vivid Bios | Sabine Messner

Sabine Messner
Senior Visual Designer

Having graduated Valedictorian from both the Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts programs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Sabine set out for San Francisco in early 1994 to realize a dream - to become a pioneer in the advent of Web design.
Already a year earlier, she had fallen in love with the Web. So great was her enthusiasm for its potential impact on global communication that she created an Internet art installation as her master's thesis. "Fishing For The Heavenly Body" garnered critical acclaim at art shows and galleries in Berlin.

As the first designer hired to work on HotWired, WIRED Magazine's legendary San Francisco-based online publication, Sabine helped launch the site just two weeks after Netscape's first beta browser was released in October 1994.

For the next three and half years, her influence was seen on all frontdoors, dozens of channels, sections, feature articles, site templates and navigation maps. As managing and lead designer, she spearheaded HotWired's biggest redesign ever, creating core visuals for the entire site and managing the design department through the launch of 4.0 in the summer of 1997. For their work on RGB Gallery, Sabine and her design team won the 1998 Webby Award for best art site.

Sabine's work is featured in major web design publications, such as Creating Killer Web Sites, Mastering Photoshop 5 for the Web, Elements of Web Design, "ID Magazine," "Graphis Magazine," MultiMedia Graphics - The Best of Global Hyperdesign, and others. She has taught multi-media design students at the University of California Extension and the San Francisco Art Institute as well as given workshops and lectures at numerous Internet conferences in Germany and Austria.

She is thrilled to be a part of vivid and for her first project designed our new site.

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