COOL HUNTING Turns 20
Informing the future since 2003
Twenty years ago today we created COOL HUNTING in our kitchen as a personal utility and archive of design inspiration. Coming home from a day at work the first thing we’d ask each other was “what did you find today that excited you?” We’d talk about those discoveries, eager to share with each other and on occasion would get a bit competitive about whose find was more remarkable.
It’s fun to wind the clock back and imagine what the landscape looked like in February 2003: Netscape and Opera were the browsers of the day, though Safari launched a few months later (June 2003) and Chrome was still years out (2008). The hot mobile phone was the Nokia 1100; the seminal Motorola Razr wasn’t released until the following year. Friendster launched later in 2003 and if you were interested in design, creativity and innovation Designboom was just about the only game in town (it launched in 1999). Mainstream magazines had begun to dabble online, but it would still be years before most had considered their online presence equally important.
Read the full letter from our founders
