Q: What is your educational background?

A: As an undergraduate, I was studying international relations and social sciences.

How did you get into design?

Well, I was heading straight for law school, and my heart wasn't in it, and in my spare time, I was very much involved in the visual arts -- I was working on the school newspaper as graphics editor, and doing a lot of sketching and drawing. My last year I decided that I really, really wanted to be in the visual arts, so my last semester I took all arts courses. It didn't make my advisor very happy. But that was the beginning of a major career change.

Did you go on to get a degree in art?

Actually, I ended up spending many years in the field of design, starting with advertising, and magazine design, then working here at NYU. I learned a lot on the job. My art degree is really from here [ITP].... Right after my undergraduate degree, I needed to do something dramatic to change fields, because I didn't want to take a long time doing it. I took a vacation and wentn to Sri Lanka, which is where I am originally from, and I spent a year painting and drawing, and exclusively doing artwork, and had an exhibition there. One thing led to another, and I was offered a job there, in advertising -- an international branch of an ad agency. So I was there for a year, in the early 1980s.

Computers were very, very new. In fact, in Sri Lanka I also studied computers, but at that time, it was just some basic programming, which I had done a little bit of as an undergraduate also, so I was always interested in computers and in art, but the fusion didn't happen until later. Once I came to New York, I started working at the American Museum of Natural History, and I was there about five years or so, as an assistant art director for their magazine. That was a wonderful experience, very different from advertising. While I was there, I started exploring what was, at that time, the beginnings of computer graphics, and on my own I took some classes at the School of Visual Arts, and explored digital painting. It was primitive by today's standards, in the sense that the technology was really limited in some ways. Memory was very expensive, you didn't have millions of colors to work with. Everything had a computer look. I think that what is wonderful now is that, finally, you can achieve some very naturalistic effects on the computer, and people have spent a great deal of time creating software with algorithms that simulate naturalistic textures and things like that. Coupled with the advances in technology, it's more affordable now to have a lot of colors, and you can do some really beautiful things.

How about some of the programs that are out there now?

If you are interested in painting, something like Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful, and supports some third-party plug-ins as well -- those are additional features that you can access through a main program. You can run a watercolor filter which simulates a watercolor painting. Fractal Painter is also a great program. Another thing you can do with many of these programs, that you couldn't do in the past, is that they are touch-sensitive, so if you have a drawing tablet, you can simulate real painting.

Why would you want to make something on the computer look like a real painting?

That's a very good question. I think the whole society is moving in this direction, without really questioning it. Some of the obvious advantages, of course, which people will tell you, is that there are certain strengths that the computer has, that, as an artist, you might want to take advantage of. It can do some of the tedious tasks. If you have a repeating image or something, you can just create image and multiply it -- you don't have to sit there and draw it over and over again. That would be one advantage.

It allows you also to play with greater variations, quickly, to get a quick idea of different possibilities.

Isn't this a problem too? You see a lot of bad computer art and design coming out, because the technology has become available to so many more people? What are the advantages of coming into the digital art world from a traditional art background?

The advantages? Many. As I see it, in the end, the computer is only a tool. Whether you are creating a page layout, or painting -- on the computer, or on paper -- you, ideally, would want to know some fundamentals about composition, or the use of type, or layout -- those are some fundamentals that apply in either realm, I think. People don't realize this.

Also, when you are designing for print, you have certain limitations. If you are using the computer to design for print, there are certain things that are unprintable, that are too complex. There are certain technical considerations to take into account. When you are designing, and the final output is something that you see on the screen, there are fewer limitations in that sense; you can have 35 colors and not worry about it printing -- things like that. But I think the fact that the computer is so powerful, it's very easy to get carried away.

But the flip side of that is that so many more people are able to come into this field, because it has become available to more people.

As an analogy, I like to think about what happened when word processors became common. At first, flyers and stationary etc. -- the level of quality in the design, or lack of it, was very noticable. But after a few years, the general standard goes up. In time, it's inevitable that people become more, if you want to call it, visually literate, just because they are surrounded by all this.... Even, for example, some of the work I see here [at ITP] that students are doing today, the general base level of accomplishment and skill is so much higher that it was years ago. This is not something they are being taught, because they are coming into the program with this knowledge somehow.

So it is a form of visual literacy to know what looks good on the screen.

Yeah, to be aware of these things; to be aware that there are different typefaces -- some people don't know this. They'll walk down the street, and see all these different signs, and it won't be a part of their world [49.01.18

How would you translate something like a magazine to the screen? I assume it depends on a lot of things, but can you give some general tips?

Let't take something like Wired, for instance. They're actually an interesting case, because they're simulating the sense of multimedia in print. Something like that would probably translate more easily than a more conventional magazine.

