September 1998: David Culbertson

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September 2, 1998

The following article was originally published for the Site Builder Network Workshop (now MSDN Online Web Workshop.)

"If you have ambition and a sense of adventure, find someone else who has the same. Amazing things can happen."

David Culbertson is a self-taught designer and programmer. "Most of the refinement of my skills as a visual and musical artist I owe to the years I spent among some of the most colorful and inspiring people on the planet, those who followed the Grateful Dead around the country and called themselves 'deadheads.' One can gain quite a unique insight into the world through the eyes of a tie-dyed grilled cheese vendor." David never spent a day at college, except to skateboard through the underground tunnels of a local university when he was in high school. He has worked at flashCast as lead designer since it opened in July 1996.

flashCast moved to Seattle to work on Microsoft's Redmond campus during the production of Chromeffects technology, which David said is "certainly near the apex in my list of career highlights." "I am always excited to be 'in the know' on promising new technologies while they are still forming, as I was with the development of Internet Explorer 4.0 and Dynamic HMTL. While it can be quite a harrowing experience in terms of delivery, cutting away on the bleeding edge of Internet technology is terribly exciting for a progressively oriented designer."

One of David's first inspiring moments as a Web designer was having a site he built become a finalist in Microsoft's 1996 Activate the Internet contest. The Diner on St. Clair, a 1950s diner-style restaurant in Dayton, Ohio was the project. "It was my first attempt at a Web site that reached beyond HTML, making use of Java classes and ActiveX technologies to produce flickering neon menus and so on, imitating the décor of the establishment itself. While it was a modest attempt at best by today's standards, it was impressive enough at the time, having captured quite effectively the art deco trim of the place."

"Last but certainly not least," David told SBN, "I had the opportunity to work with some tremendously techknowledgable (take that, Merriam-Webster) people at Lexis-Nexis to build the Reed-Elsevier Channel Guide in support of the Active Channel technology that made its debut with Internet Explorer 4.0. Considering the massive amount of information that would make its way through their automated data pipeline and onto the screens of thousands of people via the Channel Guide, the task was daunting, to say the least -- and rewarding nonetheless." You can check this one out at http://channels.reed-elsevier.com/.

SBN: You couldn't have thought you'd grow up to be a Web designer when you were a kid. How did you end up working in this field?

David Culbertson: Color. Curiosity. Fascination. Ever since I can remember, I have been a devotee of art in every sense of the word. As a child, I spent many a sunny summer afternoon in my room or in the woods filling my notebooks with my own pen-and-ink comic book heroes, poetry, and music. As a very young child, I can remember doing things like collecting objects made of translucent colored glass or plastic, just because they dazzled my eye as they caught light and colored it. Perhaps I was a bit tilted in that sense; when I got new shoes, I would always leave them by my bed arranged with the box in a way that resembled their appearance in the store display. I have more or less always been driven artistically by this sense of visual impulse.

As it happens, that part of me has been probably the single most important factor in my pursuit of visual design. I learned early on how to be in touch with this "inner directive" -- and in my opinion, this has been more than a substitute for the formal training I could never quite manage. This approach embraces that idealistic notion that to be good at what we do, we need only appreciate what we do, and do it often enough to be appreciated by others.

SBN: How did you find your job?

David Culbertson: I helped create it. If you have ambition and a sense of adventure, find someone else who has the same. Amazing things can happen. I have a friend who several years ago was a contractor for a consulting company in Silicon Valley. Having been already rather practiced at user interface design as a Visual Basic dabbler and digital media artist, I was occasionally commissioned by him (and a handful of other local acquaintances) to build various GUI components for small projects. Eventually, when the California-based company decided to step up to an Internet presence early in 1995, I was selected as the person to build their Web site. Shortly thereafter, I was mailed a book documenting the HTML 1.0 specifications and instructed to have a working prototype completed in a couple months. I guess I learned to swim by jumping in, so to speak.

The primary focus of my skills has always been graphic design, although computer programming has fascinated me since the third grade, where I started learning to write little basic programs. As the separation between the two fields grew shorter and shorter, I inevitably was drawn to computer-based graphic design by the time I graduated from high school. My first job in the field was with a small Internet service provider located in Dayton, Ohio. I have also worked as a Web design consultant for some other small companies, most notably a consulting company in Santa Clara, California. In July of 1996, flashCast communications was created by just two people: Paul Scholz (President) and myself (Chief Designer). Much has happened since 1996, and it's quite satisfying to look back on the struggle to survive as a small startup company. We've come a long way from the days when there were only two of us to speak of, and we were making deals with local restaurants to build Web sites for food. This is the big adventure!

