Listen:

Over the last few years there's been a huge amount of hype surrounding new media. So much so that many interactive companies think they're in the business of being “Gurus of Digital Enlightenment” rather than designers serving their clients. Our business is providing solutions to our client’s communications problems. We are not here to spout the cosmic significance of the digital age. We are not here to mess around with unproven new technologies at my client’s expense. What we are here to do is learn everything we can about a client's business and create the most focused and effective laptop presentations, websites, conference designs, trade shows, sales pitches and CD-ROMs that we can. That's another way of saying that the first, and perhaps most crucial, step in any job is for me to listen carefully to our client’s needs. It's something we have been doing for over 5 years and it's why we are a dedicated project manager whose sole focus is client service. It's also why we are designers and programmers whose passion is creating real solutions to real problems, not just making cool and groovy graphics. This focus on listening to our client's needs means we deliver elegant solutions, on time and on budget, not because our web site says so, but because our business depends on it.

Think:

In the new millennium one hears a lot about how our new digital age is without precedent; about how new technologies require radically new ways of approaching problems; about how people no longer experience the world in a linear fashion and so the conceptual methods of the analog past no longer apply. Well, frankly, we beg to differ. We believe that technology is a tool, not an end in itself. We believe that interactive digital media are here to do one thing -- to help human beings communicate messages to other human beings. Obviously, that's a need as old as humanity itself. Which is why we pride ourselves in our ability to engage in an old-fashioned activity - thinking. Long before we put hand to mouse we work to define our client's problem as sharply as we can. we doodle. We graph every variable. We walk through a number of possible solutions. We do sketches. We do sitemaps. We do storyboards. For this part of the process we often use an extremely effective bit of technology known as a pencil.

Build:

As you know, the pixels that make up a multimedia presentation are really just a bunch of ones and zeros on a hard disk. That means -- unlike atom-based communications -- our work can be changed at will, quickly and relatively easily. This is the joy and the curse of digital media. The joyful part is that interactive media allows rapid editing of presentations, adding a customer's logo or updating a statistic or a bar graph on the way to the meeting. The curse is that many new media companies don't put enough time into the conceptual work, figuring it's best to jump in and design it fast since they can always change it later. By the time we begin the work of building the graphics, animations, video and sound components of a client's presentation we know exactly where we are going. We are not fooling around with cool stuff our clients don't need and haven't asked for. We are not experimenting with animations that may or may not fly. What we are doing is delivering elegant solutions to real business problems.