolkit. JavaScript and jQuery added interaction. Search engine optimization became increasingly important as search engines became the primary way people discovered websites.

A website could now be much more than a collection of pages. It could become a working business system.

That philosophy remains at the centre of Avenue 12 development work today.

Over the years, Avenue 12 has worked across a surprisingly broad range of industries.

The portfolio has included branding, identity systems, packaging, print, photography, illustration, websites, e-commerce, database applications and custom programming.

Projects have included work for organizations such as Pacific Chai, Total Impact Wear, the National Black Tourism Network, First Nations Automotive, Kawa Movement Center, The Ballantine Company, Sound Advyce and others.

The work has continued to evolve, with more recent projects including Pro Cappers and corporate, professional and specialized online systems.

Some clients needed a logo. Some needed a website. Some needed an entire system built around their business.

Avenue 12 has always been comfortable moving between those requirements.

In 2005, Avenue 12 moved its operations to Costa Rica.

The move did not mean abandoning the Canadian business or starting over.

The Internet made it possible to move the location of the company without moving its client relationships.

Avenue 12 continued working with clients through the Web while establishing its operations in Costa Rica.

Eventually the business became entirely based in Costa Rica while continuing to serve clients in Canada and elsewhere.

In many ways, this was simply the next logical step in a company whose business had already become digital.

Long before remote work became a mainstream business model, Avenue 12 was already operating across borders.

Clients could be in Canada while the work was being designed and developed in Costa Rica.

Files, email, servers and the Web provided the infrastructure needed to make that possible.

The tools have become dramatically better since then, but the underlying model remains familiar: a small independent studio, connected to clients wherever they happen to be.

Avenue 12 has existed through several generations of the Web.

From early hand-built HTML pages to database-driven applications, from dial-up connections to broadband, from desktop-only layouts to responsive design, and from static pages to highly interactive applications, the underlying technology has repeatedly changed.

So have the tools.

Today's development environment includes HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, responsive design and modern SEO practices.

But Avenue 12 has never been particularly interested in technology for its own sake.

Technology is useful when it solves a problem.

Almost everything.

The computers are faster. The screens are better. The Internet is everywhere. Websites are responsive. Databases run businesses. Phones have more computing power than the machines used to build the earliest Avenue 12 websites.

But some things did not change.

A good logo still needs to work. A website still needs to communicate. A database still needs to make sense. A business still needs customers.

And a designer still needs to understand the difference between making something look good and making something work well.

That distinction has probably been one of the most useful lessons of the last three decades.