designboom celebrates 12 years

this saturday, november 19th, designboom turned twelve years old. it’s been an exciting adventure for us, and we hope also for you.playing with numbers

we wouldn’t say alexa is a very accurate measure of a site’s popularity amongst the internet elite, but we are flattered to see that we are into the top 4000 most popular websites in the world. more numbers? more than 300,000 people receive our newsletters, more than 100.000 like designboom on facebook, more than 50.000 follow us on twitter. we’ve published more than 22.000 articles. thanks to our 4 million fans for reading us.

the idea of designboom was born in bali, indonesia, to where founders birgit lohmann and massimo mini escaped for a few months after leaving their jobs as industrial designers and creative art directors. architect luca trazzi, former associate of aldo rossi, joined us a few years later. the internet was a very different place when designboom started in 1999, creating the world’s first online magazine in design and architecture. whereas now people worry about the death of print, back then very few saw the potential of the web.

 this year we built a summer office out of shipping containers on the island of sardinia, italy! read more about the project and some tips for building your own shipping container home here.

where are we going? it’s nice to look back every so often at how far we’ve come, but designboom is always looking foremost to the future and what’s next. we have some big plans we’re already working on, but if you have ideas for how you’d like to see the site grow in the coming weeks and months and years, let us know in the comments below