SBN: What advice would you offer to someone interested in a career in Web design?

David Culbertson: My first piece of advice to newcomers in the Web design field would be not to be afraid of wearing all the hats that you can. A good Web designer must often fill multiple roles in the production process, including author, programmer, artist, and diplomat. Because the Web is already so extensible in terms of media and applications, virtually any talent imaginable can be translated into something useful in Web design.

Moreover, beware of pride. While certain standards of quality are critical to the repertoire of a designer and company, it is easy for commercial artists to take their work too seriously. What you are producing is not fine art, nor will it be displayed in a museum. The inspiration and creative process are much the same, but the goal is not to transcend words and deliver emotional, meaningful beauty. The goal is to sell a project. If the former can be incorporated efficiently into a solution, then by all means do so. But generally speaking, neither the client nor the executives of a Web company are concerned with appreciating the artistic nuances of your beloved creation. They want to either sell or be sold a logical, functional solution that benefits their business. Despite the mundane shade this casts on what is otherwise truly an art, I find that such an artless point of view actually breeds innovation in the creative mind. It forces a Web designer to be a little more clever if not emotional, a little more resourceful if not expressive. There is much creative power in that "outside the box" sort of agency between business and art. Those who adapt survive.

SBN: What sub-categories do you see emerging within the field of Web design?

David Culbertson: As in any industry, as the technology evolves it will become continually more specialized. I can see a point when top Web design teams will commonly require such positions as a cinematic director and photographer to produce real-time video as the potential for it develops, a model architect to create the 3-D objects and landscapes that will soon dominate the horizon of user interface design and sheer Web experience, and a sound engineer to produce and mix the high-fidelity audio that inevitably will be demanded of any commercial Web site. Internet marketing is all about impact, and extending the very definitions of "multimedia" and "interactive" is certainly going to be a target of future Internet developers.

SBN: What do you think is the future of Web design and of the Internet itself?

David Culbertson: In the near future, I see Web design marrying into such already well established fields as cinematography and sculpture, and drawing its share of expertise from both. Both of these arts translate directly to some of the emerging and most engaging technologies of today: motion video and 3-D modeling. The Web designer of the near future will likely be a hybrid of software engineer and Hollywood set designer, perhaps with a bit of construction crane operator to account for the inevitably more sophisticated tools that we'll see.

As we come farther and farther down the path toward "pure usability," we approach a point where the interface between human and machine is as seamless as it can get. Here we May see machines taking the form of human "agents" to perform various information retrieval and processing tasks. Conversely, another possibility is that we May virtually enter the world of data ourselves, much as agents of humanity to a vast network of machines and information. As we are most efficient when directly interacting with our environment (rather than through a simulated on-screen representation), this May be the very future of ergonomics. But the more important consideration is that while our methods of interfacing with any particular machine will eventually reach a peak of efficiency, the machines themselves are likely to change at the same time, or even sooner. The way we interact with the machines of the future, and thus with the information available through them, will depend greatly upon the development of those machines. Ideally, we May someday be successful at creating a biologically oriented computer, one that can comprehend and mimic our own brain functions. Telepathy would be the ultimate user interface. I imagine my job would be toast at that point, as the machines would probably be building their own Web sites with an understanding of both art and engineering to rival da Vinci's.

I think the greatest change we'll see in the years ahead will be not so much in the information available, but rather in the way we interact with and access it. As the Web is a GUI-driven environment, it relies strongly on the dynamics of interface design, which in turn rely on ergonomics to make it an efficient and convenient process. Ergonomics, by definition, is a moving target. It is a quest to purify the interaction of, in our case, "man and machine." As this becomes more feasible with the advent of new interface technologies, we can expect it to be reflected in the work of Web designers, right down to the colors and shapes they use. In this sense, form and function almost seem to orbit each other with equal effect. The concept of natural-movement interfaces, such as a motion sensor worn on the forearm to guide a cursor, will probably play a large role in near-future user interactivity. Three-dimensional holography will also undoubtedly make an appearance in the living room of the future, enabling the user to draw information from a much richer experience.

SBN: Do you have a specific screen resolution for which you prefer to design?

