Interview with Tim Frick [timfrick]

What is your specialty?

Design-driven media solutions, primarily web, video and Flash.

Where can we view your portfolio online?

What made you interested in design?

For starters, all the bad design out there in the world was inspiration enough to strive for good design in my work, but also the realization that design permeates everything we do and plays such a vital and important role in any communication endeavors.

What has been your professional career path?

After grad school in film/video at Columbia College Chicago, I started off in TV and video production, moved into motion graphics from there, embraced interactivity and, after a few corporate gigs, started my own business. Somewhere between my first corporate gig and becoming obsessed with motion graphics I began swallowing design books whole.

Have you received any awards for your work in the field of design?

Most recent Mightybytes Awards:

2008 American Graphic Design Awards for the following sites:
- www.blkipper.com
- www.dcatheater.org

2008 Communicator Awards from the International Academy of the Visual Arts for the following sites:
- www.mightybytes.com
- www.blkipper.com
- www.neofuturists.org

2008 Creative Shake Awards for the following sites:
- www.mightybytes.com
- www.neofuturists.org
- www.blkipper.com

2007 American Graphic Design Awards for the following sites:
- www.mightybytes.com
- www.grottoonstate.com
- www.neofuturists.org
- Our company sign

Also, our client Houghton Mifflin Harcourt won a 2008 Codie Award from the Software and Information Industry Association as Best Social Studies Instructional Solution for a project we collaborated with them on for about a year.

What is your motivation? What makes you get up in the mornings?

While Trader Joe's Fair Trade Organic French Roast certainly helps, so too do all the ever-changing, always-evolving design and technology advancements in my field. Seems like just about every day there's an exciting new application released that makes us smarter, better, faster, more productive, etc. etc. The really interesting work we do for our arts, education and non-profit clients certainly helps as well.

How would you define your design style?

For each project we couple our own artistic vision with that of the client and end user's needs, so it's hard to pin down our work as one particular 'style', since each project has different needs. For many of our projects we adhere to clean, uncluttered, mostly grid-based design work, but that's a rule that's regularly broken too.

How do you promote and move your work?

Public speaking, social media, portfolio sites, blogs, e-newsletters, some PR (when something particularly smashing happens). A lot of our clients come to us via the almighty word-of-mouth as well.

In which new areas would you like to experiment?

Large-scale, interactive, user-generated visuals, like at conferences, museums, and on the sides of tall buildings.

Shapes, color, concept: where do you usually begin when conceiving a design?

If the design is for a client, we start with an exhaustive creative interview that helps us define the client's needs in great detail, including existing brand standards, competitive analysis, functional communication goals, and so on. Then we approach typography, color palettes, layout, concept, and all the other good things that go into the design stew accordingly.

If the design is non-commercial or for our own use we make it a very organic process: searching for work that inspires us, testing out color combinations that we like, learning new techniques that increase our skill set, etc. Still, the needs of the end user/viewer/audience/etc. never stray far from our sights.

What are your sources for documentation and to generate ideas?

Sketchpads, notebooks, brainstorming sessions, and shared bookmarks help us push the creative idea envelope. We document every project with web and email communications and are in the process of building a web app that will help us manage projects and client approvals on files.

Which festivals or awards in your field do you find most interesting?

HOW Design Awards are always an interesting lot, as is their design conference. Flashbelt, HD Expo and Adobe MAX provide a lot of practical information as well as glimpses into what's coming down the pipe. We like the Motion Graphics Festival a lot too.

What is your favourite type of customer?

Of course who isn't going to answer 'the one who is practical about timelines, budgets and creative vision'? But clients building innovative products, affecting real change for altruistic causes or creating content with unique artistic and/or educational vision are very attractive to us. Those who want to embrace new technology as part of the work we do for them make our inner geeks beam bright as well.

To a certain point, is copying justifiable?

