America's Hottest

by Janet Abrams

Note: This article appeared as part of I.D. Magazine's "I.D. Forty" for 1995

From their spacious atelier overlooking the Bay Bridge ramp in San Francisco's "multimedia gulch," the guys and gals of vivid studios are busy figuring out the Three I's: the principles of information design, interaction design, and interface design, which will determine whether readers of books and screens will sift the wheat of wisdom from the chaff of knowledge, or merely drown in data.

Creative director Nathan Shedroff explains, "We're trying to work out how we can build great experiences with this new medium called interactivity. I'm convinced that in five years we'll look back on this period and think how incredibly quaint it was, the same way we look back on silent movies."

Shedroff, 30, brings vivid his experience as a senior designer at TheUnderstandingBusiness (TUB), where he worked on the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages and Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety; he also designed Danny Goodman's Macintosh Handbook (jointly with Wurman) soon after leaving TUB to cofound vivid. His partners, Henri Poole, 31, and Ken Fromm, 30, have the business and production skills necessary to integrate its 20-strong team of twentysomething software engineers, digital artists, animators, videographers and writers. Since its founding in 1990, vivid has produced CD-ROMs, software products and books for the business, entertainment and computing communities.

CRUSH, for "Silicon Valley Svengali" Regis McKenna, will be the first in a series of CD-ROMs aimed at business executives that combine case-study marketing 'seminars' with productivity tools for users' own presentations. Among other interactive media clients, vivid has designed the interface for Sony's in-car navigation system, and its Web site home page; developed new interfaces for online services; and is currently working on projects for Microsoft and Sega.

Meanwhile, on the 'old media' front, Demystifying Multimedia, produced by vivid in 1992 for Apple Computers, has become a college set text and standard reference. vivid's next book (working title: Wizards), a series of interviews with leading multimedia practitioners, will be previewed online on HotWired before its print publication in 1995.

It may come as a surprise, then, that vivid's creative director trained at Art Center in car design. "At school you'd say 'I'm Trans,' but in San Francisco you have to be careful because it means something completely different."

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