The New Brand

In my notes from 1997 and 1998 I found this graphic from the last days of Fractal Design, immediately after the merger with MetaTools, and the start of the newly-formed company, which was to be called MetaCreations. It shows my irreverent take on typography, with letters verging on an alien alphabet. Perhaps this was my thinking in those days, clearly influenced by Star Trek: The Next Generation design and increasingly beginning to think that aliens were taking over my company.

The graphic was a last hurrah, buried in my logo-search stack. These were the papers that detail the search for a new company name and logo, begun as a result of merger. Those were turbulent days, full of interesting ideas that never made it. Here is another little sketch from that collection of the doodles drawn in those days when the meetings were long and the bickering was uncomfortable. I was already thinking about the metaphors for the idea processor.

Name search

First came the name search. The first edict, from John Wilczak (the MetaTools CEO and soon to be replaced) was that the name should contain "Meta". Once you put that flag in the ground, there are only so many names that can be chosen. We all bought into it.

John Derry and I thought up several meta-rooted names for the company. We centered around various concepts, like making: names like metaforge, metafactory, and metaforce. We also tried words around branding: names like metabrand, metaware, metafactor, and metacraft. Next we covered concept names like metapath, metaform, and metadesign. Of course, we also looked at location names like metaworld, metastage, metasphere, metawave, and metalevel. Combination names sometimes became useful, like metalith and metastar. We were going for simplicity and pith.

We had a hundred names to choose from, and three or four made the top of the list. But it turned out that they were always taken by one company or another, and so proved themselves to be unsuitable for our purposes.

In the end, the root word meta (meaning "on another level") was merged with "create" and we somehow found MetaCreations as our new name. We worked out the typestyle, using a PR branding firm called 30SIXTY, contracted by Sallie Olmstead. The result was a very good type treatment. One of their designs stuck, seen here. MetaCreations passed the trademark search and so we found ourselves in the position of needing a good catchphrase to go with it.

Catchphrase and Logo

At this point, we hired a new CEO and the branding began afresh. This cast us into disarray: the implications of three separate groups pushing in different directions. Let me introduce you to the three groups:

One group was Gary Lauer's group. Gary was the new CEO, hired by the board and taking on the challenge of merging two cultures with a third culture of his own. The second group was Kai Krause's group. Kai was the design thinker from MetaTools and the creative face of the company. The third group was John Derry and myself, Mark Zimmer. But, frankly, I took the lead because I was the representative to the logo group. As you will see, the three groups couldn't agree less. And yet we eventually found a logo. Here I show a doodle from a page drawn during the endless logo meetings.

The catchphrase Gary preferred was staid and traditional: The Visual Computing Software Company. The logos from his group were not unlike the ones from Claris in style. The other two groups saw the logos as pedestrian and frankly uninteresting. Here you can see one of the color schemes of his final logo set. The earlier ones were considerably more amateurish. This one features an M-shape with a bit of a shine nestling into it. My comments on this particular logo are unprintable, sadly: I will leave them to your imagination. Kai felt pretty much the same about this logo.

The catchphrase Kai preferred was genuinely clever: where great ideas are born. Also, John Wilczak, before he left, preferred start the migration, though I'm still not sure where he was going with that one. The logos from Kai's group initially centered on an egg - with the idea of hatching a new idea. Other groups just kept thinking "Meta lays an egg" as the headline. After a brief trademark search, we discovered Software Ventures had an egg with a shadow as its logo, and that was the final crack.

In the sessions for my group, John and I tossed around the creativity concept endlessly. One catchphrase was bringing creativity to you. Another was changing the way people think. Our final try was sparking your creativity. While fascinating and very ambitious, I still think Kai's catchphrase was best. Our logo designs centered on a hand - for software that was human-centric. The hand was the artist's signature from the days of the cave-painters. Other groups just saw "stop" - a hand telling you not to enter. Here, we placed it inside an oval form to suggest an egg.

All three groups had a basic problem - the other two groups opposed their design. So Gary, thinking his group was more equal than the other two, decided to make a presentation of his logo. Allowing us to choose the color scheme. Ah, that was a rough meeting.

This required Kai and I to work together on a new logo. I dredged up an old design: the trefoil knot. I had made this design in 1983 when working as a consultant for Auto-Trol (I was building them a 3D system for computer-aided engineering). I had resurrected this design when working on Detailer, the 3D Paint Program, adding a mirrored surface to it. Here we see a small version of this knot, produced in Detailer using a brassy look. Kai's people used Bryce to create a much cleaner, smoother nicely-tilted version of this knot, and added a slight soft shadow underneath it.

This shadow was eventually omitted and the catchphrase was changed once again.

This time I wasn't asked. As you can see, it became The Creative Web Company. The times were changing, and at this time, before the dot-com boom and collapse, everything had to be  naively covered with web-web-web. The trefoil knot had a nice reflection and self-shadowing, though. Kai and I approved the form.

