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Steampunk DesignRichard Mueller · Minneapolis

History · 2007–2026

The 3232 years

How a Minneapolis design studio with a zebra for a logo and a brass instrument for a menu became Steampunk Design.

  1. 2007

    Eyeballs as postcards

    The eye on the front of this site started as a run of postcards: eyes set into rusted steel, bark, stone and leather, each one ringed with brass and lettered “Design · Print · Interactive”.

    Apparently a lot of people haven’t seen the weird eyeballs I’d made as postcards last year, and as they seem to fit in with the mood of the site I’ve stuck them in there. Those who have seen them sometimes ask, “Why eyeballs?” Though they usually ask that after saying “Weird.”From the 3232 Design blog, 16 November 2008 (as captured January 2009)
  2. 2008

    A workbench on a website

    The first 3232 Design site was a desk seen from above: old wood, parchment, blueprints and a card with a zebra on it. The menu was a brass instrument in Flash at the top of the page, with engraved rings you turned and a lens you looked through. The pages behind it ran on ColdFusion.

    A note pinned to the desk explains it: the outermost ring “controls the category”, the inner ring “focuses the image”, like looking at a microscope slide.

    Seen at 3232design.com, February 2008 (Wayback Machine).

    The 3232 Design workbench: parchment, a zebra card, blueprints and a note on old wood.
    The workbench background of the studio site.
  3. 2008

    Sites that won things

    The studio built a site for the novelist Ian Tregillis that was visually rich, with interactive pieces all the way through and a game hidden inside it. In the studio’s words at the time, it won two 2008 W3 Silver Awards, was an Adobe Site of the Day, and was featured on coolhomepages.com. Ian’s reaction: “This is a thousand times cooler than I had even imagined.”

    Source: the studio’s home page, January 2009. Ian’s site today: iantregillis.com.

  4. 2009

    steampunkdesign.com

    By January 2009 the same studio answered at steampunkdesign.com, a second front door to the brass workbench. Seventeen years later it is the only one.

    steampunkdesign.com, 31 January 2009 (Wayback Machine).

  5. 2013

    Rebuilt without Flash

    In 2013 the site was rebuilt on Coeditor, the PHP system behind the studio’s client sites, and the instrument was redrawn in HTML and JavaScript so it worked on phones. The portfolio that autumn: IMS Productions, Cobblestone Media, Mark Heath’s cartoons, Pladson, Catherynne M. Valente, Steamlawyer, The Pillars of Hercules, Ian Tregillis, TigerOx and Unincorporated Universe.

    That site is still running, unchanged, at 3232.steampunkdesign.com.

    The 2013 3232 Design home page: the zebra card, a green eye set in stone, the latest blog entry and the studio’s introduction.
    The 2013 site, as it runs today.
  6. 2026

    Steampunk Design

    The studio takes the name it had been wearing all along. The instrument on the front page is the 2008 one, put back together from its original layers: the porthole, the two engraved rings, the gears in their slot and the glass, with the eye now following you. 3232design.com points here, and the work and the journal live here too.