After having left my first job as a “multimedia designer” I now found myself in the centre of London during the summer of 2000 to start my new job as a “Senior Art Director” at the London branch of Vir2L Studios. It was going to be exiting, but I quickly found out I had to start at the bottom of the ladder again. The Vir2L adventure only lasted a year, but it was the year that changed everything…
I remember setting foot for the first time in the Vir2L London office (small temporary office unit) and feeling the buzz that was in the room. Everyone was frantically at work, music blaring through headphones, jamming like their life depended on it. One of the first questions I got asked by my new workmates was “So, whats your website?” — a seemingly innocent, and as I’d find out soon enough, routine question in the design world we inhabit. When I sheepishly answered I didn’t have my own site consternation errupted: “Dude! You have to have your own site man! Its what we do! We all have our own stuff going on!”.
Right. No pressure then.
Our flat in London — the “lounge”.
I shared a flat in central London with two of my workmates and it took the three of us the better part of the year to actually furnish it. Simple luxuries of furniture where an afterthought and we’d lived out of boxes literally — and used them to great effect to construct an entertainment set and a coffee table. No working TV either, so my trusty iMac served as a DVD player as we rented every possible DVD from the rental place down the street. I did have a proper bed though.
Hard at work at the Vir2L London office
I quickly got used to the high-flying dotcom mentality. Being a web designer was like a badge of honour, and there seemed to be a lot of us in London! Not that I met any of them regularly since I’d pretty much given up my social life in favour of design. I felt I had a lot to prove so I started working day and night on personal work, trying to keep up with the pace of everyone else.
Up until then I had never really considered creating self-initiated work and publishing it online, but because I was working alongside people like James (threeoh), Anders (Dform1), Bradley (Gmunk), Patrick (Supershapes), and my flatmates Erik & Phillip, I felt cofident enough to say to myself “If they can do it, I can too!”. Apologies for the blatant name-checking, I’m just trying to get a point across. Oh, and in the American office we had people like Michael Young and Justin Fines working.
I was in really, really good company to riff off.
Around August the whole Vir2L crew moved to their swanky East London warehouse space and from then on we pretty much spent every waking hour there, 7 days a week. Our daily routine would consist of getting in at 10AM (overpriced Starbucks coffee in hand), work until 6PM and then spend the evening working on our own sites until we got kicked out of the office. Repeat on weekends.
Inspired by the trend in webdesign of that period — that of very themed and object-driven releases (think VolumeOne, Future Farmers and the like) and abstract 3D — I started working on my own little corner on the web. It was only a few months ago that I was toying around with robot designs, and decided to evolve the concept further.
Atom 7, my Robbie the Robot
The result was Atom 7. I can’t remember why I settled on that name, I guess it sounded cool at the time… The highlight was a fake commercial I created, throwing everything at it: the tiny type, the spinning 3D, hyperactive flash bits rendered at 60FPS, layer upon layer of 3D shapes. You name it, it was in the clip. All because I wanted to prove that, yes, I could do those things too. Once completed I realized I got completely bored with it and moved on. So now — for the first time ever online… Atom 7:
Atom 7 from helloMuller on Vimeo.
Months went by, and I was still tooling away at my site. Out went the robot idea, in came a sort of abstract flash thing, which went out the door as well, and I was back at square one. I went back to Belgium for 2 weeks during christmas, and when I returned in early January a lot of things had changed overnight. The dotcom bubble had burst. Or at least there were some rather large cracks showing. We’d been hearing news of layoffs and company closures — companies like Oven Digital, Deepend and Razorfish were forced to close their doors, and finally the ripple had reached us. Half of the staff was on notice, giving them until May to find a new job. To my astonishment my job was safe, for now at least.
Another design for ximeraLabs that never made it online
Months passed and I still didn’t have a site. I finally registered ximeralabs.com around February 2001, as an incentive to stop messing around and actually put up something. So I started making holding pages instead of something more substantial.
The ximeraLabs holding page
While I was still fiddling around, James (Widegren) was working on the May 1st Reboot and asked me if I wanted to be part of it. The previous Reboot had proven to be successful, and this year he would open it to the public.
Of course I wanted in!
James added my site to the rapidly growing list of participants. I got listed on the first page at the 10th place, so I knew at least some people would click the link to my site. Better get my act together and do something… fast!
One night at the office we were all working on our sites, making sure we’d be ready for the now self-imposed May 1st deadline, when I was playing around with a Photoshop design I’d imported in Flash. By accident I’d created a colour swatch of the image and discovered I could draw shapes – with my image as its fill colour. RESULT! I was happy with the source image, but had no idea what to do with it. Now I did. I started breaking apart the image further, redrawing it, deleting parts of it, rearranging elements — and before I knew I had created a series of 10 different images out of just 1.
I ditched all previous ideas and decided to use these compositions as my site. I threw everything in Flash, added some pages — and the obligatory “Links” page and lo and behold, on the 1st of May – along with 1700 other sites – ximeraLabs officially launched. And just like that, everyone — in the design sphere at least — knew of me.
ximeraLabs version 1 (2001)
From that point things changed rapidly. Aside from constantly seeing the visitors rate of my site go up and up (forgive me, I was new at this, and thought it was incredibly cool to know that somewhere people were actually looking at my work), I used my newfound “popularity” to leverage some more exposure. Suddenly I was “one of the guys” and I started to randomly approach any project that was inviting designers to contribute: design books, magazines, web portals and the like and tried building a collection of personal work. The sky was the limit.
But then the sky got cloudy.
Around June we got a visit from the Big Chiefs, who flew in from the U. S. of A. (company laywer included) to let us know that “because of the current climate in the industry” (translation: “Our big clients don’t think this internet thing is gonna work, so they pulled out”) they had to let 95% of the remaining staff go. This time I was amongst the casualties, and I was introduced to the “American layoff system”: sign the papers, pack your personal stuff and GTFO! And so I did. I went to the local IT shop, got me an external drive, and went back to the offices in the afternoon (after the bigwigs had left), copied all my files and went home. And then went back to the office the next morning.
I didn’t have an internet connection at the flat yet since we spent most our time at the office anyway, so I used the office as my base for the next 2 months while I frantically put together a portfolio and for the first time started looking for work.
Not as easy as I thought it was going to be.
Next: 1998 – 2008, part 4: Can I haz job pls?
November 20th, 2008
interesting read…
November 20th, 2008
Great article.
November 20th, 2008
can’t wait for the next volume. I was wondering if Justin was going to make it into any of the posts. We’ve talked about vir2l a couple of times. Hes an instructor of mine at Pratt in Brooklyn.
November 20th, 2008
@ Christopher: Ah cool — Didn’t know that. Good instructor to have!
December 8th, 2008
he sure is. he has saved my life as a design student, after almost eight years in several design schools I was getting exhausted with hypothetical design projects, he gave us projects that we could explore on a bit more of a personal level.
May 13th, 2009
Ha! At least you had a proper bed. I slept on an old inflatable mattress from Argos for almost a year. The wallpaper still haunts me, still… I loved every second of the good old days ;)
Your old roomie…
May 13th, 2009
Oh yeah. And the cardboard “coffee table” we had in the beginning. Those were the days!