Working with Dale

Andrew Keegan: Dale is an amazing, brilliant, wild-haired mad scientist. Colette Becker: Dale is the Chief Creative Officer here. You can really feel it in all the projects that happen here. Even if he is not in the room, there is a presence there. Andy Jonez: If you look at a lot of our projects, everything sort of has this distinct visual style because most of that art direction is coming from Dale. David Vegezzi: He always wants the best I think of every project. I think that he takes it always to that next level. Andrew Keegan: He is brilliant. He is well set his ways. He knows what he is talking about and having somebody with that kind of experience and that kind of knowledge behind you to work with is an absolute dream. It's kind of the reason I came to work here. Dale Herigstad: The things that I really enjoy about Schematic, about what's happening here at this company is the ability to work with other really talented people. I mean that's what gets me out of bed in the morning. I mean, being able to come into the office and I am a little tired, I've just have my coffee, and I walk into my office, which has a glass and there is like a sea out there. And suddenly, you see this activity happening and I get over and I know that there is a team over there. I can say something and it hits them a little bit and they head this way and they come back. I have got really talented and really fun people I am working with. Colette Becker: He is definitely thought of as a pioneer or someone who is ahead of his time, someone that's going to bring us into things that we haven't thought of before. Andy Jonez: We are doing CSI Interactive for Interactive TV. I think maybe 11 people saw it. Like we get the numbers and it'd be like six people logged on this week. But we would take these projects very seriously. Dale is always thinking this is the first step. He is always thinking about sort of where is this work going to lead. Jason Brush: He has a great vision for how people should be interacting with things and the way in which product should work and the way in which people should be able to control interfaces. He has been way ahead of the field for a long time in all of those regards. But for me just on a day-to-day working level, the most remarkable thing about Dale is his ability to map out visually a solution to a problem. Trevor Kaufman: Dale and I are mostly together in new business contexts. It's funny because I often think, Boy! This is a more traditional company. They might not really understand everything that Dale wants to tell them about new paradigms for television, or spatial navigation, or any of the ideas that Dale wants to put forward. I am universally wrong in those circumstances. Because what Dale is talking about and the things that Dale is addressing are things that every one of us think could be better about the way we navigate content and the way we think about organizing media. Andy Jonez: Everything is sort of make- believe land and we'd say, one day the technology is going to be able to do this and one day set-top boxes are actually going to be more like computers. We'd do these demos and they'd be fantastical almost. Now, they look kind of lame compared to what we can actually do now. David Vegezzi: Well, we have been really always trying to look at how far we can go with it and that the functionality of it is just taken to a level that it's a complete visual experience. Colette Becker: There is a whole thought process behind everything and there is a reason for everything. Jason Brush: We often ask ourselves what would Dale's solution to the problem be? After you have worked with Dale for a long time, you have a very-- I feel like I can hear his voice. So I can hear and I can see how he would solve a particular problem, which is really valuable for us because it allows us to tackle a huge variety of problems even without him being in the room and to understand that he is really driving the vision of the company forward. Dale Herigstad: It's so critical to work with great people here. They are all slightly crazy, like all of us. I mean we are creatives. We all have great quirks. We have got great --- if you look more carefully at their desks and you see that they all have something unusual they like doing. That's part of being a creative. We are not suit and ties here; we know how to have fun and bring some of your character to the process.