Dec 19, 2006 Legacy

A Talk with Jessey White-Cinis From Stolen

Jessey White-Cinis, co-founder of Stolen.la and long-time client of (mt) Media Temple, recently came out to the island of Oahu, Hawaii to work with a newly obtained client. Since he was in the neighborhood, Oahu based Jason Mcvearry, (mt) Partner Director, decided to hook up with Jessey and conduct a small interview while they caught a local surf break.

board meeting

(mt): Jessey, aloha and welcome to (mt) Media Temple Hawaii! Lets start off by talking about how your trip has been so far and what you’re doing out here. I personally travel quite a bit for work and relish the trips that double as vacations, so maybe you can touch on your pseudo nomadic work style and how it affects your work.

[jc]: Aloha, thanks so much. The reason that I am in Oahu is to oversee and lend some ideas to an up-and-coming clothing brand based here on the north shore. Thomas and I became involved with a group of pro-surfers about a year ago and since then have helped them launch a small clothing line and surf-team branding. Mind you, we did not design their clothing or logo as this was already done, but did build out a website, online store and an advertising campaign for them.

Since being here I have been helping their business managers figure out how to branch out and explore more grass-roots ways of marketing the clothing and spreading the north-shore lifestyle. This includes working with videographers to help put together video-casts, teaching all of the surfer’s how to blog, post audio and video and help become expert self-promoters.

(mt): Stolen.la is you + Thomas Brohdal, who is well known for his illustration style while you are a renowned PHP programmer. How did that relationship come about and how do you two principally influence each other?

[jc]: Well, I guess I can begin to tackle this question by stating that as you know, the web industry is rather incestuous. Thomas and I first met many years ago thru some mutual friends. At the time I was working for Epitaph Records and developing a site for them with Mike Buzzard of Cuban Council and Greg Huntoon of (mt) glory and more recently GoFarm. Thomas had known the two of them for some time thru his dealings with Surfstation and was brought in on the project to do some comps (which later became the final designs).

Thomas, at this time was still living in London, and being that I have tended to spend much time there through different phases of my life, we naturally ended up meeting again. After a long summer of hanging out, talking politics and building some fun little internet projects, conversation started to sway much more to the idea of working together on a more permanent basis. Actually, the funny thing is that the moment we decided to start the company, we took a photo so that we could remember it, just in case it actually happened.

The Beginning

“… I didn’t say it was a good picture”

(mt): What project you’ve completed with Thomas stands out in your mindas the ideal collaboration and why?

[jc]: It’s hard to really pick anything that I feel is the ideal collaboration since the majority of our projects have a very similar work-flow. The majority of our “collaboration” happens at the very beginning of a project, when we brain-storm, try to come up with new and interesting features and take a stab at doing something that may already be established and giving it a spin. Honesty, the projects that I am most excited about, are yet to be released. The first being a cool micro-site for a stroller company that has a 7 language CMS and some fun back-end features, and of-course our largest project at the moment, the new Surfstation.

(mt): What’s happening with Surfstation?

[jc]: Haha, isn’t that always the question… Since starting the company we have always had the development of Surfstation on the back-burner, as we were much more worried about keeping our clients happy than spending time on our own internal projects. Finally we have managed to get to a point, almost two and a half years after the fact, where we can work to bring some of our ideas to fruition.

The first of these projects was to build out a small t-shirt line called Stat-Attak which sets to help raise awareness about troubling statistics in our world thru simple, yet beautiful Bauhaus style designs. Along with this project we staged a launch party and art show featuring large-scale pieces by Thomas and photography by our good friend Peter Reid of OurCommon…. as for Surfstation, we started working on it full-time and will be launching it at the beginning of 2007… for real this time…We are actually somewhat happy with the fact that it has taken us this long to get working on it again.

We really feel that within the past year, the abundance of great Web 2.0 successes and failures has really helped guide us in a way that we can now build a more successful website, aimed at a much more navigationally educated audience.

(mt): Being a small shop known for doing original, “hot” work, do you find it difficult to work with some of the huge brands you work with? How do you cut the red tape?

[jc]: Well, I think that dealing with any client has it’s ups and downs. We have been pretty lucky thus far and have had an overabundance of clients that have been great to work with. Most recently we have been doing quite a bit of work for The Walt Disney Company, and although at first we had imagined that many of these “red-tape” issues would be coming up, we have found them to be incredibly responsive to new ideas and to a certain extent, explorative designs and functionality. I suppose that is one of the benefits of being primarily concentrated on doing so-called “hot” work; when the client comes to you, they are typically already aware of your work and understand the direction in which they are going to be pushed.

(mt): How big was the biggest wave you’ve surfed? (not referring to web 1.0 or 2.0 bubble) Worst wipe out?

[jc]: Haha, I would have to say that I am much more a fan of a nice, shapely, chest-high left, than a double-over-head widow-maker. To answer your question though, I would have to say about a 12ft+ right/close-out day down in Baja. I did however this week fulfill a child-hood dream of surfing pipeline here in Hawaii and having Kelly Slater catch the wave right before mine. Definitely no-where on his level, but it was a fun experience just the same.

