international interactive television

SPEC: Lead the Design + Production teams for eCity's Amsterdam deployment of Europe's 1st broadband WebTV/MicrosoftTV {DVB} for mutual client UPC. Managed User Interface, Design, and Production groups to deliver EPROM-burned STB on time and over a year before Microsoft.

TOUCH SCREEN User Interface

SPEC: Design and Produce graphic assets for touch-screen interface for easy office-to-office transfer and/or conversion of professional-grade video into global formats {HD, PAL, NTSC, etc}. Form and Function worked early with both hard/soft-ware teams to deliver a Java-based Control Panel for this long-lived product.

SPEC: Design + Production of professional digital video composer for turnkey digital broadcast production. GOAL: That any newsroom, commercial editing bay, or corporate department {such as Odwalla} can turn out clean digital presentations. RESULT: Think Adobe "Premiere" done on wavelet hardware back when GVG dominated NAB.

CORE TECHNOLOGIES the Simulations

A multi-year consultation informing the System Software group of new technologies developed several faux applications exploring interactive case studies. Visualizing these archetypal programs via modern tasks communicated issues to all facets of team.

HOW children of TODAY learn via YESTERDAY...

Seminal late 1980's interactive media design prototype via the lens of Picasso's art + life using a unique language embodied in tools to 'build' queries by clicking various tools on graphic images and menus...what's in every internet classroom today.

VIRTUAL WORLD TOOLKIT

SPEC: Implement vision of world-class seamless texture libraries. A self-produced and published line of smart-pixel tessellated images on CD. From clever tile-able photographic patterns with alpha channels to the extra deep bits & pixel fidelity sought by professional graphic artists and high-end desktop publishers.

'TEXTURES are the FONTS of the NINETIES'

"These Pixels Have Legs..."

Long ago, pre-Internet, F+F sold Wraptures featuring an earth globe as product ID. As the art was crisp + pretty for the period these color icons were soon spinning off CD-ROMs on every continent.

Later, somewhere in the halls of NSCA, may-haps Netscape founder Marc Andreesen himself, was finishing the first web browser and needed a unifying symbol... the year was 1993.

Our planet is a universal theme and as countless people enjoy using 'Terra 1.0' who are we to say, No?

With this post we simply plant the F+F flag firmly in the high ground and claim a very minor footnote to history. We never intended to keep this baby from mutating, growing up, getting tattoos + spiky hair...

Your welcome, ENJOY

SPEC: Logo and web design. When venerable ISP PANIX re-purposed their expertise to address corporate data services they sought a ruggedized precision tool symbol. F+F modified the IT db symbol of stacked disks into high-tech blades and designed a fluid site that behaves like standard applications.

Logo Development and Web Design

Witnesses and investigators to crimes are in danger when strongmen e-copy notes at checkpoints or confiscate documentation at crime scenes. When our security system isn't {hijacked, graft, etc}, then whistle-blowers are both truth serum and civic-body antigen.

C A V E A T

We're not real heroes, we just gave CRF nicer brochures & pleasant web site

PLUG & PLAY video editing GUI.

SPEC: Design consumer video sequencer for home hobby and family media production. Colorfully illustrated tools make it easy to log tapes & assemble clip-lists from diverse sources. Listed clips may then be recorded as one event or project.

Studio M - Multimedia presentation tool.

F+F dramatically simplified an ad-hoc feature-heavy interface of their popular Astound! product to make it appealing to a broader audience.

EXECUTIVE Video Information System

Multiple parallel multimedia control through microcomputer switching of video/audio signals via serial port {via Director scripts + Xobjects}: this example is a custom front-end for advertising executives that debuted at Tokyo's Makuhari Messe.

RE-SKINNING an old favorite

Before Roxio the mother-ship contracted F+F to give a multi-resolution graphic update, al a Apple's Bondi iMac to the venerable Toast media burning software and a growing family of tools like iView Multimedia, Spin Doctor, and others.

RE-SKINNING popular DVD software

We were hired to "go wild" with the visual, functional, and abstract concepts of media playback devices... naturally, we pulled out the X-acto knifes and scalpels. With a nod to Time Machines of Olde we stylified a button-crazy interface into relevance.

