For many good folks, 2009 marked a year of bad after bad then some more bad for good measure. And for us too, what started as an extraordinary year, ended with an “oh la la, is it grave doctor?”

So just like most of the world, we at AREA 17 are happy to see 2009 fade away into history while we look towards a fruitful and more chill 2010. But for us, 2009 also has a special significance that we do not want to forget. This past “year of the ox” is our unofficial 10 year anniversary.

To mark this occasion, we’ve launched a design portfolio archive — a semi-complete archive of used and unused work from 1999 until 2009

For those of you that don’t know our background, AREA 17 is the 2003 merger of Elixirstudio, an interactive design studio started by Arnaud Mercier and Area 17 Media, an interactive consulting firm started by George Eid.

By happenstance, both entities started doing business in 1999 (dude, that’s insane right).

To mark this occasion, we’ve launched a design portfolio archive — a semi-complete archive of used and unused work from 1999 until 2009. This collection of work is not curated (for the most part), but a dumping ground of most everything we’ve done, including explorations, iterations and rejections.

The archive is semi-complete because we are continually updating it with new work and still missing old work (damn Sam, it’s a big job). The website itself uses Subfolio, our file browser app that is currently in private beta. To try the app, request an invite by contacting us.

So if the world ends in 2012, we will never see our official 10 year anniversary. But if the end of the Mayan calendar fails to bring doom and boom, we aim to celebrate with a bang of our own … hopefully by then Internet Explorer 6 will finally be dead.