Defining Dale

Dale Herigstad: I could still be a broadcast designer, I could still be in film, and I have done some projects still in that area. But what fascinates me about interactive work is that there is this other layer that you are doing. I mean you are moving from linear, where you are making these grand, beautiful, little mini-stories graphically, which in television could be 3 seconds longer, or a second long or a 10 seconds, very short, or commercial work in little bits out of a 30 seconds spot. So they are very short segments of stories. But they are linear and you spend a lot of time, you build this thing and edit it and craft it down to the frame, and you get it just right, and you look at that. It's a completely different world, when you are making that a nonlinear world and interactive. Those experiences are completely controlled by the viewer. So how do you set things up in that sort of animating possibilities so that there is a flow to it that's controlled by the viewer? That to me is really an interesting challenge. So that's the part I like about it, that head trip of like getting on white boards and figuring it out, and doing prototypes, and looking at something, and making a mistake and trying something else. The Web is such a huge thing and web design, and web designers and web design shops, that are out there. I come at this not from that place of the web but I come at it from television. So that gives kind of a different experience and I have always tried to take a fresh approach to everything. It's sometimes a simpler approach. Even things like the simplicity that you see on the iPhone which is a -- if you get web experiences or application experiences on the iPhone, which have been simplified. They may be richer when you see them on a two-foot experience on your computer. That process of simplifying things is an interesting challenge and it's one that's been throughout my career. How do you make this work in a simple way but also be really engaging? So it has like-- so it has got all those roots. To me it's that difference between ultimate simplicity in interface and very intuitive but also having the rich components that are there. So, it's fully layered like we see in broadcast. It's probably that layering and the dynamics of motion. The things that interest me a lot are about innovation and I particularly lead that effort with this company, which is about at this time something new comes along, the iPhone comes along or a new settop box comes along or a new capabilities on a game box or something. It's just another screen. It's such an interesting process to be handed a new technology and you just think out of the box about this. You are always thinking kind of new and fresh and I like to think as we start the design process on a new thing, is just take stereotypes away. Just sort of say here is something new. What could this be? So some of the interesting projects that we are doing now that I really enjoy are the ones that we are working with-- it might be with Comcast, or with Time Warner, or with Sony or Microsoft on some new platform, some new technology and just imagining what that could be, really with some rigor, taking our user experience folks and really thinking about what the function of that is and that's what everything else hangs on and then going from there into what does that mean design-wise? So putting that blend of new thinking together to kind of create some of these new platforms.