Titans of Tech


BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Senior Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

During the technology industry’s peak at the turn of the millennium, tech tycoons like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a handful of others were leading the charge. To chronicle their achievements, former tech-centric network TechTV commissioned the weekly biography show “Titans of Tech.”

Capturing the essence of these captains of industry lent itself to a typographic approach for the show’s graphic design. Words, both descriptive and defining, were chosen to characterize the personalities of those leaders being portrayed.

Much like an infinite crossword puzzle, these words snake and slide into view, forming a grid of intensifying descriptive language. As more words enter the grid, they begin to form the faces of these iconic titans, until only faces comprised of the data-matrix remain.

To accomplish this, the words were individually animated to travel along the grid, with grayscale values of the positive and negative spaces used to create the facial definition of the featured individual. At the time, my skill at coding expressions wasn’t advanced enough to achieve the given effect procedurally. So I settled for the old-school frame-by-frame approach to the animation. Time consuming, but effective.