Multimedia is back! Today’s web is full of music, video, animation, games… a multimedia extravaganza. But to those who have been developing websites 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.
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.
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 website 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.
Give us a call at 503.977.5130 or email
or
.
There are no comments yet, add one below.