Skeuomorphism
Way back in the 1990s, "multimedia" was something that came on a CD-ROM, and 8-bit (and even 16-bit!) color monitors were increasingly common. I worked on several multimedia projects in college during this period, and just like everybody else, I thought it was totally awesome that you could now make interfaces that looked like real-world objects.

Then, in 2011, the software industry learned what the word skeuomorphism meant and, simultaneously, decided that it was the worst interface design principle ever. I don't entirely disagree, but I do think designers have overcorrected a bit, to the point of making it difficult to figure out what's a button, what's plain text, and what's just a colored rectangle with some text in it.

I'm still proud of the work I did in this style, especially since this is how I cut my teeth on Photoshop and Illustrator (and Director, back in the day). All of the work in this section dates from 1994 to 2006.

Dashboard widgets
Media/tools:
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Shortly after Apple released Dashboard back in 2005, I got into developing widgets for a couple of years. (Surprisingly, this was not yet the point at which OS X hit peak skeuomorphism.) While fun to make initially, keeping up with the almost-weekly changes to WebKit required constant vigilance, and maintenance proved too irritating for me in the long run. None of these widgets work properly anymore.

ProdMe was a widget for setting timed reminders, like clock chimes. It was surprisingly popular, and was even selected by Apple as a featured widget and staff favorite a couple of times.

Lint Catcher was a front-end GUI for JSLint, a static code analysis tool for JavaScript. (Graphics were blatantly inspired by Strong Bad.)

Medicate allowed the user to set reminders to take medication, something I myself was having trouble with at the time I made this. I never actually released this widget, because the vagaries of Dashboard made it difficult to keep it reliable, and I was concerned about the potential legal fallout if a user missed their meds. I still think it's a good idea, but these days, it would make a better phone or smartwatch app.


Timetables of History
Date:
December 1995
Media/tools:
Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Director
A class project that I worked on with two other students, this was a sales pitch that we presented to Simon and Schuster to try to convince them to let us make a multimedia version of the reference book, The Timetables of History. While this interface mockup seems rather clumsy and amateurish today, compared to the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia that was published in the same year, for example, it looks amazing.


The Theory of Language
Date:
May 1997
Media/tools:
Adobe Photoshop, SuperCard
The Theory of Language is a linguistics textbook by Steven Weisler and Slavko Milekic that had a traditional paper release as well as a CD-ROM edition, the latter of which I contributed to for both graphic design and programming. It was an interesting experiment; in retrospect, some of our ideas were clearly dead ends, but I've noticed that others are now being incorporated into modern e-book platforms, and there are a few concepts that still strike me as highly innovative and that should be adopted in current software.

Regrettably, this project was started when Macs were still the dominant computers in most colleges, and it was finally released in 1998 for Mac OS 8. Less than two years later, Apple released Mac OS X, rendering the electronic book essentially unusable on modern computers. While I doubt that it would have set the world on fire even if classic Mac OS had remained a viable platform for a few more years, this project was definitely a victim of bad timing. Such is life.