We like a lot of things here at Competitive Methods. Here are some of them:

As mentioned on our Company page, the work of architect William Massie

Architect Tadao Ando is another of our favorites. His Azuma House in particular

And of course, the great pioneers of the genre, Frank Lloyd Wright, along with Mies, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius 2 3.

Roycroft Design, neatly straddling the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movements.

The Greene Brothers (Greene & Greene), well known architects of the Arts and Crafts Era.

Edward Tufte is the author of the classic work The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN says, "Original, beautifully presented, sharp and learned, this book is a work of art. The art here is cognitive art, the graphic display of relations and empirical data."

OK, while we're talking about architecture and such, we know you want our opinion regarding the best homebuilding magazine out there. Well, here it is, and it's logically named Fine Homebuilding. FB's from a publisher named Taunton Press, and it's consistently got articles that transcend the notion of simple construction. If you're a craftsman/artisian, or are just a frustrated dreamer living a life of quiet desparation, pickup a copy. It's expensive and worth it.

Great art movements, design, architecture on a personal scale must, of course, eventually intersect somehow with... web design. There are so many good resources out there, however, for the designer who wants to move beyond the strictly mechanical aspects of site construction and understand why people love (or despise) certain sites, you must start with a resource like Boxes and Arrows. BandA contributors delve deeply into the psychology of learning and perception. Boxes and Arrows is totally free, but it's one of the few web sites out there we'd actually pay good money to have access to.

Please go to our portfolio page to see the examples of our sites.