(mt): What is Stolen doing differently to push design and functionality forward? Include some links to work please.

[jc]: Well in terms of design, I couldn’t be more lucky that to work with someone as naturally talented as Thomas. Thomas has always had a way of pushing the envelope with his designs while still keeping in mind, very technical site functionality and navigational issues.Even in simple little ways, Thomas is constantly coming up with great organizational and navigational advancements. Most recently some of the navigational designs that he came up with for BVG (the orange bar at the bottom) and honestly the new Surfstation tools, I have been blown away with… you’ll all see them soon.

Functionally, I have been very proud of developer tools we have built such as CacheCrop, our OpenSource image-manipulation tool, or our ‘RAD’ CMS framework. Even though the site has changed quite a bit since it’s launch (we are no-longer working on the design of it), the site we built for The Guerrilla News Network (GNN), is functionally one of our most impressive. The site itself was very “pre Web 2.0”, but was based on a large user community and all content on the site is democratically advanced by the users. We like to think of it as a primitive version of Digg that also features a very tight user-community. The engine that we built for it is based on site “clout” which we explained to the users as “rank”. The premise is that the more content a user provides that is accepted by the community, the more a user is able to do and the more weight their vote has. At the time this had not really been done to the level that we took it and although it was hard to get off-the-ground, it has really paid off for the independent news community.

(mt): What are you working with besides PHP?

[jc]: Honestly, the usual suspects: MySQL, Javascript/AJAX, Flash, PERL, C, Shell scripting… I also get the opportunity from time to time, to do audio (my first love) and video work on some projects.I have been pretty reluctant to hop on the Ruby bandwagon and have found myself to be more of a traditionalist when it comes to my coding. Hopefully I will not miss the boat as a new generation of programmers are raised learning on pre-existing application frameworks.

(mt): What are some of your favorite Web apps your currently using?

[jc]: I unfortunately fall into the same category that many programmers do, I typically write my own web apps. The thing about programmers is that once you see something done, you immediately think of twelve different ways that you can improve upon it… I guess that is what makes the OpenSource world work so well. As much as I am a huge fan of the whole new boom of web applications finally being pushed out, I have been taking issue with the lack of integration that has been happening on a whole with the applications. I many times tire of creating accounts all over the web to do the smallest of tasks.

I honestly think that companies such as YouTube and Flickr really got it right from the start, they let you output their content for use anywhere on the web, no-questions asked.I typically don’t use the applications that I find the most impressive. I love del.icio.us, but I usually just use my Firefox bookmarks or publish to our internal “LinkShare” program we built. I’m incredibly impressed with Flickr and have been since the very start; by and large I think it is one of the most impressive sites on the web, however, I usually just moblog most of my images from my cellphone directly to my own site, AlphaDecay.com.

The web applications that I use the most often are probably digg, last.fm, roundcube, and of course the all powerful google (maps, local, analytics, checkout and video). If we are still counting the poorly designed and horribly coded MySpace.com in the Web 2.0 revolution (I know many people count it as the catalyst), I suppose you could tack that one on to the list as well.I should mention that as a business owner, I feel that applications such as BlinkSale and 37 Signals ever-popular BaseCamp really represent a new way of doing business and take much pressure off of small companies.

(mt): Where do you get your inspiration from? Does the desired functionality outlined in a project typically drive how you approach your work or do you have a set approach?

[jc]: Music, fashion, travel, friends, conversation, etc, etc, etc…I think inspiration is an ever-present thing and changes drastically with time. I think that on a project-to-project basis your ideas, ideals and inspirations change and are reflective of your current likes and dislikes. For instance, in design, you can see trends very blatantly. Things such as the 45 degree angle, the glass effect and more recently “the bevel”, as we call it around the shop, tend to take over the majority of the designs that are rolling out at a given time. Because of this, you tend to want to stay in front of the curve and look outwards from typical web-design for your inspiration.

One of my favorite things about working with Thomas is that he is not only a great designer, but he is also an amazing illustrator, photographer and artist. Because of this, his designs tend to lean more towards being visually stimulating on their own as pieces of art rather than following the current design “norms”.

In terms of functionality, the most inspiring thing for me is having new toys to play with. The thing that most people in the design community do not realize, is that the programming side of building sites is developing almost just as fast as the design side, if not faster. Because of this, the simple addition of a new server-side video library, or a an API for building PDFs on the fly can easily inspire you to no avail. The problem with many of these things is that browser constraints, server load or any number of other technical hurdles can keep these cool new ideas from coming to fruition. This is why it has been so great to have such a close working relationship with a hosting company (Media Temple) for all these years.

The programs that have inspired me the most:

Thanks so much for having me here at (mt) Hawaii and for all that you have provided to the design community over the years! Mahalo!

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