My Design in Pop Culture
My Design in Pop Culture
OCTOBER 13, 2021
16 years ago I got an opportunity to completely rebuild and redesign one of the most famous movie sites on the Internet. With over 30,000 articles at that time and hundreds of thousands of community members, it was a juggernaut. Because of it's notoriety, the site was spoofed in pop culture.
Seeing a Bizaro version of my design on the Simpsons was and is amazing. Somewhere in that cartoon universe, sitting at his desk, is a yellow version of me. I'm Simpson's canon. NBD.
Any Given Sundance episode 418, season 19.
It wasn't the only time my design was remixed. Here it is in the movie Meet the Spartans. My Kevin Bacon number to Carmen Electra is 1.
Here it is in a Penny Arcade strip from May 9th, 2005.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/09
The design for the site was very particular to the owner. I liked the challenge and launched the site on February 2005. Yep. Before the iPhone even existed. The community members were famous for being a pack of wild animals and after launch I spent 2 days making edits and responding directly to every who had a gripe or wanted more information on the design decisions. Spoiler alert. My nome de plume on the site was Doc Falken.
An interesting side note to all of this. Typically software design and development is akin to building sand castles. They don't last very long as there is always another interface update or features change. This website design defies all of that. I haven't touched the site for over a dozen years and yet the site still has most of what I designed in place. It is a testament to a community that doesn't want change but also a stubborn owner.
During my time working on the site, the Texas Longhorns won the National Championship. I got an opportunity to edit one of the famous Cartuna animated gifs. It was derivative but lots of fun.
Coda. In the years since I did some design and dev work for Harry (over 15 years ago), allegations of sexual assault circulated and from what I've read they are disgusting if true. I don't know anything about that and was never in a room or conversation where horrible things like that happened or were brought up. I hope those women find peace. I hope a resolution happens.