FOR EIGHT YEARS TAIPEI-BASED PACE DESIGN HAS COMBINED DIGITAL AND TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES TO MEET ITS CLIENTS' NEEDS.
Ian Town's design career began before he'd finished his formal education. "Even before I went to university, I was already involved in design", says Town of his first job. That first work involved designing advertising and marketing material for a variety of import and export companies operating from his native Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan.

It was a valuable experience and it inspired Town to start his own business. "Pace Design was founded when I was a junior at Taiwan Culture University", he noted. Now 10 years old, Pace Design employs nine designers and has a client list that includes Philips Taiwan Ltd, ABBOTT Laboratories Services Corp, the PC Home Publication Group, Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan, Dynalab, the Taipei Financial Corp Center, ERA Communication Co., and CIC Taiwan.

	Graphics are used to enhance content, not to decorate or hide it... - Ian Town

Pace Design's designers are, according to Town, all equipped with art degrees. "An emphasis on headwork over handwork is the best way to describe our design process", he says. Although traditionally trained himself, Town began working in the digital realm almost a decade ago when he bought his first Apple Macintosh and a selection of Adobe software.

Both the Mac and Adobe are still very much a part of his day to day work life. "I use three software packages every day: PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop", he reports. Interestingly, though he works with the very latest versions of these Adobe tools, the product that has most impressed him recently is Adobe Acrobat 4.0. "My clients, like Philips or ABBOTT, are international companies. Every day our files go to many countries, and other countries' files come to us. Doing this file exchange used to be very hard because everybody uses different software in different languages. Now I use Acrobat 4.0 and it is much better." And the key, he says, is simple: Acrobat 4.0 supports two-byte fonts. "This means it is compatible with Japanese, Chinese, Korean and the other two-byte languages."

Although he is happy with the current versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (he likes the former's Action palette and the latter's gradient tools and colour management), Town like many other designers, is waiting anxiously for one new Adobe product in particular to appear in his market. "I'm waiting for the Chinese version of InDesign", he says. Having seen a beta version of the revolutionary software, he was impressed by its convenience and functionality. "I hope it comes out quickly!"

Pace Design specialises in digital retouching, colour enhancement, complex image manipulation and illustration. Says Town, "Our design is disarmingly simple. Graphics are used to enhance content, not to decorate or hide it. Photography, collage and illustration are used to create playful environments." Pace tries, he adds, to be "elegant but never chic; serious but never pretentious and disciplined but never dull."