As someone pointed out to me the other day, I was there during “The Revolution,” right there in the trenches in London, smack bang in the very middle of it all.
The Online Revolution, that is, the one where the Web as we know it, and especially Web 2.0, was born.
Right in the Middle of The Web Revolution
I was there when the Adidas Webzine was being created by three and a half people in an attic in Shaftesbury Avenue. We were competing against Nike’s well-funded team of 27!
I was there when e-commerce was created and took its first faltering steps, with the industrial-strength software we really needed to make it work big-time still being worked on in software development labs throughout the USA.
I was there, creative directing the stills photography side of the thing, when we worked out how to show off photographers’ and directors’ portfolios and showreels online via British Telecom’s Creative Services Network. I came up with tags – tagging images and videos for classification and searchability – for the CSN’s ThePortfolio channel way back then, pre-dating their use by Flickr and other core Web 2.0 websites.
The Web Revolution Continues
My hands-on involvement in Web 2.0 innovation didn’t end when I left London for Australia. I got involved in online advertising during the start of the Flash craze, when damned few people had figured out there was more to it than simple timeline animations. I had been introduced to Flash when it was still called FutureSplash, and knew this was a technology to keep a close eye on in the coming years.
SemperMac was an experimental webzine that explored new ways of publishing online. As its creative director I came up with a whole new form of Flash advertisement – the Website-in-a-Website.
Almost a quarter of a million designers and advertising people around the world subscribed to SemperMac magazine at its height, and a huge number of readers asked for more of these ads in each issue – an unprecedented request at any publication I had worked on. After SemperMac’s demise, the Website-in-a-Website advertising format wasn’t entirely forgotten – Google recently revived it with slightly different specifications.
This new portfolio PDF depicts it as a schematic diagram, as some of my archives of the time – foolishly stored on Zip disks back then – became irretrievably corrupted.
Why This One is Different
This PDF is styled rather differently to the others in my portfolio – my Mac is out of action for the time being so I had to cobble it together on a borrowed Windows PC, minus access to my customary typefaces and design software. I am as proficient with Windows machines as I am with Macs, but I am damned if I can design to the same high standard on PCs as I can with Macs. With PCs the limitations of the operating system and especially its poor handling of fonts gets in the way all the time.
To download the PDF, please go to my Brand Advertising portfolio page.