DM History

Desktop Miracles, Inc. was founded April 1, 1994 by Barry T. Kerrigan. Yes, April Fools Day. Seems appropriate yes?

Click Here to find out where we came up with such a great name.

In a past life, way back when in the early 1990s when computers still had things like floppy disk drives and 4 megs of RAM, Barry created and managed the Desktop Publishing, Typesetting, and Electronic Prepress department at Word Publishing in Dallas, at the time the world's largest Christian publishing house. He ran the department from 1990 to 1994, participating in and managing the design, typesetting, and production of hundreds of books, including several NY Times Bestsellers, multilingual academic texts, and a complicated multicolor Bible in house. In 1993 Thomas Nelson Inc. purchased Word Publishing from ABC Capital Cities, the company was restructured with some parts moving to Nashville, and it was mutually agreed that both he and Word Publishing needed a break from each other.

Desktop Miracles started in Plano, Texas in early 1994 with Barry managing several others who worked on a freelance basis. We concentrated on Book Design and Production from day one, although we also worked with advertising, marketing and design clients because we were a start-up and we thought cash would be a good idea.

The business grew quickly, especially on the Book Design and Production side, partially due to Barry's publishing contacts.

Del LeMond, who had worked with Barry at Word Publishing in Dallas, joined on a full-time basis in mid 1995, along with another designer and co-worker from Word. Virginia Kerrigan joined on a full-time basis in late 1995 to handle office management.

The business grew rapidly, but was going in several different directions including web site design and advertising.

At this point, Barry, Virginia, and Del made several key strategic decisions:

• We wanted to focus exclusively on Book Design and Production.
• We wanted to remain a small, tight-knit design studio, with individual responsibility and freedom.
• We wanted to focus on doing the job right: providing our clients with high quality work and outstanding customer service.
• We DID NOT want any part of the headaches we had experienced with a large staff and corporate life
• We DID NOT want to run websites and servers and huge teams of programmers to support them.
• We DID NOT want to have work with people or clients that we didn't enjoy working with. Life is simply too short.

We relocated to offices in Addison Texas, in Far North Dallas in 1996, and stayed there until 1999.

Our business continued to grow, and the great Dan Wroe joined as full-time employee in 1997, giving us the most physically intimidating line up of book designers in publishing! This seemed like a good idea at the time.

Life was good, lunches were eaten, hockey games were attended, etc etc. Then the office lease came up for renewal, the economy was booming, and the rent numbers went "crazy high." This epiphany led to the conversation that since almost all of our client contact was via phone, email, and Fedex, we could be located almost anywhere, and more specifically somewhere without HOURS of traffic jams each day, GAZILLIONS of shopping malls and urban sprawl, and cute summer temperatures around 160*.

Thus on a whim and prayer (and OK, a little research), we decided to move from Dallas, Texas to gorgeous Stowe, Vermont, on July 1, 1999. Contrary to rumors, it was not some sort of Y2K survivalist hide-in-the-mountains thing!

It was, however, the best decision we ever made....

Despite the fact that it hit MINUS 27* one night.

Click Here to find out why we chose Stowe, Vermont....