DESIGN DIRECTOR | DESIGNER

In November 1995, soon after I had moved to New York and while I was halfway in the MFA program for painting at Hunter College, I got an internship at Word, the first advertising-supported "webzine" ever that wasn't affiliated with any offline publication (basically the only other regular publication on the web at the time was Hotwired.com, an offshoot of Wired Magazine). Within 3 months the Design Director had quit, and since there weren't too many other folks doing web design at the time, I became the Design Director. Back then being a web designer meant you not only architected and designed a site, but you coded it all as well, in HTML 1.0. Anyway, so much for art school!

Word was a very artsy-fartsy venue, kind of an illustrated literary journal with art pieces interspersed, and not super-interactive, but hey, it was 1995. The butt-ugly "Cat Contest" archive page down below is THE FIRST webpage I ever designed and built, and the "Big History" piece featured animated gifs(!), which all the editors worried would distract from the content. My brother Madison designed the "Shooters" piece (the red & black one with the gun) which had small Real Audio files of gunshots included.

I spent most of my time art directing a small legion of freelancers around the country via email, but we also did monthly "staff home pages" in which we tried to find new ways to ironically comment on ourselves ;) Word is also where I met Dan Pelson, who had founded it in the first place, and soon afterward we would leave there and co-found Concrete Media and Bolt.com.