MINDSCAPE is celebrating 20 years!! As we look back at this tremendous milestone, we want to celebrate the people that got us here and the culture they managed to cultivate.
Mark Swanson seems to fully embody the culture MINDSCAPE has created – a culture meant to generate personalized growth and enjoyable experiences. Even as a co-founder, he cared most about turning his deeply passionate hobby of web design into his lifestyle and career – all with people who unanimously enjoy each other’s company.
“We were trying to turn it from a hobby to something we can make a little money off of. It started as three freelance guys pooling our resources trying to find a bit of work to do.”
Even from their humble beginnings, Mark felt prepared and excited to take on any design challenge and do better or as good as the rest – whether it was the local floral shop or a multi-million dollar client.
As one of the original three founders of MINDSCAPE, Mark had the opportunity to step into business management roles, but his creative nature has kept him in web design for the last 20 years.
“I’d rather sit in a room with my headphones on and design stuff.”
Even though sales and business management weren’t what he wanted to do, Mark enjoyed the friendly atmosphere of collaboration they’d created at MINDSCAPE. He’s known another founder since grade school so MINDSCAPE was built on a strong foundation of trust, and to this day MINDSCAPE values that foundation of trust.
That being said, he does miss the early days with MINDSCAPE quite a bit. While getting the company started was incredibly stressful, for Mark that stress was worth the excitement of exploring an untapped digital design space. In the internet’s youth, there were so few standards and expectations – Mark loved the challenge of creating something completely new and never seen before. Every website had its own unique identity and Mark enjoyed creating that identity from the ground up.
“I miss that, it was a lot uglier in a lot of ways but it was more creative because the constraints weren’t there.”
To this day, Mark says he still tries to create designs that are constraint-free. Designs that break the mold and set a new standard for the web. MINDSCAPE has come a long way in the past 20 years and that’s entirely thanks to people like Mark who push us forward to stay ahead of the curve.
In a constantly changing world, there’s some comfort knowing you can still find Mark and designers like him, alone with their headphones in, creating worthwhile, enjoyable experiences for us all.
Check out how you could have Mark and other MINDSCAPE experts design your website.