There was a CDROM put out by Time-Warner on Desert Storm, and it was from articles in Time Magazine. It was a challenge, and I think that something was lost in the process, because somehow, the way the CDROM was organized, things were taken out of context, like the audio was separated from the photographs, and the photographs were separated from the articles. Things were made modular, but in a way that didn't really present a coherent experience.

It's a problem because you can't fit all that information on a screen comfortably. You can't really fit a whole page, unless you're providing a scrolling sort of window, which isn't really friendly.

If you were to translate Wired, say, to a screen version, would you make it look like the magazine? Should a magazine look like it does in print, on the screen, or not?

I think it should bear some similarity, to establish a common identity. Somehow I would visualize Wired as being incredibly nonlinear, as a magazine. And that's another issue with this type of thing -- the computer has the power to provide nonlinearity, which means you can jump from point A to point X, as you wish.

But a lot of magazines do that -- allow you to flip pages. But it's different on the screen.

It's very different. In print, you can visually scroll down a page really quickly, and if you have to flip to page 100, it takes a while. On the screen, flipping, whether it's to page 100 or to page 2 takes the same amount of time. But scrolling down to the bottom of the page you're reading takes a long time.

How about a general-interest magazine, like Time? How would you translate Time into a multimedia version?

Well, Time is published on a weekly basis. I think that it all starts with the organizational structure. For one thing, you could put more than a week's issue, and cross-index everything by subject and by week. To take advantage of some of the power of this medium, maybe to liven it up a little bit, add some motion and sound, but to keep the images in context somehow.

Let's look at some of the work you've done.

These are printed versions of some artwork I did in the mid-1980s, on an IBM-based painting system. As you can see, it's fairly pixellated, because the technology was still pretty primitive, but it was still fun.

This is one of my favorite things, which I did for the American Museum of Natural History. It's a school kit for kids. I think they're still selling them. This was all done by hand, but today I would do it all on the computer, probably. I think that, no matter what I end up doing in the end, I probably always start with some kind of physical sketch. Then I would use a drawing program like Freehand or Illustrator to execute it.

So, working on the computer, you haven't forgotten all of your traditional skills.

Those skills are still very necessary. Also, when you are dealing with a client and you have to convey ideas; often they are not particularly visually-oriented, so you have to have some way to convey your ideas. In fact, that's a problem sometimes. At my current job, at NYU, I have a tendency to go right to the computer and start right away there. The problem with that is that you end up showing the client something that looks pretty complete and finished, as a starting point, and they get very attached to that. If it's a pencil sketch, they know that it's just a working copy.

With multimedia, people have heard of it, they've seen it, but they have no idea what kind of time and effort goes into it. When working with a client, it's important to establish the phases of a project. This is one of the ironies, I think, of technology -- it provides you with a whole new level of operating, but I don't feel that I save time by using a computer; sometimes I save time by not using a computer.

I think it has to do with the fact that you can play forever -- you're never satisfied. You just keep going, trying this and that, changing colors. And I think that on a broader scale it's like that in society in general. All of a sudden, people cannot live without fax machines, for instance. They're supposed to save you time, but they don't. Because if you receive a fax, you've got to respond immediately. You can't wait three days as with letters. All of a sudden, the whole pace of our lives has accelerated. And as an artist and a designer, that pace is really a factor to be considered, because of the quick turnaround time, of all software. Programs are constantly being upgraded, and you're just struggling to learn one version of something when another version comes out. And with more and more and more features that you may or may not need. But you still have to keep up with it. You really can become enslaved.

And there is hardware to learn as well -- tablets, mice, trackball...

And how to deal with different machines, different platforms.

Do you think the Macintosh platform is the best for graphic design?

At one time I would have said so. I think that everything you can do on a Mac you can do on other platforms, at this point. People are developing cross-platform CDROMs. It's a whole new set of technical considerations. There's still so much technical stuff to know, that often the creative process can get lost, perhaps not completely lost. Small teams of people are working on these projects, and invariably, technical issues come up. I think that [the technical and creative] are both phases -- the creative process happens in the earlier phases, and along the way also. The technology sometimes pushes you in a certain creative direction. It's not always clear-cut, like "Now I have the idea and I'm going to execute it." Then you might use some strange filter, and something wonderful happens, and you're like, "Hey, maybe I should do that, instead!"

Things happen by accident.

By accident, which happens in all art, I think.

Because you work on the computer, do clients expect a fast turnaround?

