Welcome to the Black Riders Design Virtual Studio

Author’s Note: This text is from the “About Black Riders Design” section of the very first Black Riders website, circa. 1997. You can see it in its partial original glory in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Black Riders Design is a small design company focussed on providing complete communications solutions through writing, editing, graphic design, and information architecture for both print and electronic media. Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Black Riders Design provides its services to the public and private sector, with a client list that includes the Alberta Science and Research Authority, Alberta Economic Development and Tourism, the Ogaranko Group Incorporated, the Juvenilia Press, and the Alberta Kodály Association.

Our president, creative director, graphic designer, writer, and illustrator is Winston Pei, a man who has no objection to writing about himself in the third person. In addition to eight years experience in graphic design, advertising and publishing, Winston earned a Bachelor's Degree with Distinction in English from the University of Alberta, successfully completed the Design in Publishing Workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and is currently writing a Master's thesis on how book design affects literature.

Our company is named after a book called Black Riders: the Visible Language of Modernism, written by Jerome McGann and published by Princeton University Press in 1993. The book gets its title from Stephen Crane's first published book, Black Riders and other lines, whose typographical innovation inspired a second poet, Robert Carlton "Bob" Brown to say of his own optical poem "Eyes on the Half-Shell,"

I like to look at it, merely sit and look at it, take it all in without moving an eye. It gives me more than rhymed poetry. It rhymes in my eyes. Here are Black Riders for me at last galloping across a blank page.

We would especially like to thank one of our clients, Ogaranko Group Incorporated, for having been kind enough to provide server space for our web site until we got around to getting our own domain. If you are in need of information technology policy services, we encourage you to contact them.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy your visit to our virtual studio.