10 YEARS OF INTERACTIVE – VIEW PROJECTS


How large was your company when it first started?
Firstborn began with 4 people in 1997.

What was the first version of flash that your company used?
Flash 2. We even did some projects in Authorware in its earliest stages!

How large is the company today?
Between our New York and Los Angeles offices, we are 35 people fulltime, on staff and on location. Our team is made up of artists, designers, developers, animators, 3D artists, video producers & directors, project managers and strategists. We have an amazing group of people from eclectic backgrounds and actively pursue local talent as well as brining in people from around the world. We have many people here from Korea, Brazil, Sweden (to name a few places) that come over on visas we sponsor for them. Our group of interns who we pay as well, are often given fulltime positions after their internship comes to an end.

What was the first project produced under the firstborn name? Who was your first
client?
Our first project produced as Firstborn was Terracommunica, a self-promotional piece that we used to get our first projects. The first client we worked for was the fashion Designer Antonio Fusco for whom we did an interactive marketing presentation. Soon after that we also worked for Calvin Klein, creating a CD-ROM version of their men’s runway show.

Are there any projects that you did where the process is now considered out-dated or ancient?
Certainly CD-ROM’s were a large part of our portfolio in the early years but with broadband internet connections now widespread, they have gone the way of the dinosaur. One project that was originally created as a CD-ROM can now easily run as an online experience. We created a CD for Chrysler that ended up being one of the projects we won a Silver Pencil for (view project).

Interactive design has come a long way in 10 years. How has it lived up to your expectations?
Parts of it definitely have while other parts remain somewhat grounded in certain principles. The bigger challenge is understanding how to adapt to an ever-changing shift in the way people use the internet in general. People look for information in a very different way than how they did 10 years ago.

Consumerism has completely flooded the web in the last ten years and this has changed the way people use the web to communicate. It has also altered the populations’ perception of the internet and its ability to provide information.

With the new technologies that are available to us, [we’re] able to create much richer and immersive experiences than we could when we were first starting out. To a large degree, however, we’re still confined to the computer. We’re starting to do a lot more projects that go off the web such as an exciting installation project we did for Windows Live using Processing.

How were you able to continue to raise the quality of your firm’s work while still keeping it all together during the dot.com slump?
One of the most satisfying comments we get is when our clients tell us how well Firstborn is run as a business. When the dot bomb hit and the economy took a dip, Firstborn stayed true to the sound business principle that had always governed our company – not expanding for the sake of expanding and always focusing on doing the best work possible.

Your studio is a little unorthodox in that it is PC-based, whereas most New York design firms and ad agencies are all about the Mac. Why is it that you deliberately chose to stick with Windows?
Typically, Flash works and plays better on a PC. Being a shop that primarily delivers full Flash sites and applications this makes sense. However, the newer Macs are pretty fast…so we’ll see! We do have a few Macs that we use the work with video, and a few of our designers also prefer to work on a Mac, so we accommodate that as well. When we started in 1997, PC’s just seemed to be the right direction to go in and we haven’t changed much since.


Firstborn is known for its beautiful flash sites. What are some of the lesser known projects that your studio has produced?
We’re very proud of the kiosk project that we did for Fila. People could go into the Fila stores around the world and get their foot scanned. Based on the contours, size and shape of your foot, they would put together a custom-fitted shoe. You also received a card with your info on it so you can order more shoes with your fit either at any Fila store or on their website. It was a huge year long project and we started not knowing anything about how we were going to make this project happen. In the end, when it came to testing, we were literally selling shoes on the floor of the store (view case study).

We also just collaborated with Digital Kitchen and Wexley School for Girls to create a generative art exhibition that was projected onto a 65 foot diameter sphere located at New York’s South Street Seaport.

The client was Microsoft, who teamed up with Operation Smile. As part of the event there were numerous kiosks at the Seaport for visitors to get their smile captured and have it projected on the sphere. Using Processing, we were able to create particle generated art, which was projected on the sphere.

It was awesome because it wasn’t Flash, wasn’t a website and integrated with many different types of media to provide a “real world” digital experience (view case study).

Another web based project (but not a “website” in the traditional sense) was a project we created for McGraw Hill. It is a digital asset library with a custom CMS and admin tool that is also browser based. It allows professors who use the company’s textbooks to access and download all supplementary assets for use in the classroom.

This online application acts as a centralized asset repository that enables McGraw-Hill business units to add and adapt any digital assets via a custom-built admin tool. Pushing the boundaries of today’s online applications, we created a ground-breaking interface designed to house up to 250 assets per book, presented on the screen at one time (view project).

What does “the next 10 years” of interactive design mean to you?
We continually look to do more and more projects that aren’t web-based. We’re also doing our own video production now and that’s becoming a huge part of interactive design and our hope is to build this area of our company out and continue to create content for the web and other digital experiences.

We also want to extend our design sensibilities into areas that aren’t thought of as “design-centric” technology areas. We build many content management systems and admin tools and aim to design these to be just as functional and aesthetically pleasing as the site itself.