Design by Fire • Party like it’s 1999

Party like it’s 1999 Jan 10th, 2004

I was lucky enough to attend the party of the century in San Francisco on December 31, 1999 during the glory days of the dotcom era. The location was the house of of one of the original Netscape engineers, Aleks Totic. In attendance were many of the other original Netscape engineers and employees, their significant others, family members and friends.

All in all, I think they were easily some 200 hundred people there.

I took my trusty little Olympus Camedia to the event, not knowing what to expect or if I would have time to take any photos. Further, the lighting condtions were very low, and I had no desire to use a flash. I hate using a flash. So the details were dark and grainy, and people were constantly in motion. Many of the shots came out blurry and too dark.

Below are the few gems that survived from the evening.

Skye

Before the party started, we all gathered around the dinner table to enjoy a catered meal and some good wine. Skye Lee, a vey good friend of mine who worked on my team at both Adobe and Mambo, and who introduced me to my wife Donna, was seated across the table. We were eating dinner and Skye was listening to someone tell a story.

Skye

The candle in front of her was hitting her just right in terms of lighting, so I quickly grabbed my camera and snapped off this shot. As soon as the shutter clicked, Skye looked at me and asked, “Did you just take my picture?” Skye doesn’t like to have her picture taken.

However, this photo turned out far better than I expected considering I only had one chance at it. Skye looks gorgeous, sophisticated and a bit mysterious. A little bit of Photoshop to create softer pastel tones and blur out the background was all that was needed.

Donna

This is one of the first pictures I have of Donna. We had just started dating, and this was the first time I had seen her all dolled up. Needless to say, I am a very lucky man.

Donna

The only unfortunate part of this shot was the low lighting level, making the shadow details muddy and almost nonexistent. It was difficult to get as much detail as I did out of this photo, but I’m still fairly pleased with it.

The Conversation

The party was just getting started, and I was running around grabbing as many photos as I could.

The Conversation

I liked the composition of the group in this shot, especially Paul, Skye’s boyfriend at the time and now husband, gazing right into the camera. But I couldn’t hold my hands steady crouching on the floor and the shot came out a bit blurry.

I suppose one could always chalk up the blurry look to happenstance.

Paul

Paul always has this quiet, calm persona about him. Here he was as his usual, relaxed, nonchalant self, having a drink and mingling with all the pretty women.

Paul

Once again, the blurriness of the image came from low light and movement. It’s not a Photoshop effect. I rather like the blur effect, finding the result to be bit reminiscent of Jakob’s Ladder.

Which is not to imply I think there are any demons in these shots. I just think that wild kind of digital blur is cool.

The Postcard

No idea why, but this shot reminds me of a Hallmark postcard. That’s Matt Fisher on the left, looking like a Calvin Klein model. David K. and former girlfriend Ricki stand in the center, talking about who knows what. And Paul’s on the right, always looking to insert himself into every picture he can.

The Postcard

Midnight

Here’s the only shot I got off at midnight. So much chaos caused everything to be in motion. That’s Carlton Waters, a good friend of mine, in the middle there wooing a young woman I had never met (and I’m sure that he had never met until that moment) for a turn of the century kiss. Carlton is the man.

Midnight

Once again, Photoshop was used to create the soft pastel color look and process all the images, while Extensis PhotoFrame was used for the edges. This would be the last time I used the polaroid edge look. I got over it pretty quickly after the first six months with my camera.

Bullet

Standards rant

Repeat after me Separator Standards do not block, impede or otherwise hinder innovation. Businessmen, engineers or product managers who only care about how they want to implement technology or only care about their own bottom line are the ones doing the real damage in the larger economic picture.

Design by Fire strives to be as standards compliant as humanly possible in spite of the fact that those in charge of developing the technology, the browsers and the operating systems can't seem to to code to the W3C specification with 100% compliance.

However, even though I'm a firm believer in standards, I'm beyond sick and tired of trying to figure out what works and what does not work according to the W3C specification. So while I make every attempt to do the right thing, occasionally I'll just do what I have to get the thing working. In other words, if you run any Design by Fire URI through a code validator and find invalid markup or css, please don't bother sending me an email.

With that little rant out of the way, here are some good articles about the benefits of web standards.

About Web Standards

Web Standards for Business

And of course, there's Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards, which is easily one of the best reads from both a practical and technical point of view on the subject.

