UI for TV

In 1993 I was asked by Shari Glusker to be the Creative Director for an ambitious group at Silicon Graphics and help develop an interactive television network. We were riding on the tails of their Full Service Network in Orlando which made a giant media splash. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone asked SGI to build an entirely upgraded system on top of Urayasu's spanking new fiber optic cable infrastructure. With a $2000 settop box and blazing network, our Japanese clients asked for the experience to be "high blown." (I loved this job, and the design team was stellar. Ask me about it some time.) It was only at the end of the project that someone described "high blown to mean "causes you to feel intelligent." But it's TV! What were we thinking?

Working with Colossal Pictures, Viewfarm helped create the first interactive Web/TV merge thing. Kids would watch a TV show called Zoogs on Sunday, go to the Zoogs website during the week to make their comments about it, and then see those comments imbedded into the show on the following Saturday. I was the animation director for the show open. George Evelyn was the Creative Director. (Man that guy is good!) As a side-note, in the middle of Zoog production, Drew Takahashi, Margeigh Novotny, and I had the opportunity to pitch ideas to an unknown company called TiVo. Pittard Sullivan kicked our asses on that one.

Then it was on to Microsoft's WebTV to be Creative Director of their design group. Soon enough we were designing for three brands, MSTV, the software platform for digital television, MSNTV, the evolution of the WebTV service, and Ultimate TV our digital video recording product. This time TiVo kicked our ass.

Viewfarm continued to work with Microsoft and picked up a bunch of other TV-centric clients including Comcast, Avtrex, Pause-TV and a few little side projects.

Working with Ray Larabie we've also developed a set of fonts specifically to meet the new FCC requirements for closed caption display. Visit ccfonts.com.