The name Sawada literally means 'rice paddy near a swamp, marsh or valley'. It is the japanese family name of owner and designer, Alissa Barthel, who entered the arena of web design mostly by accident. Her first web page was designed to distribute homework answers for a genetics class she was teaching in the mid-90's. While studying to earn her PhD in Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she developed an unnatural affinity to computers. She found news ways to analyze data using neural network algorithms, and generally spent eyebrow raising amounts of time hanging out at the computer lab and designing code with (hard to imagine) bigger geeks than the biologists. Although the results she obtained using these advanced algorithms was intriguing, she was eventually kicked out of the program for having 'an artistic temperament' and encouraged to pursue something more in that regard. The computer programs were 'seemingly' irrelevent.

Discouraged by the brow beating and protestations to her sanity, she walked away from science and bought a guitar. Over the next ten years, she would remake herself as a vagabond and music geek thinking that science was a distant shadow in her sordid and confused past. But, she would learn later that our elegant universe generally has more holistic visions for our lives than our fragmented illusions of reality can offer.

Meanwhile, in a land far away from most people's illusions of reality and Alissa's birthplace (Los Angeles, CA), the music industry was collapsing. It was a bloated and corrupt system that hinged on control of expensive and unwieldy distribution networks which have subsequently been ANNIHILATED by you guessed it, the internet. Further, as Rupert Murdoch buys up any vestiges of 'free market' media, and corporate media continues to only feature artists with the most payola, outlets for independent and concomitantly vagabond artists have become increasingly scarce.

Enter Creot Radio. Sometime in 2005, Alissa read an article in the New York times detailing how podcasting was going to be the next big thing. Never one to miss a trend and becoming increasingly engrossed in an online and global music community called Creot, she thought 'maybe we should make a show out of this?' Little did she realize that the idea would develop a life of it's own, and she would become it's steward (mostly because she was there and nobody else wanted to do it). In the process and without really meaning to, she learned enough about building web pages that others started asking for assistance with theirs. Well, one thing led to another and Sawada Design was born.

Sawada Design. The intersection of art and science, Japan and America, dreams and reality.