Thomas Walker is the president of the New York-based design firm GRAF/x, which specializes in publication, media, and corporate design. Besides working as a designer on the original Day in the Life series for Collins Publishers, Walker worked with Rick Smolan on the innovative book/CD-ROM packages “From Alice to Ocean,” and “Passage to Vietnam." Walker is currently developing and designing a series of cross-media projects integrating traditional book and magazine publishing with online Web-site development.

Walker:

Because of multimedia, we are seeing a lot more use of photography in general, and I feel the whole language of still imagery is expanding. We are becoming a much more visual, less text-oriented society.

With each new medium the aesthetics change, and that is especially true for multimedia and the Web. For example, if you use a digital camera to create images for your project you don’t have to worry about the cost of film. It becomes like shooting for a movie--you shoot a lot and then edit back at the studio. When you edit you aren’t looking for one perfect image, you are looking for sequences of images that tell a story.

When I edit pictures for use in multimedia and especially for the Web, I know that people want the biggest bang for the buck. They want information and speed. They will accept much less technical quality as long as an images appears quickly on the screen. For that reason I use custom color palettes a lot. I just used a photograph of the sky and clouds for a Web page and I actually dropped a few more colors than I should have, just to make the image file size smaller so the image would load on the screen quicker. But the effect worked. There isn’t much room for subtlety on the Web anyway, and monitors all vary. When we were working on the “Passage to Vietnam” CD-ROM we tested it on a dozen monitors and each one looked different. Now I just make sure that red apples appear red and trees appear green and there is enough tonal separation between the colors so that no matter what colors actually come up on the screen, they feel different.

Multimedia lends itself very well to the photo essay, but not in the traditional print sense. People want the option to explore in detail lots of images and not just a complete all-in-one picture. For that reason, the use of photography in the electronic media has to be multidimensional: you have to give people the option of going into the texture and detail of the image itself and then back to the overview, if they want. All the while, you have to provide a context for the images, create a narrative that holds everything together. This means working with the element of time, something that you don’t worry about in traditional western photography and art.

Currently, I get a lot of my inspiration from the artists David Hockney and Robert Rauchenberg, especially from their collages. They have created multidimensional works based on still images, and successfully used the passage of time in their pieces. This is very difficult to do and they have done it well.