After Kai and I decided to redesign the logo, he had his people design some new forms. Many of them were based on threefold symmetry, which I also tend to prefer. One designer, Athena Kekenes, produced some iconic figures that still hold up today. The first figures were triangular-symmetry organic forms that had a very interesting, yet somehow alien, lilt to them. With tree-like branching properties and spherical ends, it looked a bit like some strange form of sea-weed. You can see one of the designs here. We asked for some more ideas.

One was a cube that had a sphere subtracted from it. This, when viewed from the direction of a corner, had a six-fold symmetry that was quite pleasing.

Here you can see the cube, with the sphere subtracted. With Boolean operations in Bryce, this stuff just jumped right out of the imagination into the page.

When you look at it, it's a bit busy. It has a shadow, the three visible sides of the cube have different shades. The sphere has gradations. The objects even shadows itself!

I'm sure this is what Kai and Athena were thinking when they came up with the simpler version of the logo.


Here we can see the flower logo. It's very clean, simple, stylistic, and suggestive of 3D.

Negative space is used in two ways: the sphere is negative space when subtracted from the cube, and the flower is the result of looking through the negative space of the 3D form and coloring in the holes.

In some way, though, we found these cube-based logos to be too derivative of the Silicon Graphics logo. I even found the SGI logo in my notes right next to this one.

Kai's group never really gave up on the egg, until the trefoil knot became our focus. By that time we were tired of the process of logo search.

Here is an egg-derived logo that used the shape several times in negative and positive space to form an op-art logo. This held up better because it could be reproduced in black-and-white. As any good logo should.

But eventually we centered on the trefoil knot. It's iconic form was clear. Before any of his people had a chance to perfect the trefoil with reflections and shadows, he had his people do special black-and-white versions of the trefoil.

This version is exceptionally clever, using rotated versions of the knot silhouette in alternating colors, then subtracting out the middle.

Though we liked the line art reproduce-ability of this form, we thought it looked a bit too much like the woolmark logo.

In all, we spent too much time working on the logo. Gary, in his desperation, did an end-around and created his own logo and placed it on our products. This was done because, after all, we had to have something to put on shipping products. This was another logo based on the M (and, it seems, on Freddy Krueger).

As you can see, Gary even replaced the typeface we selected! His quest for a unified package design was next. This actually made us mad, because each product was a brand of its own and the entire concept of unified product packaging design seemed wrong.

What did we do to deserve this?

In all, I wasn't really satisfied with what came out of this process. Personally, I doubt Kai was either. Meta continued to create great products, nonetheless. Bryce, Painter, KPT, and Poser saw fantastic new versions. And Ray Dream Designer metamorphosed into Carrara, which was a very ambitious project and a great product in its own right.

And I just kept drawing new iconic logo designs. I knew that someday they might be useful to me. And someday the story would be told.

The Fractal Design Formula

There was a formula for creating great software at Fractal Design, where we created Painter. And it was built into our every employee. As friends, we shared the load. We all had our specializations. We collaborated. We argued, and forgave. We had a band, and performed sometimes at company summer parties. Like a family, we watched each other get married, have kids, go through tough times, and we cared.

Our products tended to sell themselves because they served a real purpose: to enable artists to do more. We captured the nuance of human expression and faithfully reproduced it, allowing the artists' style to come through.

And Painter, now advanced by Corel, still does that wonderfully.

John Derry

To build our products, we had the gang of 3: Tom Hedges, John Derry, and myself. We always worked in the same room. So our offices tended to be a bit strange. We might have been the nexus of development, but there were many others who put their hearts to the task. We had a formidable QA department headed by Michael Cinque, who came to us from Letraset; he worked with ColorStudio in the early days, Tom recruited him, and he came out west to join the Fractal team. QA people like Steve Rathmann, Stanley Veale, Steve Yatson, Joe Grover, Adam Croston, and others helped us perfect our products.

The gang of 3 were patiently overseen by our admins a: Kim Hinrichsen (now Kim Kern) and later Karen Carpenter (now Karen Cooper).

Our engineering always made me proud. Priscilla Shih (now Priscilla Cinque), Shelby Moore, Bob Lansdon, Glenn Reid, Christy Hall (now Christy Brandt), Vahe Avedissian, Scott Cooper, Matthew Kaufman, Qaren Van Brink, and Erik Johnson worked on the Painter family of products. In 1996, Fractal Design merged with Ray Dream, and this brought with it a fantastic staff of engineers like Pierre Berkaloff (who ran our combined R&D), Pascal Belloncle, Nicholas Barry, Emil Valkov, Damien Saint Macary, and Alexandre Clappier. Ian Sullivan was a framework guy, and I totally respected his work. He always kept up with demand and that couldn't have been easy! The Ray Dream engineers helped our engineering move forwards because their systems work clearly matched our own in sophistication. Larry Weinberg, the Poser author, was clearly in a class by himself. It put a totally new aspect to human expression into our products. Seath Ahrens became part of the Poser team in the late 90s.

Tom Hedges

Tom Hedges was always a great engineer. Between Tom and me, we had several advantages. His systems work got us so far, with innovations like tiled virtual image memory, plug-in capabilities, and scanner drivers. There wasn't a problem that Tom couldn't figure out.