David Culbertson: Personally, I prefer resolutions in excess of 1024x768. I use 1152x864 at my workstation. I generally target projects for the 800x600 audience, but not to the extent that they lose functionality in 640x480. I think that providing some recourse for all users, even those far outside the ideal demographic, is important. This is a global Internet, after all. But I draw the compatibility line when low-resolution considerations begin to affect the overall quality of experience for the majority of users. Especially in a Web technology related project, where the typical user is in some way involved or interested in the technology used to build the site, it can generally be assumed that they have a fairly capable computer setup, the minimum definition of which (in my opinion) includes a resolution of at least 800x600. Even smaller resolutions are on the way. As Windows CE comes of age, it seems to be drawing quite a following. We'll see what avenues future releases of the product will open up for the Web designer.

SBN: What, if anything, is standing in the way of you realizing your best dream designs on the Web?

David Culbertson: Lack of standards in Web technology. Cross-platform design, for whatever small advantages we May convince ourselves that it presents, is the most persistent pain suffered by Web designers. So much can be done with the available technology today that the inability to do most of it on account of various incompatibility issues is a limitless source of frustration. It adds up to something like being given a box of crayons on the condition that you give away all the reds, never use the greens, only use yellow with blue and not purple, and break all the others into halves to increase the number of pages you can color at once. The difficulty of attaining a respectable level of knowledge over what can and can't be done with a particular platform is formidable, let alone the fact that this obstruction is often coupled with contradictory directives from the client, such as "make it visually intense, bandwidth-friendly, but make sure it appeals to the average business person in a wildly imaginative sense. And use rich tones." Rich tones? What does that mean?

The most valuable asset to Web designers in recent times is the combination of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic HTML in Internet Explorer's implementation. Personally, I find Netscape's implementation to be sorely lacking, particularly in its adherence to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards. But I would be happy with even a minimal subset of compatible technologies. When building a solution that must run cross-platform, and must deliver uncompromising impact, a designer can begin to feel the rock-and-hard-place metaphor at work. Dynamic HTML offers so much potential in terms of advancing Web UI design to the next level. It is difficult when forced to watch it grow older gracefully rather than be exploited to its fullest capacity. In summary, lack of compatibility standards hampers the pioneering of new concepts for Web experiences. Diluting an otherwise riveting idea into a bland, homogenous solution in order to meet various proprietary standards is, in my opinion, the worst. Nothing could be more anticlimactic, more counter-progressive, or completely antithetical to the very essence of Web design.

SBN: Where do you look for inspiration?

David Culbertson: Out the window. And then I go there. Nothing short of real-world experience will fill a depleted imagination. It is my belief that imagination requires a fountain of experience to draw from. One can only get out what has been put in, so it's important for a designer to put in as much as possible. I find it rather uncanny that something as patently unrelated to Web design as sitting around a beach fire, or driving a long way for no reason can often feed the imagination enough to be productive. Design in that sense is sort of a magical formula, you never quite know what the elements are, but you know when you've found one.

I think the single most important part of finding inspiration is simply being open to it. One good idea, however small, will almost invariably spark a chain of other ideas. The result is like trying to catch as many butterflies as you can in one net while warding off hungry birds. You lose some, you miss some, but as long as the net is open, you will catch butterflies.

SBN: What is the biggest aid to your creativity?

David Culbertson: The word "can't." More than anything, I love to disprove unbelievers.

SBN: What creative tools do you use?

David Culbertson: For building HTML, client, and server scripts, I use Microsoft Visual InterDev™. The advantages and automation offered by its development environment are superior to any product I've used. When coupled with the extensive documentation that Microsoft's Developer Network provides, there's really nothing within the realm of available Web technology that you can't do. For designing graphics, there can be only one: Adobe Photoshop. The king of all imaging tools, Photoshop provides an environment for everything from simple on-screen line drawing to full-scale, multi-layered compositions. Adobe seems to have almost faultlessly made the transition from being exclusively the workhorse of the print universe to capturing the loyalties of digital designers in every corner of the trade.

For HTML authors, a note: Never forget Notepad! The first and longest-lived of all Windows platform HTML tools, it is sometimes incomparable in terms of speed and convenience for a quick HTML edit. Having never been too excited by the amount of sheer code writing experience that a designer is robbed of by WYSIWYG editors, I started building Web sites in Notepad, and to this day I use it for creating CSS documents. The intricate understanding of and ability to write all of a project's code from scratch can be indispensable when faced with a tight deadline or a new technology.

Brain and hands tend to be pretty important tools as well, as I find whiteboards and giant paper drawings to be invaluable in architecting the more complex Web solutions. Better yet, they're free! Now if only they came with a manual…

SBN: What is your favorite Web design tool and how do you use it?

David Culbertson: My brain. I tend to think it uses me.

Michael Moore/Microsoft Corporate Photographer