Miskeeto

What’s in a name?

A miskeeto byte from Robert Hoekman, Jr. Posted on September 17th, 2008

I’m often asked about the name of our little collective. In response, I usually recite the simple story of how I came up with it, but truth is, there’s far more to the name than the story. So for the inaugural, and rather lengthy, post on the “Miskeeto Bytes” blog, I’d like to take a moment to reintroduce ourselves and explain what we’re about.

Our motivation

First, the story.

Late one night, while watching a television show about sustainable furniture design, I heard a designer say he used to have a boss who often paraphrased an old African proverb that goes, “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.”

Inspired, I immediately wrote it down. The next morning, it was the first thing on my mind. A few hours later, I filed the paperwork to turn Miskeeto, LLC into my new business.

The part I‘ve never mentioned before now is that for months prior to hearing the proverb, I’d grown increasingly disheartened by the idea of spending the rest of my life doing little more than helping companies make copious amounts of money (when it comes down to it, that’s what most designers do for a living). I thought that if I was going to spend all my time designing—something I am extremely passionate about—I’d like for those projects to genuinely improve the world in some way. Any designer can help the Fortune 500s and startups of the world make money. I wanted to do something deeper. More meaningful.

Upon hearing that old African proverb, Miskeeto was born. Something about those words inspired me. Filled me with ambition. Gave me something to believe in.

The proverb reiterated something I’d always believed—that even a single person can have a big impact on the world.

Fortunately, two of the best developers in the business—two of my dear friends—felt the same way.

Mosquitoes are bad, Miskeetos are good

Why the funny spelling? Well, two reasons.

First, mosquitoes are known to spread malaria, which kills over 1 million people every year, and for obvious reasons I didn’t want to create an association between disease and design. The distinction is simple:

• a mosquito is a little bug that bites people and spreads disease
• a miskeeto is a person or small group that, in spite of (and possibly because of) its size, is able to have a positive impact on the world through socially-conscious and socially-responsible action

The second reason is that all but one of the possible spellings I came up with were unavailable as domain names. Go figure.

So, how does our business model support enable us to have a positive impact on the world?

If you’re socially-conscious, you save 10%

First, we discount our work by 10% for any company or organization whose project qualifies as socially-conscious and/or socially-responsible.

If not, 10% goes to the greater good

Second, we now devote 10% of our income from every for-profit, commercial-only project to a worthy cause, such as a charity, a foundation, a socially-conscious project of our own (such as an awareness campaign), or any number of things.

Find out more (complete with examples) on our Pricing page.

As we go forward, we’ll continue pointing out these worthy causes through the Miskeeto Bytes blog.

Big enough to change the world

Miskeeto is a tiny collective, but between us, we’ve designed and/or built thousands of sites, and we’ve influenced, taught, and helped tens of thousands of web designers and developers create better user experiences through our books, articles, speaking engagements, and training sessions.

Now, as a team, we’re pooling our efforts to improve the world beyond the web.

And we’re confident that, as a small team of three, we are every bit big enough to change the world.