We made it ourselves.

In January of 2007 I received a mysterious late night IM from my friend Jen Bekman. We had been talking for a few months about working on a project together... the message read: "I have a killer idea, and I want you to be part of it." We didn't actually sit down for lunch until a month later, and from the very beginning she was clear. "I want to sell great work by my favorite artists in a way that everybody can afford." When she told me she had reserved the domain name 20x200 and that she was planning on selling editions for $20, I'll admit I blanched. "How will you break even?" I sputtered. "And if the site is called 20x200 aren't you locked in to that price forever?" But the more she explained her vision of 20x200, the more it made sense to me and I signed on then and there. Eventually I started to look at the twenty dollar price point as a challenge and now I see it as a point of honor. How often do you get something super for twenty bucks?

Months later we're poised to launch and I believe we've created a little art ecosystem that will be good for all involved and a website to be proud of.

The site branding and template design came from the guys at Little Jacket, a design firm with branches in New York, Cleveland, and Colorado. Working quickly and with a real sense of fun, Little Jacket was able to turn Jen's design ideas and our initial site wireframes into a beautiful set of mockups that served as as templates for for our coding work.

I've worked with many designers over the years and rarely have I ever seen a group make revisions and improvements with so little fuss and with such great results.

I was able to turn the Little Jacket designs into a working site quickly by designing in css/xhtml with CSSEdit and wrapping those designs around a custom set of templates for Movable Type. Many think of Movable Type as a blogging system, but it's actually a flexible and powerful content management engine perfectly suited for this type of site in which sequential editions are to be offered weekly.

We chose Google Checkout to take care of our sales transactions. Google checkout offers speed and easy integration as well as a robust set of tools. Our programmer David Yee handled all the integration between our sales and their checkout system. Additionally Mr. Yee handled all the ajax required to show correct live-updated inventory on the site at all times, as well as all the login and membership code. Soon he'll be rolling out code to handle credit based purchases, gift certificates, subscriptions, and more... David's the kind of programmer I love working with. He's fast, efficient, and a clever problem solver...

The site is still a work in progress and we're actively tinkering to make it even better as a platform for artists, as a store, and as a showcase for what very small groups of people can achieve when they put their heads together to create something great.