A book documenting the story of a private edition of Nancy MacIntyre: A Tale of the Prairies, published by my great grandfather in 1951, and distributed by hand to almost 1800 people over the course of his lifetime.

When my father pulled our new 9600bps modem out of its box in the summer of 1991, and installed it in the family computer, everything changed. We were not alone in taking that first curious step towards a more networked society, but what distinguishes my story is that my generation is one of the last to be able to remember that exact moment when the Internet entered our lives. For the generations after us, this speed and interactivity will have always been there, but for us there was a very obvious shift -- a "things will never be the same" moment -- that deeply informs the way we work, and the way we design.

I have spent my life trying to reconcile two opposing reactions to this shift. On the one hand, I react as a programmer -- the grown-up version of my twelve-year-old self, who immediately used that dial-up connection to log into Prodigy, and to teach herself html -- and find that the Internet world is a fascinating social experiment, teeming with new ideas and accumulated knowledge. On the other hand I react as a designer -- a person who values the craft and skill inherent in handmade experiences -- and feel a deep sense of loss for the more analog world that I had such a short time to inhabit. Pervading both of these responses is an awareness that technology, the web in particular, is taking over certain aspects of design with increasing speed and efficiency, but not much soul.

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"We, therefore, the delegates, with plenary powers, of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the supreme Arbiter of destinies of nations."

I have often wondered at the dual histories I learned growing up. The first is the classic American creation myth - with a cast of characters like Uncle Sam and George Washington, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. And the second you might call the Texas creation myth, with characters like Sam Houston, Stephen F Austin, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the nefarious (and gum chewing) General Santa Anna. We have our own battles and our massacres, our songs and our Pledge of Allegience (which always comes after the US one). People joke that its like a whole other country, but in many ways they are more right than they realize.

Today is the 173rd anniversary of the Texians convening in Washington-on-the-Brazos to declare their independence from Mexico, culminating with the words above. The idea that we pass down histories of our heritage through heros and stories and songs has always fascinated me, particularly when I could lay claim to two of them growing up within the same country.

I am beginning to understand that the phrase "coded by hand" does not exist by accident. The process of writing code can be as intimate, and as handmade, as setting a line of type on a press bed. And building in this new medium, as I have come to practice it, is as much an act of design as the graphic design itself.