GAME based on techno-thriller novel

Time-ticking game of accelerating technical failures as you work the controls of an advanced computer tracking down a virus spreading murderer + averting national disaster. F+F designed and made working simulator of advanced near-future OS and hardware -- in collaboration with & based on the novel by NYT senior technology editor David Pogue

Interactive Communications

Interactive press release effectively and concisely communicates the corporate message by flooding the press with reams of quotes, piles of data sheets, and clip-art books worth of product beauty-shots at the ready for needy editors plugging content holes.

IT User Interface Modeler

This Java-based intranet toolkit for enterprise development needed a rich set of visual language symbols to connote the nuances of data manipulation.

Original Content + OEM Bundles = Publishing

Our close association with MacroMind, Paracomp, absorbing Authorware, unto MacroMedia beget Adobe... gave us a hand in the creation and improvement of many, many, products. F+F made everything from shippping MacroMedia interactive example files of external video + audio device control to OEM bundles of content templates including a subset of Wraptures.

Five modules for an office utility suite designed to tie otherwise separate office equipment; fax, printer, scanner, modem, into a unified small publishing and/or document processing system.

Developed under the direction of legendary color technologist Ephram Arazi.

Poor-Man's Virtual Reality

Roll-out presentation for RaduisTV television capture device featuring multiple advanced video and data capture inputs for video compression, control and display. Lingo scripts choreographed analog video through a Director movie simulating a 3D fly-through by flowing frame-by-frame animation output to laserdisc as source material. The demonstration focused on symbols, like a Desktop Toaster appliance, for addressing business & educational solutions.

Enterprise intranet IT construction set

Interface additions for java-based website construction toolkit for corporate intranet and e-commerce systems during the dot-com peak.

gratis publis

Before software there was this wall and a dream of flying over a cityscape while daubing great curving arcs of paint across a world wired up for sound and cheering crowds.

One perfect day {or perhaps a finer quality lucid dream?} a certain building caught my eye looking awfully nifty. I got to thinking BIG.
And then...

A year later state and municipal art grant proposals were submitted after site negotiations and conceptual designs developed. The western facing wall was aged and weathered brick from a turn of the century hotel and measured 150 feet wide and 35 feet tall. The site was unique in that it sat across a major set of traffic routes along the Portland metro area and only blocks from his alma mater Lincoln High School.

Donations of scaffold and materials + gear came good, but the grants were so slow Jonathan was off to architecture + painting classes and production waited until summer holiday to begin. All told, costs and labor equalled $0.43 an hour for this effort of love that has brought eye-catching pleasure to millions of travelers every week for two decades.
Alas, hard times have befallen the DePaul Center for Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation that inhabit the building and to cover their bills they've covered over the publically funded mural with a series of advertisements. We all look forward to meeting the patron who sponsors the restoration of the Rose Mural.

Creative visualization

As a child Jonathan was domesticated by a tribe of women artists in the wet forests and soggy valleys of Oregon.

Growing up in and around the paper + radio businesses encouraged familiarity and interest in the power of media. Pursuing a graphic artist path he studied Design, Layout, Painting, Air Brush, Brush Lettering + Calligraphy, Screen Printing and many other Graphic Arts to develop a deft-hand creating rich visuals. An adolescent climbing giant printing presses and sleuthing newsrooms he became known for comical but realistic looking flyers made by knife/scissors/x-acto cutting out clip art from oversized books the advertising department stocked and pasting collages together with hot bees-wax... the became the very archetypes underlying our modern workplace metaphors and he would later help define the desktop publishing revolution and be a champion of its benefits.

...and in the course of time an artist comes to understand all politics is economical or, maybe it is physics that everything is reduced to? When the time-clock + money rule this planet our time-space continuum can only become compressed until worlds collide. As long as our so-called 'free market' economy provides copious idle time to play with our bouncing checkbooks these busy hands will make mischief at www.cafepress.com/agit-pop until things are set right. Let's start with an industrial and commercial re-gearing that values labor + energy over monetary 'misery indexes' + such consensual hallucinations as the notion of a 'profit'.

Slow down, now?
We'll sleep when we're dead.
Call us and we'll be get busy for you and all too glad to shut the *F#@Σ€ up.

This area will spontaneously shrink + grow.