I think using the work of others who inspire you as a springboard for creating work that has your own unique creative stamp is completely valid and respectable (not to mention flattering to the people who created the original work). When the work merely becomes derivative or plagiaristic, however, perhaps you should consider a different profession.

List some things you dislike seeing in design.

Skip Intro, Coming Soon, and pretty much anything with Comic Sans in it.

Do you believe the newer generations are better at designing?

A young, fresh outlook on any design project is always a nice thing to have, but with age comes wisdom. The old adage 'you have to know the rules before you can break them' still applies in most cases.

With which type of client would you decline in working for?

I can work with a client whose product I may not believe in, and I can work with demanding clients who may not be that easy to get along with. When you combine those two things, though, that's where I may draw the line. I never say never, but in most cases have found that initial gut reactions are worth listening to. If someone is condescending or won't respect our advice in an initial meeting, chances are that will only worsen if we enter into a business relationship with them.

How do you calculate budgets for a design project?

Many things go into calculating budgets and timelines for proposals:

• Overhead (staff, expenses, operating costs, etc.)
• Estimated time/materials to get the job done based on our work process
• Some sort of financial buffer zone in case there is scope or feature creep (which there alway is)
• Our relationship with the client
• Existing budget parameters
• Timeline to completion

There are probably about 30 other factors that go into this as well, but those are the biggies.

Which professionals in your field -contemporary or past- do you most admire?

Firebelly Design (www.firebellydesign.com) for their commitment to good causes.
MK12 (www.mk12.com) for their awesome animation skills.
Hideki Keith Owa (www.hidekiowa.com) for his design and photography talent, willingness to experiment, and his incessant globetrotting.

Most importantly, all the people I work with at Mightybytes on a daily basis. Sounds like another cliché, but it's true. They make it fun to go to work and they inspire me to no end.

Which software applications do you most utilize in your work?

All of us use the Master Collection of the Adobe Creative Suite. The video team also uses Apple's Final Cut Studio. The developers seem to like Panic's Coda a lot. And though it's a server-base application, we've become really fond of Expression Engine as our CMS of choice for client sites. Occasionally WordPress too.

Looking forward to seeing if the Aviary suite of tools lives up to its potential as well.

Up to what point do your designs reflect your personality?

I'm sure this sounds cliché but our designs reflect our clients' personalities and the needs of their customers/users more than anyone. That said, we wouldn't be able to call ourselves designers if we didn't infuse some level of our own personal style into each project we do. If I had to assign a number to it on a scale of one to ten I'd say threeve.

How do you distinguish passing fads from mainstays in new trends?

By researching said new trends, knowing past trends and then throwing everything out the window to concentrate specifically on what's going to work for the project at hand. An elephant in a ballerina skirt is still an elephant.

If you weren't a designer, what would you be doing?

At this moment, what would be your dream job or project?

Here are a few. Hard to limit it to just one.

• Educational games for kids
• Community-based support sites for worthy causes
• Online travel videos and podcasts

We're already doing some of the above, so I guess we're well on our way to getting there.

Can you see yourself in this field twenty years from now?

Since this field seems to change so much, I'm sure I'll be able to find some niche I can settle down and grow old(er) in. With exceptions, the natural evolution of a designer seems to be production artist > designer > art director > creative director > speaker or educator and I seem to be on the latter end of that scale, so it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Which design resources online do you frequently visit?

What is your specialty in the interactive world?

Websites, Flash, video.

Where can we see some of your work online?

What kind of projects do you usually undertake?

We've run the gamut from banner ads and half-day photo/video sessions to year-long children's interactive educational product development projects, so we're pretty flexible. We tend to have a lot of arts/entertainment, education and not-for-profit clients but we have our fair share of corporate clients as well.

What was your first job in the field?

Creating a networked multimedia news and employee communications channel through a partnership with USA Today for baby-bell Ameritech (now part of AT&T).

What is your professional background? What did you do before?

I had various writing and producing roles in more traditional media: PR, TV, video, etc.

With which technologies do you normally work?

The Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection is on everyone's machine. When we animate we most likely do it in Flash or After Effects, with occasional forays into 3D. When we shoot, we do it with a tapeless HD camera. When we create DVDs and do post-production it's usually with Final Cut Studio. When we write music or do narration and/or sound effects, it's with Logic, Live and Reason. The developers use Flash AS3, XML, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, Ruby, and any other programming flavors du jour. The designers use Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. etc. For blogging and CMS, we use a lot of Expression Engine, Movable Type and WordPress, but we have also created Joomla sites and sites with custom admin back-ends. We integrate with Web API's when the need arises.

Lessons learnt on user interface design

Test early, test often. Prototype as much as you can. Define before you design.

Do you work by yourself, or in a team? how is that team?

I work with a super-talented, knowledgeable and fun group of designers, developers, animators and video professionals. They make coming to work enjoyable every day.

What is the secret to keeping customer expectations under control in interactive development?

Spending an ample amount of time up front defining specs and expectations is critical. This includes user profiles, technology specifications, project scope requirements, information architecture, and so on. Also, by prototyping various elements of your project and making your client an active collaborator in that process, you will circumnavigate a lot of possible communication mishaps during development.

What was your first computer, and which is your current?

Though the first computer I worked on was an Apple IIe, the first one I owned was a Macintosh IIsi. Have currently migrated to a Wintel Mac laptop.

Online virality: isn't it the same as traditional word-of-mouth?

Not at all. While there are similarities in the sense of sharing work samples, traditional word-of-mouth typically carries with it a personal endorsement from someone who has worked directly with you before. Recipients of viral campaigns who are looking to hire interactive vendors can be many times removed from the people who have actually worked with the vendor they are considering. At that point the viral campaign is just another portfolio sample in their InBox. Nothing more.

Do you think the digital gap is a social problem? What would you do to accelerate digital literacy?

Increasing federal education funding for computers and broadband access in classrooms nationwide would certainly help close that gap. The One Laptop Per Child endeavor is a really admirable effort.

What were you doing in March 2000, at the height of the "dotcom bubble"?

Pretty much the same thing I'm doing now.

In the current interactive world, what is the most relevant trend?

Widespread adoption of internet-enabled mobile devices that share a common functional standard would be a really wonderful thing. It seems that things are slowly moving in that direction, but it's at the pace of molasses on a winter day.

Digital content creators are going to be faced with endless amounts of deployment challenges until that day comes. But of course by then we'll have a whole new set of deployment challenges to deal with.

What do you see interesting about the Web 2.0 phenomenon?

The opportunities it presents to reach out and connect with people is the obvious answer, but what is more interesting to me is the unavoidable melding of business and personal lives thanks to sites like MySpace, Facebook, and their ilk. As a business owner, you tend by default to merge those two worlds anyway, try though you may to keep them separate. It just comes with the territory. It is interesting to watch that happen in the social media world and get reactions from people who embrace it wholly vs. those who are apprehensive or even terrified. The demographics to me are fascinating.

What would you do to terminate Internet spam once and for all?

I don't think that day will ever come. Just as spam filters become more sophisticated, so do spamming technologies. It will be an endless cycle, unfortunately, unless some sort of legislation is passed and even then it will never be foolproof. There will always be hackers, there will always be viruses, and there will most likely always be some level of spam cluttering our InBoxes. How's THAT for an optimistic outlook?

Will bandwidth one day cease to be a limitation?

Not if the network companies get their way. Then bandwidth and internet access will be scrutinized, censored, hoarded and doled out in soup line portions to the highest bidders. We can only hope for a world where everyone is connected and online content is not monitored by Big Brother, but that's a long way off, unfortunately.

Your tips to make money online

The easy answer: sell stuff people want.

The more complicated but ultimately more rewarding answer: create community-based closed ecosystems where sellers and consumers are all willingly playing active roles in the economy, such as www.threadless.com.

Ask me a question, make a comment, or request my opinion on something:

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