Trying to pigeonhole a creative space like Gladeye is not something anyone should attempt without first drinking at least three cups of good, strong coffee, and considering I’m only yet on my second for the day I won’t even go there. Looking through their online presence it’s clear from the outset that these guys have their fingers in more digital pies than your average studio – interactive, digital, web, games, applications – the list goes on. Gladeye’s portfolio is also one to make you drool with clients such as global megastars Google, and local talent Deep animation in the mix. We caught up with their creative captain Tarver Graham.

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Please tell us about yourself?
My name is Tarver, I’m 32. I began my career in creative arts pursuing film making. I directed a couple of short films, several music videos, and later TV commercials. I also learned After Effects, and that led to a job doing visual effects for Hercules and Xena [Warrior Princess]. This was mostly wire-removals, various explosions, and compositing green-screen elements onto background plates for scenes where someone falls in a bottomless abyss. Pretty formulaic stuff, but it was a good lesson in production techniques and tight deadlines.
Both myself and our senior art director, Guy, are self taught. We have a couple of computer science degrees on staff at Gladeye but no formal design training. Apparently Guy has a BA. I’ve never seen it but I’m sure it comes in handy around the house.

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What do you love about the creative industry?
Mostly we just like making beautiful things. It’s a bit like a drug. When you’ve created something you’re happy with, and which you know is going to be effective, you get this sort of rush because you know it’s just right, that it communicates something even if that something is just a particular mood or tone. I love the sense of craft. It’s incredibly satisfying to invent something from nothing.

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Can you tell me about the interactive work Gladeye does?
We try to make our work stand out and to give each project its own unique character. Each website or piece of interactive is treated as an original design project. Websites in particular can be very samey. They’re often treated like a commodity, and lots of designers lean on template layouts and formulaic designs. It’s a fine line because you need to accept that online people have very short attention spans and usually you don’t have time to educate them on a new type of navigation technique for example, so sometimes you can’t experiment as much as you’d like. The challenge is to build interfaces that are unique and exciting, but also intrinsically functional and intuitive to use. We’ve learned from trial and error. We’ve gone just a little too far a couple of times (I won’t say
which times) but we’ve learned from our mistakes and I think we’re pretty good now at finding a good balance between originality and usability.

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How would you describe the Gladeye ethos/ style?
We consciously try to do work that awes people – work that grabs and holds their attention and that they ultimately want to come back to again and again.
I don’t believe there is a difference between design and development and we tend to work both simultaneously, rather than having one team do dev and a separate design team come in to add a ‘look’. It’s all design. In some circles design has come to mean this thing that goes on like a skin, which is hugely misleading. I think that view comes out of a print outlook, but interactive is more related to, say, furniture design or car engineering that it is to print. You’re building things people have to actually use. Design is everything from the colour of the button to how the button reacts and what it does to how you want the user to feel before, during, and after they click that button.

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Can you tell us about some other projects you have worked on that stand out for you? What makes them special?
A favorite project right now is our own new website. It was an intensely personal project. It went through about seven thousand revisions and the whole team was involved. It also combines some of the best of what we do – humor, nice design and animation, some unique interface tricks and solid integration with a number of third party APIs. The site is complimented by sound design, which we engineered in house and which is quite subtle but I think helps to create the mood.

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Why is research and development so integral to business – especially interactive and web building?
Research is vital because interactive is still only vaguely defined and is evolving constantly. Research as far as learning new techniques is also crucial if you want to stay in interactive for more than about six months. But R&D that involves inventing your own techniques, or re-combining established techniques in new ways is harder and more time consuming but ultimately much more rewarding.

How do you know something will work on the web – or it won’t? What sort of testing do you do?
You don’t know. You guess by gut instinct and experience, you build it, then you test it. It’s no good testing on paper or with wireframe models, because it’s not the same, just as a storyboard is not a film. You need to give people a complete experience, and design subtleties matter. When you’re testing something you know very quickly if it doesn’t work. It only takes watching over the shoulder of half a dozen people to see if they’re missing that button or this piece of interface logic.

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If someone comes to you wanting a spiffy interactive experience/ website built what process do you follow to make it happen?
1. Define goals. What’s the proposition, purpose, target market, media. Targets should represent genuine brand-savvy engagement metrics: sign-ups, time spent, games played, fans generated, messages sent, widgets sold, etc.
2. Determine ways to measure if and when those goals have been met.
3. Prepare a concept / proposal / scope of work / budget with the client. Make sure they’re involved and understand what we’re doing and why.
4. Experiment. Fail. Experiment again.
5. Craft something awesome and original.
6. Measure against the goals, and react and update if necessary.

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Do you have any advice for anyone wanting to do what you do?
You might think that you need to go out and try to be completely original right away. That’s not really true. It’s worth noting that great painters and sculptors of the renaissance worked in studios where they weren’t allowed to produce their own original work until they could perfectly copy the old Greek masters. By all means experiment and be creative and original in whatever way takes your fancy, but make sure you learn your craft. Ideas are easy. Craft is difficult. Start with the hard part, even if that means being ‘inspired’ at first by other people’s work that you like. It worked for Da Vinci.

www.gladeye.co.nz