Web Endeavors
Wednesday, November 23, 1995
Clients
It's been a long time since I had clients. After the Mac painting business died in 1988, I drew a little typeface called Tekton that brought me a regular income for the next several years. I spent a lot of time reading books and learning about movies and the environment. I did some teaching and some more typefaces. I thought I'd be a type designer for a long time, because the money was so good. I did a lot of graphic design, but mostly for my own projects and friends. I didn't need clients.
I worked on projects. Last year, I put a lot of money and all my time into making a program that makes handwriting come out of your printer. Not "handwriting fonts" as you may have seen them, but real handwriting. My partner, Ken Keller (who is an amazing programmer and now advises Architext) and I designed and built a system to faithfully recreate handwriting, including dozens of alternate glyph shapes for each character, bouncing baselines, and context-sensitive cursive construction that really makes it look hand-written.
Then the bottom fell out of the type market. Our "fonts" took a lot of effort to make. The exact opposite of "make your own handwriting into a font: real bad, real cheap." We tried to get some distribution deals, but prices on the store shelves plummeted faster than the necklines on Baywatch. Ultimately, it came down to doing a deal with Hewlett Packard's ink-jet division, and they finally decided to pass. Kind of too bad, since now that many people have a Pentium machine, our program would have been competitive (it ran too slowly on a 486). Another MBA from the School of Hard Knocks. I went to Blockbuster and applied for a job, but they said my butt was too small, so I wrote a screenplay and was starting on another one when I got sucked into the Web. Like everyone else, I started a web-site design business by accident. I was just in the right place at the right time with a little extra time on my hands, and boom.
My father followed in the footsteps of his father. My paternal grandfather, whose name was Max long before it was cool to be named Max, started a business selling mobile homes, also occasionally referred to as trailers. He was very successful. My father worked his way up through the company and eventually became president. I was the son of the owner. We had company picnics with over a hundred people. Although my grandfather had been an entrepreneur (In Salt Lake City, the Jews set up all the retail establishments for the Mormons to do their shopping), the company was well established. I never had any interest in the business. I wanted to create. I wanted to design things.
When I was about 14, I sent one of my designs (for a river-rafting shoe) to Adidas, and they wrote back. They sent me a gift certificate good for any pair of shoes in their catalog! I was so psyched! I was off on my design career. Little did I know how far afield it would take me. But that's another story.
The Big Leap of Faith
Now I am doing what my grandfather did. I'm starting a business. I have clients. I even like them, which is really great. I have taken the plunge and hired three great guys. Gino Lee is an exceptional book designer from Boston. He is also one of the world's foremost authorities on typeface design. He is a true renaissance man. He plays classical music in the office and explains the themes and the lives of the artists. He is well versed in medical and artistic knowledge of the most arcane varieties. I'm so glad he agreed to come be part of the team.
Ray Guillette worked on the "Sombient Records" web site I featured as a high five earlier this summer. He lives in San Francisco, in North Beach, and he has a master's degree in music theory or sound design or something pretty intense. He plays music and does amazing things with sound waves. He's really into crafting Perl scripts and making tools with which we can make our web sites. He takes the train down to Palo Alto and just dives into our projects. A rare talent.
Robert Frank is an architectural illustrator by training. He volunteered to help put together a Frank Lloyd Wright web site, but it never happened because the Foundation people dragged their feet. We worked together on a site for HP last month and we enjoyed working together. Now he's an official web site designer, and I'm lucky to have him. I'm lucky to have all these great guys working hard for our new clients. We all get along well, we all want the same things: Web domination and girlfriends. Uh, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not exactly speaking for all of us on that last point.
Oh yeah, and there's the multi-talented Hussein Kanji. He's our "Serverman" and a student at Stanford. He's one of those amazing undergraduate students who can write Perl scripts in his sleep. Hussein's goal is clear: he wants a car, so he can be one of those mobile California cellular phonies. Hussein is helping me redesign the Casbah for your viewing pleasure.
I'm still looking for more people, mostly site designers. I'll also need another full-time HTML person fairly soon, but I don't know when. We have an office about 100 yards from Sun Microsystem's Java building. They haven't invited us over yet to see how some designers could help make Java better, which is kind of too bad, but maybe it will happen. We still don't have a good name. Coming up with a good, un-taken name is harder than getting a vanity license plate, like "IXRAYU" or "NO4SKIN."
The New Casbah
Speaking of the new Casbah, I'm looking for people with content to help me build a few sections. I'd like to collect quotes, factoids (things that want to be facts, but can never be), statistics, statments, and pointers to good research on: women's issues, environment, population, and vegetarianism. If you have little goodies, or pointers to little goodies, please send them my way. If you are good with Photoshop, and want to help, let me know how much time you can commit. You should have a large selection of quality typefaces on your hard disk to work with, as I'll be wanting to turn quotes and statistics into compelling images with interesting backgrounds.
Shameless Self Promotion
Two things. First, I'm teaching a 3-hour HTML class in San Francisco, on December 13, starting at 6:30pm. I'll be indoctrinating HTML terrorists in the ways of rule breaking, so bring your laptops and prepare to assault the WWW with good design! Find out more at The Center for Electronic Art.
Second, I got a note from a nice guy at c|net named Dan Sexton, who's in charge of new developments there. I had visited him last month, to discuss turning my High Five column into a 4-minute segment on web site design for a new TV program he's putting together. I had worked hard to write a 4-minute piece covering two web sites, including an intro and a signature. But I'd be the first to admit I have no on-camera experience. I've done public speaking, but no on-camera work. I think that made them feel a little skittish about asking me to come test for this new pilot they are putting together.
But hey, you gotta learn somehow, right? Not everyone is born a TV personality. I'm willing to learn. I spent half an hour with Richard Hart, the program's host, and he was so great. I learned a lot from him about what to do and what not to do. I really enjoyed what he had to tell me. I'd love to give it a shot and spend a bit of time testing for them. Don't you think I could learn? They don't have to choose my piece, but I'd love the chance to give it a try and learn. Maybe we'll all be surprised.
If you think I should have a chance to show them I not only live on the Web and know what I'm talking about, but I can communicate it to their audience, please send a short note to dans@cnet.com and tell him what you think of my potential to become an asset on his new show.
If you want to see the rest of my site, just click your mouse twice and say "There's no place like Dave's Journal Table of Contents."