AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts has a site on User Experience called Gain. Ironically, it takes quite a bit of patience to navigate. If you do manage to find your way around, you might come across an interesting graphic illustrating the distilling of the many pioneering web-firms into the few struggling behemoths we have today.
Because their site is based in flash and pop-up windows, I can’t link to it. How’s that for #$!@ing user experience. They do have a PDF version of the chart, but it obscures the interesting data in its own totally X-treme way (note to graphic designers, most of you suck).
Since I can’t link to it and even if I could, you’d be annoyed by the flash interface, I’ll sum up the most interesting info with words (they can be so handy sometimes).
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Razorfish Avalance CHBi Spray Network Sunbather I-Cube TSDesign Lee Hunt Assoc. Medialab AG |
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Studio Archetype Sapient Adjacency E-Lab |
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Rare Medium i/o 360 Circumstance |
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| = | Razorfish | = | Sapient | = | Rare Medium |
Oddly, Sapient also designed the website for AIGA. Hmmm… They should read some Edward Tufte.
re: AIGA’s Gain site.
Indeed, it’s now about two years old and no one’s bothered to touch it since. I’m sure Sapient has more to worry about, like morphing themselves right out of the Experience Design business and into the Big Consulting business.
Who’s left on that (rather neat)chart? There are some small firms around somewhere, but Rare Medium’s gone from the biz, Razorfish is marginal, and Sapient’s just the last man standing of the three.
Oven Digital is gone too I think. I remember of the early work of these shops before they were swallowed. Early Studio Archetype work (including the original IBM and UPS sites) had a strong and solid trademark style that I quite admired. Adjacency also had the coolest animated gif menus of any site ever (except maybe the spinning top menus at k10k.