Two years ago, my wife and I were redoing our kitchen and baths with tile.

We are not gifted interior designers so we did what most people like us do: we bought/borrowed books with photographs of beautifully tiled rooms, and we noodled around with pencil and paper.

But most books are limited in how many photographs they can include. And pencil and paper seemed like a crude approach given the powerful computers sitting in most homes today.

I griped that "Somebody ought to have published a CD-ROM with lots of pictures and some design tools." To which my wife replied, "Well, you're in the multimedia development business. Why don't you do it, honey?"

(Actually, she didn't call me honey. Never has, and after 26 years, probably never will.)

But I digress. After a year of mulling it over, and caring for our corporate clients (www.bassworks.com, if you're interested) it was time to begin.

We invited tile makers from the USA to submit images. We were delighted with the quality and uniqueness of what we received. As images would arrive, there were many jaw-dropping moments when we'd say "Wow, look at that!"

We were also impressed with how nice tile makers are, truly some of the friendliest folks we've met. Many went out of their way to refer us to someone else, ostensibly their competitors. We thank them all.

We worked hard to make the CD as easy to use as possible with a clean, simple interface. My eight year old daughter was a perfect test subject. She became so adept with the pattern designer, we used some of her pattern designs.

So the disc is complete. We like it. We think you will, too. If you buy it and don't like it, we'll gladly refund your money.

One note: the pattern designer is not a CAD tool that allows you to enter room dimensions and generate specific plans. It creates patterns that can be applied to any size space as they are repeated.

Yours,

Jim Bass
Bassworks Multimedia