Posted on May 11, 2001 - by deCadmus

Net Hunt

It all started with a Net hunt.

You remember Net hunts, right? Mad scrambles around the web? Coaxing obscure information out of cranky, infant search engines? This particular hunt–a marketing machine for the 1995 movie, Johnny Mnemonic [an awful movie]–was produced by a tiny-but-way-hip company called Vivid Studios, a pioneer company in the heart of S.F.’s growing multimedia gulch. What particularly struck me about this hunt was the instant on-line community that formed around it… a fascinating group of geeky competitors playing a game of one-upsmanship, and shared aggravation. The hunt was challenging and mildly rewarding… the community, though, was an *amazing* virtual village sprung up around a common experience. Vivid clearly understood the relevance of the community.

After the hunt was over I got in touch with the folks responsible… Drue Miller, then writer and web-mistress [now a very talented independent information designer] and Nathan Shedroff, a founding partner of the company, and its Creative Director. Nathan has been a significant contributor to the field of information architecture, and I’ve enjoyed comparing notes with him at conferences. Nathan’s just authored a very interesting book, “Experience Design”. I’ve only just peered between its covers, but already it’s clear that this is *not* your typical “IA is a serious discipline” body of work. Instead it attempts to express specific concepts of designing for the user experience by, well… by being something of an experience itself. It’s an experiment, I think, to convey rich media materials in print form. Why? Maybe because people *buy* books, while they tend to not buy access to online materials. Unless, of course, they’re pornographic.

Which is an interesting coincidence… Vivid Studios suffered through a couple of buy-out / buy-back struggles… what’s left of it is now part of Modem Media. The original Vivid domain? It’s now owned by a porn company. Gack.