24 posts tagged “ydnar”
Sometime before Flickr and Twitter scratched my lazy itch, I used to blog. Whole paragraphs! Structured sentences, posts with conclusions and enclosures! Double entendre! Exclamation points!
On Sunday Beau and I rode up the Marin headlands to film a long skid from the top. Since we’re good at math, our calculations for how long the tire would actually last were, in fact, wrong. Physics was working against us and the skid blew early. Fortunately, we had enough footage to fit the tune and this is what we ended up with:
When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an architect or a filmmaker. I drew lots of pictures, mostly pen & ink of monsters and cathedrals. I built clocks and violins and artificial limbs with Legos. It was a typical (I suppose) childhood for a kid who liked to draw. I drew a few yearbook covers for school, and illustrations for other bits.
In 1992, I started playing around with Freehand and Photoshop. I later moved onto Illustrator, and very quickly my use of traditional media dwindled. I fell in love with Helvetica, post-modernism, Emigre and The Designers Republic. I tried and utterly failed to make it as a freelance designer in New York, and oscillated back to software engineering.
At a startup in Virginia in 1998, I was the closest thing they had to a designer, so design I did. The logo, the letterhead, marketing materials, even a trade show booth. It was a non-subtle nod to AIGA and Apple. Garamond Condensed, Bondi Blue and symbols evoking the original Interplay logo were the order of the day. We made tons of one-off products for various clients, skinning our site. Our business model revolved around integrating business data (sourced from InfoUSA) with WHOIS data (sourced from somewhere shady).
We were acquired by AltaVista in 1999, and with that the need for a designer evaporated and I moved to doing coding & software architecture full time. Until I occillated back to game design, that is…
Found this on YouTube—a video of someone (badly) playing through the opening level in Marathon Infinity. I made this level and the accompanying textures in 1996 while drinking way too much Coke and listening to Portishead. The music definitely influenced the textures.
Update: Yes! Portishead’s new album!
