hello world

My intention in creating this blog is to allow myself a place and time to delve a bit more deeply into the small gears of design theory, as well as the daily application of design in the creation of software. Doing this has been a long time in the procrastinating. I have resisted writing for a number of reasons, which I will undoubtedly dwell upon in future entries, but for now, I will provide an introduction to etch the surface of this tabula rasa.

First, a brief history. Perhaps because my father is a professor emeritus of history, or due to my mother's studies in the classics, or my own nostalgic bent, I nearly always feel the need to preface. The story of a plant's bud, for me, is likely to begin with a trip down the trunk and into the earthen roots before moving on to the topical subject of the new growth. This drives some people to distraction, and I have tried to temper the pre-story; often beginning closer to the action than I would without constraints. You have been warned.

I used to do similar things to what I do now, but with different results. I have almost always done design on a computer. and almost always on a Mac. There was a brief time in my professional nascence where I did things like cut Rubylith, spec type from a book, count characters, and use a stat camera... I have just dated myself, and will likely continue to do so. The first version of Adobe Illustrator I used was called 88, and it wasn't because there were 87 versions prior.

Pixels have long been my medium, but for half of my career, those pixels were carefully arranged to be served to the public as overlapping translucent CMYK ink. The ink was slathered across great sheets of paper in patterns of at least 300 dots in every inch. There was an excitement in this process. The knowledge that expensive plates had been made, that the Heidelbergs were running at speed, that the die-cutters would soon be slapping their custom-crafted razor blades against the perfectly registered and now dried paper, and soon to be converted by clever robotic machines or underpaid hands into boxes, or brochures, labels, or stationary. A grand, nerve-wracking, early morning endeavor in massive, corrugated steel warehouses on the outskirts of somewhere. Fantastic, beautiful, expensive and wasteful.

My days, still, are filled with pixel manipulation, but now what I see is what you get. Screen resolution - low resolution. Colors generating light as opposed to reflecting it. The methods involved in producing these screens has changed a bit since I began down this path, and the presentation, interaction design and quality of the product have vastly improved. My first internet software gig was a registration wizard for a modem company called Global Village. The software, such as it was, was designed to conform to a 4 bit web-safe palette, and was compressed to within an inch of its life to fit on a single-side floppy disk. The "wizard" was led by an illustrated persona of a "world-traveller" drawn by my good friend and colleague Beate Fritsch. It was a drastic departure from the packaging design we had been doing, and a trial-by-fire initiation into the world of internet software design. This uncharted territory held all of the same design challenges, with new constraints and the tantalizing dimension of interactivity. I was captivated.

Many years and many, many projects later, I am working with an amazing, talented group of engineers in product development at Laszlo Systems. Everyday we are serving up crazy-cool software, built using the OpenLaszlo platform and now the Webtop framework. There is a long history here. Most of it is interesting, some frustrating, and all of which I will likely refer to in more-than-passing detail - If, indeed I keep my promise to do a bit of writing here.