EP Diary Forum

VISCOMM 96 Design Conference Notes

The VISCOMM conference at the end of last week was packed with ideas and perspectives on new media. We put together the Design Track seminars and booked some outstanding speakers who spoke about a vast range of creative automation subjects.

I filled a notebook with the things I learned, and we'll be turning it into notes and articles here on E-P in the next few weeks. Here are a few highlights from the Design Track seminars:

Interactive Media Design
Marla Milne and a diverse panel of designers kicked things off with some brilliant insights into the business of creating great multimedia. They also talked and demo'd ambient sound surrounding interactive products, an idea that was repeated at several sessions at the show.

Speeding the Art: Creating Effective Graphics for the Web
Sitting at a Mac with PhotoShop and other programs, Mark Silverman showed us how to streamline graphics for the web. He described resolution issues, palette reduction tricks, the JPG/GIF difference, dithering and digital watermarks (an upcoming feature of PhotoShop 4.0). A new thing I learned was to eliminate the resource fork from Mac graphics to cut the Mac thumbnail out of the file and save space. Ex-Kodak imaging pro Fred Shippey was in the audience and contributed several good points and perspectives, as well.

A Designer's Overview of Multimedia Programming
Multimedia program whiz Daniel Schwartz talked tech to designers, explaining server and client side programming, describing the different languages and their features, and discussing the way that programmers work on multimedia. (I swear he used the word functionality a thousand times.) Dan was balanced by partner Monica Chau, a designer who spoke about the creative "challenges" of working with technical types. It was a session in which the left side of the brain issues collided with the right side of the brain perspectives.

Web Authoring Tools: Keeping Track of All Those Pages
GRLab's Hollis Wagenstein led a panel of experts from design, engineering and business backgrounds. Engineering expert Ilias Sarris had a fascinating insight: Designing a web site is more like developing a computer application than like producing a printed brochure. The hard part, he said, is not the HTML coding, it's the thinking through of software functions that make the site interactive. Another great story came from the audience: A print designer who's customer bought a hugely complex multimedia-intensive web site from an expensive, big name web developer scrapped the whole thing when the customer couldn't make the thing work for his kid on his home PC. The print designer got the job to re-do the site in a more practical format.

Creating Virtual Reality
Jim Cornacchia gave a great live demo: cooking up Quicktime VR files on stage, describing the photography and computing processes, and showing his latest work for Time Warner based on the Visible Human project. We also saw another photographic VR technique, PhotBubbles, featured on the New York Times web site, and we played with a VRML (Virtual Reality Meta Language) world to see what the object-oriented future will bring.

Designing Sound and Video
Jonathan Hirschman, newly promoted to production director of Time Warner's Pathfinder site, gave a terrific, fact-filled presentation on the nuts and bolts of sound and video on the web. He talked about the kinds of products he's used and made the point that neither the Mac or the Windows platform was enough: he needed both to do the work. He figures that Pathfinder is now up to a million HTML pages with more than 20 gigabytes on the web.

If you were at VISCOMM, tell us what you learned. If you couldn't make it to the show, stay tuned to E-P for more on these and other VISCOMM subjects.