I think they think that, for instance, client who've done a particular project and are now just modifying it. They think, "Well if it lives on the computer, it's, you know, 1, 2, 3, just fix it. But for the most part, we have particular turnaround times for particular things established. If anything is complicated, or a long term project... this, for instance, was a campaign I worked on for the university called "Purple" -- Preserve University Resources & Protect the Living Environment. This was a challenge because I was really given very little direction. The assignment was to emphasize the preservation of resources, and to come up with a brochure, a sticker, and a button. Pretty much, that's it. So I had to do a certain amount of research on my own. I went to the bookstore and bought one of those books on ways to save energy at work, and things like that. I really wanted to find a way to address the environmental issues as well as the conservation issues.

I played with some graphic ideas first, and I wasn't getting very far with that. Then I thought of the idea of an acronym, and I started playing with words, thinking about what we wanted to convey. Playing with the words, I came up with Purple.

Let's look at some of your work on the computer.

These are some interactive short stories about the near future that I wrote, and decided to put into this multimedia format. I had a lot of trouble deciding how to go about doing that, and spent a lot of time trying to decide how to visualize it, and whether to put narration or voiceovers.

Basically, the stories are about a future in which -- it's taking a look at the flip side of technology, in a way. We all think we know ways in which technologies are going to help us in our day-to-day lives, accomplish tasks, and things like that. I think sometimes we' don't realize how much it has various side effects that affect our social interactions. That's what this is about. I've conceptualized a future world in which social groups are differentiated by their stance toward technology -- they either love it, or are threatened by it, or they hate it. The stories take place within this fictional geographic space. There are purists who just view technology as a tool, and terrorists who think technology is evil, and border life dwellers who have lost their jobs because of it, and the high-tech synergists who see it as a creative tool.

Would you classify yourself as one?

Somewhere between a purist and a synergist, probably.... I used Macromedia Director to create this, and the visuals were original photographs of mine that I manipulated in the computer using Adobe Photoshop. The background was created using Kai's Power Tools, which has some really nice effects. I decided to use sound only as a sort of ambient thing, and not to use voiceovers, because I felt that it would be distracting, it would establish a certain pace. The viewer might want to spend more time looking at an image, that kind of thing.

This is a story about a woman who lives in a small community, completely isolated from the rest of the mainland. Their personal lives have become very much tied to being online, so in their physical lives they've all grown really overweight. Their reality has shifted, in a sense -- they all have relationships with people online, and they work in this digital copyright center, so all day their worrying about rules about digital copyright. Then after five, they completely break the rules, and their manipulating their own images, or whatever. The story, the drama, has to do with the fact that this one woman's lover is actually coming in person to visit her. So this whole question of self-identity in an age of image manipulation is what the story is about.

Interesting. So you are a writer as well as a designer.

I used to write a long time ago, back in high school, and somehow being involved in this technological work, somehow, suddenly, in the last couple of years, I suddenly feel I have something to write about again. So I've come full circle.

Do you read a lot of stories like this?

A fair amount. Philip K. Dick, I think, had wonderful ideas.

Looks like you paid special attention to the text.

Yeah. Somehow, I was thinking that the nature of the story is such that I wanted to have some formal element, some sense of structure. You know, here they are in this copyright center, and there is something unchanging and fixed about that. So that's why I decided to frame it. The text is one of the typefaces that works fairly well without being antialiased. It's called Industria. It's sans-serif, so it's a little easier to read sans-serif faces on the screen. In print it's different. If you do have on the screen something that's similar in quantity to what you see in print, then I would still use a serif face.

This is fairly linear, which is another issue that I battled with; it's not hypertext, so the user has to go through from beginning to end. It's just text and visuals, and some animation, in some of the stories, and ambient sound.

Can we see another piece?

This one uses artwork that I created by hand -- paper collages that I scanned in, just to show that you are able to mix different media. This one is fairly static.

I see that you're using complimentary colors. Is there a rule about using them on the screen? Is it done for a certain effect?

Yeah, generally speaking, complimentary colors, positioned next to one another create a pretty dramatic effect, because they're opposite one another on the color wheel, so you have a hot color and a cool compliment of it. The danger is if they are fully saturated and they're positioned in some sort of pattern, they can give you a sort of op-art effect, a dizzying effect that's difficult to look at, like a checkerboard pattern, for instance. So you have to be a little bit careful.

What is the text in this piece? Is this a story?

This is a story. This one is the most meditative of the four in a way, and it involves travel to Mars. A woman is in search of herself, basically, and she visits a therapist on Mars, and I go a little bit into discussing the form of therapy, which is very much audio-visual. It's low on action, but it's the use of technology as a tool, in this case.

By the way, have you seen Blam!?

I have seen a little bit, yes.

I wanted your opinion on that, because it seemed to me, strictly from a design and technical standpoint, very compelling. What did you think?

To be very honest, I didn't get far into it, mainly because the sound level was very high, and I didn't find a way to control it. It just threw me off on some level. But I wish I had gotten beyond that point. I do understand that they have done some pretty incredible things, technically, and with the narrative.