Interviewed by Mark Yuasa
Interview Date: Friday, December 17, 2004
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Dave Shea of CSS Zen Garden and Mezzoblue fame. Mr. Shea took an hour-and-a-half out of his busy schedule to meet with me a week before Christmas. This interview was conducted at a Seattle's Best Coffee on Granville Street on a cool, sunny day.
Your Company, Bright Creative, was formed this year. Can you tell me about what led you to form Bright Creative?
DS: I started out in the industry about, it’s a little fuzzy but we’ll say since '98-'99. I came to this town (Vancouver) through a combination of interests. I was either doing a lot of programming before then and had a bit of an artistic background.
Eventually I realized that the Web was a great way to combine both.
Technically, Bright Creative started this year in early 2004. I’ve been working on the company itself, mostly part-time throughout the year. I’ve also been writing a book in there, and working with another company in Vancouver.
2005 is going to be the first year of doing Bright Creative, full-time, on my own. It’s still very new and I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing. A year from now I’m going to have a completely different story.
When did you start the (CSS) Zen Garden project?
DS: The early thinking for that began in late 2002, probably September or October. I came up with a couple of concepts for doing the style sheet switching. They really weren’t that interesting. I’m more-or-less sheltered because I was involved with some other things at the time.
Then, I think it was March 2003, Wired’s search engine, HotBot.com ran this contest where everyone designs their own CSS template for submission and you could win an iPod. Long story, short, I won that contest but they would give me the iPod because I was Canadian. I was so mad about it but… what are you gonna do?
It turns out that that wasn’t such a big problem. It led me to think, "There’s a better way to do this." If you’re gonna do this, "everyone submit a style"-thing, it’s gotta be run as a project. If it’s going to be run as a contest, it’s gotta be done right. They just didn’t do it right. I thought, "Why don’t I take this project I was working on back in October and develop it?"
The actual Zen Garden site itself launched on May 8, 2003 I believe. It’s been an absolute torrent of submissions.
MY: I’ve seen the list of styles. It’s quite long.
DS: The style sheets are only half the story. There are about 150 official designs on there to date, and over 500 total submissions so far. If you filter out the ones that didn’t make it onto the site for whatever reason, and the people that submitted more than one, I’d say we’re probably sitting on 500 people who’ve submitted, or more! That’s from around the globe, every continent, and many individual countries.
It’s since started to show up in books and magazines. So it’s been a really wild year-and-a-half.
Submission quality has been going up, and the general effects being used… it keeps getting better and better all the time.
I just added a couple (1, 2) the other day that were submitted by a 14-year-old kid from Singapore; they’re absolutely amazing. This kind of work makes me go, "I wish I could do that!" Seeing that bar being raised is amazing and rewarding.
MY: Watch out for those 14-year-olds!
End of Part I. Check back soon for the continuation of Raincity Studios' interview with Dave Shea.