About Pie a la Mode Productions

Pie a la Mode Productions is a small commercial concern specializing in graphic design, web design, print design, and branding. We make pretty things so you don't have to, leaving you free to battle barbarians, take over the galaxy, or do needlepoint to your heart's content.

We are located in New York, New York - the town so nice they actually named it thrice. (The third "New York" was dropped in 1882 after the rent for three names became unsustainable.) Our creative director is Matt Hooban.

About Matt Hooban

Matt Hooban began his design career as an Information Technology Assistant at Rutgers University in 1995, where he helped develop the web presence for Campus Information Services and served as the student representative to the University Webmaster Committee. Since then, he has done both freelance and full-time design and development for organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations. He has extensive graphic design experience in web and print, and is fluent with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash.

His first website contained recipes for ice and toast along with a single gif image. It took a staggering three minutes to load over a 14.4 modem connection. By contrast, the design for Pie a la Mode Productions 2.0 makes extensive use of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, along with hand-coded HTML, CSS, jQuery. It is optimized for compatibility with all major browsers and portable devices. Over a broadband connection, it loads in seconds.

More About Matt Hooban

After famously being deposed as the undisputed* heavyweight boxing champion of Hibbings, Minnesota in 1993, Matt Hooban turned his attention to finishing high school and college in New Jersey so he could arm his brains with enough knowledges to one day take over space. He is now very well armed, and his research and preparation have decisively shown that the surest route to supreme supremacy of space is via the world of graphic design.

Hooban has variously been described as "immeasurably great at everything", "hands down the most amazing and exceptional human being that has ever existed", and "who?" His design talent has been described as "extraordinary for its slightly-above-averageness" (Time Magazine) and "breathtakingly unlike his trombone playing" (HOW Design).

*this is disputed

Our... History?

Thanks to a bacon-related accident during the construction of this site, I was fortunate enough to fall through a time warp, where I obtained a copy of The Rise and Fall of Pie a la Mode Productions: The Annals of the Greatest Company Ever Formed, published in laserbook spaceformat in the year 2209. Following is an excerpt from that publication:

William Shakespeare. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Julius Caesar. Jesus Christ. The Beatles. Astrodave Robinson-Spacekarma. TT4-F99wXK-Q49122, Jr.

All of these beings were held forth by their societies and civilizations as geniuses, not just during their lifetimes, but for decades, and in some cases centuries, beyond. And not one of them ever created anything remotely as great as Pie a la Mode Productions.

P. a la M.P. began inauspiciously enough in 2006, as the brainchild of Stargenius Matt Hooban, who was at that time employed as a legal assistant at an earth-based company that published an archaic form of information-transfer device known as "books" – collections of a substance known as "paper" bound together to create a linear reading experience with no interactivity. Out of the doldrums of this moldering existence, Hooban started playing around with graphic concepts for web sites, logo design, print products, and various other creative projects. In 2011, he took an graphic idea he had been ruminating for years and paired it with a domain name he had purchased from the "Internet," and thus was born Pie a la Mode Productions.

And as simply as that, a page of human history was definitively turned.

Over the coming years, Hooban's venture would redefine...

The excerpt goes on to detail the many ways in which Pie A La Mode Productions made lasting impacts on society, culture, and, to a far lesser degree, design. But due to certain statutes of the Space-Time Continuum, I'm unable to provide more details about that as-yet-to-unfold part of history. What follows instead is from the chapter on the initial concept for Pie a la Mode Productions itself.

Hooban's initial attempts at a concept for Pie a la Mode were crude efforts at best, the work of a dabbler, albeit one with a keen eye and an intelligence obviously far superior than any contemporary human's ability to express it. Note the uninspiring color schemes, the poorly chosen fonts, the inexpert manipulation of shapes. An art teacher at any level would have written this project off as the work of a 5th grader with a middling grasp of aesthetics and some possible color-blindness.

But Hooban persevered. And in mid-2011, he finally managed to break through with an elementary effort – what was then known as Pie a la Mode Productions 1.0. P. a la M.P. 1.0 was a modest, barely interactive showcase of some of Hooban's first forays into the world of design, not at all a harbinger of the global-culture-shaping empire that was yet to come...

And so on, and so forth. Basically, what you're looking at right now is Pie a la Mode Productions 2.0. Welcome, and please get ready for the future, when I take over everything.