All of these sources discuss simplification of code, rapid development, smaller file sizes, faster download times, better accessibility for a larger set of users, easier code maintenance and platform scalability - all benefits of standards at a technological level. There's also some ROI discussion on using standards.

Really Simple Syndication is still a pain in the ass

Here's the RSS feed.

Design by Fire RSS Feed

You should know the drill by now.

Andrei Michael Herasimchuk
Designer

Updated 2010 Separator The quick and dirty summary is that I am largely considered one of the first official interface designers hired by Adobe Systems. That is, the first one hired to do nothing but interface design across the professional product line. I worked personally on the interfaces for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign.

Andrei

One of these days, I'll convince Adobe's legal eagles to let me write a book about all that I have been through while working on those products. I just doubt they'll agree to it in my lifetime. Until, then you'll have to be satisfied with the History of Photoshop, an article written by a long-time friend of mine, Jeff Schewe.

Work

Director, Design Team bullet Twitter
March 2011 - Present

Sr. Director of Product Design
Applications bullet Yahoo!
September 2009 - March 2011

Chief Design Officer, Co-Founder bullet Involution Studios
July 2004 - September 2009

Project Lead, Adobe Lightroom bullet Adobe Systems
December 2002 - June 2004

Director, User Interface bullet ePeople
April 2001 - December 2002

Director, User Interface bullet Impresse
January 2000 - April 2001

Director, User Interface bullet Mambo.com
August 1999 - January 2000

Senior User Interface Designer bullet Adobe Systems
August 1995 - July 1999

Co-Founding Member, Director bullet Specular Int'l
June 1990 - August 1995

Play

Having the opportunity to work on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom has given me a chance to explore photography in way I would not have had access to otherwise. You can find samples of all my personal work on this web site, and unless otherwise noted, everything here is photographed by me.

For a short period of time, I was exploring a screenwriting career. I had a script optioned by Hyde Park Entertainment (a division of MGM), a studio that has since gone under. I even had an agent in Beverly Hills for a short period of time.

I enjoy playing poker on the side and find the game infinitely fascinating. I have made the final table in a few bigger tournaments. One at The Hall of Fame Poker Classic and the other at the Bay 101 Open, but no World Series of Poker bracelet for me yet. I have had the opportunity to play against some world-class poker professionals and have gotten crushed by them.

In my off time I play bass guitar and far too many video games.

Publications and Awards

Industry Awards bullet 1995-2000
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign have won far too many awards than is possible to list here.

The History of Photoshop bullet February 2000
An article written by Jeff Schewe for Photo Electronic Imaging Magazine. This covers the history and development of Photoshop. A copy of this article can be found here in PDF format. You can also find another copy on Jeff's web site, Schewe Photography.

Design Graphics, Cover Story bullet June 1999, Issue 46
This article covered the work I did on the redesign of the professional product line while at Adobe.

Collage with Photoshop bullet 1994
This book features 14 digital artists using Photoshop and Specular Collage. I'm only mentioned in the prologue, but the book was created to promote Collage and what digital artists were doing with it at the time. I'm still fairly proud about the book and the work produced inside of it.

Education

Amherst College bullet 1989 to 1990
Left Amherst College to start Specular Int'l

The Hill School bullet 1984 to 1988
College preperatory school.

Contact

andrei@designbyfire.com bullet To avoid getting tagged by my spam filter, be sure to create a meaningful subject line.

Colophon and other details

Design by Fire v4.0 Separator A quick overview of the design and implementation of DxF for those who care about such details.

Browser Support

If you are viewing Design by Fire in either Firefox or Safari, congratulations! You are experiencing Design by Fire in the manner it was intended. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or less, you have my sympathies as you are getting a version slightly less dynamic. The reason for that is due to Microsoft's lack of support for the CSS property "position: fixed;" plus a few other things.

Bottom line, Internet Explorer promises to fix these things in version 7, so in the meantime you can either download the beta for IE7 or switch to Firefox.

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If you have purchased the Adobe Creative Suite, you should have Helvetica Neue installed in your font library. If so, then you are reading Design by Fire as it was intended to be read. For everyone else, you are either seeing Lucida Grande or Arial.

Fonts

Clearly, Helvetica Neue is far superior.

As for the logotype of Design by Fire, it's set using the classic Bodoni typeface, complete with ligature for that extra flourish.

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