Tom was the consummate finisher and polisher. He was the best debugger I have ever met, a true genius. And honesty was his policy always.

Sometimes Tom and I would get into an argument over how to do something, and we could really yell! But we always worked it out the next day. It was worrisome to the others at Fractal, but eventually they came to know it as "our way".

We had great customer support, too. Bud Daumen, Laurie Hemnes (now Laurie Becker), Karena Vance, and Andrea Godkin (now Andrea Reid) were very hard workers. And our products definitely needed support!

Our manuals were the best in the business and were prime examples of quality work. They were, almost without exception, full color and featured the work of many talented artists. The early manuals were designed by Steve Manousos and written by Karen Sperling. They certainly set the standard for graphics manuals in the early days of color Macintosh and Windows applications. But the floridly illustrated and well-organized Painter 3, 4, 5, and 6 manuals were designed, organized, and edited by Mary Mathis-Meltzer (now Mary Zimmer), who we affectionately called M3. Mary also managed a crew of writers and designers using these years, a herculean task to say the least. All supported by our IT guy, Tom Tilmant. The artwork for the manuals came from a stable of artists managed partly by Mary and partly by our PR person, Daryl Wise. On-staff artists and designers like Rich O'Reilly, Arena Reed, Brent Houston, Aaron Begley, and Brian Moose kept our looks fresh. And Rafael Rodriguez coordinated quite a bit as a Project Manager. By the way, Daryl was also responsible for all the large Fractal Design events, such as the Winter of Love concerts we held at the Fillmore during January MacWorld shows in the 90s. This was because he actually once worked with Bill Graham Presents.

Later, after the Meta merger, Sallie Olmstead ran our PR.

Like I said, we all had our specializations. And each of us did the work of many people.

Our sales and marketing team was also quite talented, and they were quite active. Steve Manousos managed sales at Fractal and Fred Brown managed sales quite a bit later when we were MetaCreations. Working for Steve, we had Karen Bria, Mike Popolo, Jennifer Andrew, Cori Garnero (now Cori Tuck), Dawn Hannah (now Dawn Bercow), and Katherine Howard (now Katherine Kehl). And Tad Shelby, who was quite capable, sometimes had issues with his bright red hair in Japan. Today he has shaved it all off, and I like the look!

Our international team was more often than not supported by those people who, without their constant help, we would have been utterly lost. I'm thinking of Gilles Lyonnet and Claude Swimer in France. Their endless enthusiasm, effort, and help will always be appreciated. And french artists Jean-Luc Touillon and Sibertin-Blanc Pascal seemed to keep support flowing.

As Fractal got larger, we recruited talent like our well-qualified and diligent CFO, Les Wright and our product managers Steve Guttman, Jon Bass, Lora Williams, Sandra Knox (now Sandra Heuckroth), Steve Cooper (the Poser product manager), and the impressive John Leddy. Our product managers were talented, organized, and they also put up with a lot from the engineers. Our operations guy, John Hartnett is one of the most professional people I have ever met. I'm sure he still is! And it seems I was constantly impressed by Cian Hughes. Our irish operations team were always top notch, period!

Down south in Hollywood, we had Dan DiPaola, who ran the office there and managed our representation with the studios and power service bureaus that make up the industries. He was famous for having the most powerful machines on the block. He introduced John and I to more artistic talent than I probably deserved. Like Dan Clark (who is responsible for many movie posters), Lee Varis, and so many others. Other friends like Tony Redhead at Electric Paint kept us in the know and made us aware of what it really took to create high-quality artwork for the studios.

While we thought that the Ray Dream merger was quite a complex and turbulent task, it actually went swimmingly. This was in comparison to the merger with MetaTools, when MetaCreations was born.

But from MetaTools came another set of talented engineers and product managers. Engineers like Ben Weiss (the smartest guy I know), Sree Kotay, Michael Herf, Ales Holecek, Moe Doucet, Javier Roca, and Scott Fegette. And designers like Kai Gradert and Phil Clevenger, whose command of UI is legendary now at Adobe. And, of course the wildly creative Kai Krause. Responsible for epic products like KPT, Kai's Power Goo, and Bryce, they really set a very high quality bar for their software. They always wanted the experience of using their software to be the greatest of all. And they succeeded.

For Painter 5, our theme A Monument to Creativity led me to construct Mount Brushmore for the Painter poster. Here you see Tom Hedges, John Derry, Kai Krause, and myself carved out of the stone of a mountain.

OK it was kind of corny! But we did have fun in those days. In a future post, I'll tell you more about how this piece was constructed.

MetaTools had an office in Princeton that did work that was destined to be a web-centric way of communicating images and 3D data. At some point, the Meta board of directors decided that the web was the future and then they wanted to sell off the software. I was recruited once more as CEO to do that. And that was that for our packaged software business.

I guess I will always look fondly upon the Fractal Design and MetaCreations years as some of the most creative years of my life. And I will always be proud of the formula that made it all work: the people.

I can't really remember all the people that worked at our company, but, when I do, I'll probably add them to this post. It was a unique place and time