massaging media conference

Massaging Media 2

April 5, 2008

1Monday, April 7, 2008

Hi there! I’m Rick. I helped found a company called The Barbarian Group.


Copyright © 2008 The Barbarian Group. All Rights Reserved. Confidential, etc. etc.

Who We Are

· We are a 75-person interactive marketing, consulting and design company located in Boston, New York and San Francisco.

· We were founded right here in Boston, MA in 2001.

· We love the internet and we love making things.

· We act as your “internet buddy” for brands, startups, entertainment properties, etc. - anyone who has a business or content that needs help with their strategy for moving that to the web.

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About The Barbarian Group: Work


What Design Meansto Us


Design is as important as ever.




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Print has been irrelevant to us from day one.


It’s never been about “creative” vs. “production” or “art” vs “commerce” for us.



The Mirrors

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The Mirrors

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But the technical challenges aren’t ignorable - they take up an incredible amount of our time.


The best design can’t come out of a technical vacuum.



Saturn NextFest

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What Design Means to Us

· Design is as important as ever.

· It’s never been about print.

· It’s never been about “creative” vs. “production.”

· The best design can’t come out of a technical vacuum.

· The best design designs for the audience, even when that audience doesn’t want design.


The best design designs for the audience, even when that audience doesn’t want design.


Our Experiences with Design and Education


A Little History



A Little History

· In the beginning, everyone was self-taught

– I was an economist working in interactive advertising, my co-founders were:

· A sculptor who was now working as a Flash developer

· A physicist who was now working as an interactive designer

· A lawyer who was now working as a web entrepreneur

· A novelist who was now working as a hard core developer

· A filmmaker who was now working as a Flash developer

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A Little History

· In the beginning, the schools weren’t delivering what we needed.

– Schools were still traditionally bound to “design” being primarily an aspect of print.

– There was “related” trade-type education available in broadcast motion graphics, product design, and game design, but they were specialized, siloed, and uncommon.

– “Design” and “technical” were separate disciplines, and the work we did required visual designers who had mastered the technical chops.

– There were lots of old-school art directors out there who were migrating to interactive who didn’t have the chops.

– However, our production process couldn’t handle a process where the two - technical and design - resided in two separate people because most of the elegant design solutions required technical knowledge.

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A Little History

· So novel approaches were needed:

– The interactive marketing industry rapidly outstripped demand for Flash artists, etc., causing prices to rise, and making a highly competitive environment where the best people wanted freedom to work on “the awesome projects.”

– So we set up a company that only worked on “the awesome projects” so we could retain the best people.

– This simple fact resulted in a totally different business model from traditional marketing companies, who took 90% boring jobs to get the 10% awesome jobs, because the best people weren’t interested in the 90% and didn’t have to deal with them.

– This lead to a completely different quality-based business approach, where design stayed top-level, because it had to in order to retain employees, and thus we could charge a premium.

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A Little History

· Slowly, two things began to change:

– First, our reputation was slowly cemented as a fulfilling design career path, and the resumes flowed in, allowing us to secure top talent with salaries significantly lower than competitors who did not place the same premium on quality.

– Secondly, the education environment began to change: our reputation teased out the schools that were doing things in an interesting new way (Emerson, RIT, Penn), and other schools saw that the internet wasn’t going away and started revamping their programs.

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Where it’s at now.



Where It’s At Now

· In many ways, the schools caught up to these problems:

– Many schools produce awesome candidates.

– We have a three-person team roaming a school circuit keeping an eye out for the best.

– We never used to hire recent grads - now we do all the time.

– Some schools - like the VCU Brand Center - are still having a hard time facing the blurring/confusion around account direction, creative, production and technical.

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Where It’s At Now

· The technology evolved

– As AJAX rose up, and Flash became more known for video (think YouTube videos), traditional software and UI design strategies could be applied to re-decouple the creative and the tech to some extent - enough that we could begin to hire traditional art directors again occasionally,

– However, the technologies from disparate fields - gaming, architecture, motion graphics, product design - all became relevant to what we do, and they are all still, for the most part, being taught in silos.

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Our Thoughts: Educating for Design in the Modern Age



Our Thoughts

· That last point was huge: “However, the technologies from disparate fields - gaming, architecture, motion graphics, product design - all became relevant to what we do, and they are all still, for the most part, being taught in silos.”

· This is still causing us tremendous problems.

· Let’s take the M&Ms project.

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Our Thoughts

· What 3D tools do we use?

– Architecture tools for the buildings?

– Candy design tools?

– Game design?

– Animation?

· The software packages are totally different, their uses all semi-applicable, and there may be an appropriate tool for one part of the site and not another.

· The people we need to work on this project may come from game schools, motion graphics schools, web design schools or architectural firms.



Our Thoughts

· In the end, we used a team consisting of:

– A product designer with a background in industrial design

– A web design graduate of Penn with a background in coding and engineering

– A technical developer specializing in real-time chat room environments, etc.

– A traditional illustrator

– A trade-school trained 3D designer versed in Maya and MelScripting

– A technical team lead consisting of a Flash developer and a backend developer

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Our Thoughts

· Then we had to teach the whole team the things they didn’t know

– The software packages they needed to use but didn’t know:

· Our illustrator had to learn the basics of Google SketchUp

· Our building architect had to learn the basics of Photoshop and Flash

· Our Maya guy had to learn the basics of Illustrator

· Everyone had to learn how to use the basics of Subversion and Trac

· The development team had to learn the basics of Flash and Maya

· The Flash guy had to learn Maya and integration with Flash Media Server

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Our Thoughts

· Of course this is an extreme example, but:

– As far as we know, no one is teaching broad overviews of the various toolsets available

– No one is thinking about developing toolsets that take the best from all of these and apply them to web use - this is obviously not the educators’ problem, but means knowledge is going to have to solve it, not new software packages

– We need cross-discipline top-level, hands-on classes

· Intro to Game Design for Broadcast Designers

· Intro to Architectural tools for Game Designers

· With hands-on training in the most popular software

– Finally, no one is thinking about shaping a process that evaluates a wide variety of potential tool sets - web tools, broadcast tools, etc. - and integrates them into a larger process

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Our Thoughts

· We solve this with the Barbarian Labs

– 20% time off from paying projects to delve into the new worlds

– Hopefully we get projects out of this that we can then sell to clients

– But at the very least, it gives us insights, learnings, etc., that the schools aren’t providing

– Our Flash developers learn Processing, or Maya

– Our art directors learn AJAX, Javascript, HTML

· We also fund a scholarship program

– Everyone’s taking classes in software applications, development methodologies, etc.

– Schools like The Big Nerd Ranch are popular

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Our Thoughts

· We do this because there’s nowhere else doing it.

· We build our designers from disparate bases, and then teach them the tools that their career and schooling missed.

· We’d love an institution that could help us with that.

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This is what the industry needs.


A designer equipped with these tools will be incredibly well-positioned for years to come.


Thank you!


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