Red Landscape

(1996-1998) - Before the internet came about, the popular digital distribution media were CD-Roms and floppy disks. I was working for Waters Design at the time in the early days of my career and had done a few playable floppy disk demos for our clients, and the primary limit to design and production was the meager 1.4 megabyte file size limit. It was always a challenge and a lot of time was spent trying different ways of compressing images.

One of the techniques I tried one day was to take a 640x480 background image (that was full-size monitor resolution back then), reduce it to 320x240 pixels, and then resize it to fill the 640x480 space. Since it was a background image, the loss of resolution might not be so bad if we were in a crunch for disk space. This led me to think, what if I took a 40x30 pixel image and blew it up to fill the space? I started making some random pixel drawings, up-sized them to fill the space, and thought that looked pretty dope. The file size was practically zilch since the original image was so tiny, but the effect of it filling the space was pretty strong. I then started making some animations with these tiny images and had so much fun, I just kept making more and more.

I don't quite remember how I came about deciding to turn these into playable floppy disk demos, but it just became a creative outlet for me to make drawings, cartoons, video game commentaries, and just about any random video loop or interactive page I could come up with. Each floppy disk demo consisted of a 40x30 animated menu screen and 4 chapters worth of randomness. On top of that, I added audio loops for each menu screen and chapter, adding to the challenge of cramming as much as I could into the 1.4 megabyte limit.

I didn't really know what to do with them, and purely out of a random idea, I curated a list of agencies and other random people to mail them to. I created and mailed exactly one per week. I guess I was a bit of a troll back then, because I didn't include a note or any contact information, and I just imagined how funny or odd these people must think this is when they get this random disk each week, pop it into their computer, and see this weird-ass shit. One company did manage to track me down, since I always put my name in the bottom corner in small type, and they offered me a job, but I decided not to respond to maintain the oddity of it all.

My goal was to get to 100 of these, but around #45 came the emergence of the internet as a marketing tool, and the fairly immediate death of the floppy disk for promotional purposes. I created a few more targeting the internet as the platform, but without the 1.4 megabyte challenge, it felt somewhat meaningless. I don't know what it was about that silly file size limit, but it just wasn't fun without it. I made a final push to make it to 50 just to get to a round number, but the creativity had been sapped out of it. 50 sounds cooler anyway.

When I was done with them all, I decided to submit them to some award competitions for the heck of it, not expecting anything at all, and it ended up getting accepted into all of them, including the Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual 4, PRINT Digital Design & Illustration Annual 6, and HOW Annaul Self-Promotion Competition. I actually received a call from one of the judges for Communication Arts and was told that while they don't award 1st place, 2nd place and so on, if they did, they would have awarded 1st place to me. I was delighted to hear that. Little did anyone know that essentially, even I had no idea why I did it at all.