I don’t remember when, or where, I first saw the Aspen Movie Map, but I do remember thinking that it was really cool — representing a new digital media world that I wanted to get involved with. Created in the late 1970′s, the Aspen Movie Map was a groundbreaking interactive virtual tour of the real-world city of Aspen, Colorado. Users could navigate the streets, go inside selected buildings, and change the seasons between fall and…
 
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When I first saw Peter Greenaway’s film “Prospero’s Books” I was drawn to the innovative use of layering and multiple images to visualize the 24 books that made up the film’s arc. I was inspired. I wanted to explore ways to create interactive books with the richness and complexity as the books in the film… Books that felt handmade — full of magical, detailed, mysterious content. So what about some examples of interesting digital books?…
 
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In 1994 Muriel Cooper presented work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA that changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. The work, from her group at the MIT Media Lab‘s Visible Language Workshop (or VLW), took typography, literally, into three dimensions — and gave it dynamics and interactivity that had never been seen before. Tragically it was just after this that she passed away. I was a grad student in…
 
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