Interactivity Finds a Home on the Web
Multimedia is back.
Today’s web is full of music, video, animation, games... a multimedia extravaganza. But to those who have been developing web sites for more than a decade, it bears little resemblance to the web of the mid-1990s. In those days, multimedia existed only on CD-ROMs, and the web was hand-coded HTML that could not begin to approach print in terms of layout. Without a doubt, CDs were more fun.
It was 1993 when Lisa and I began work on our first interactive CD program. I was a director of marketing for a national architecture/engineering firm, and Lisa was an art director for a graphic design firm.
Many of our early multimedia CDs focused on transportation engineering and were used both at tradeshows and as components of public information campaigns.
Our initial program incorporated text, graphics, video, audio, animation and photography, and was set up to operate on a touch-screen kiosk at a transportation engineering tradeshow. I planned and wrote the content and produced and directed the audio and video programming. Lisa designed the user interface and programmed the interactivity. She also designed the tradeshow booth where the kiosk was located.
This multimedia CD was developed as a component of the Clay County, Missouri vision plan, which helped educate people about the county's long-term development goals.
It was exciting to work on that first project, and over the next four or five years we produced another ten or fifteen more CDs.
We didn’t develop our first web site until 1995 (the year Netscape went public), but by the turn of the century, with a few notable exceptions, our web work had almost completely supplanted our work on interactive CDs.
Everyone wanted to be on the web, and the web just couldn’t support rich media interactivity. So we were forced to wait for the day the two technologies merged. Well, that day has arrived, and multimedia interactivity is back.
A Trip to Japan
One of the most exciting projects we ever worked on involved developing a multi-lingual CD and website for the Midwest U.S.-Japan Association annual meeting. Lisa and I developed a CD promoting Kansas City as the up-coming meeting site, and we got to travel to Tokyo to set up the kiosks presenting the program. Totally cool.