Company location: San Francisco.

We own and run Ignition, an information design studio. Two of us are full-time. We staff up with contractors on a per-project basis. The people we hire (such as programmers, illustrators, etc.) come to our office for meetings and, in some cases, short-term production activities, but much of their work for us is done elsewhere.

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• We solve big, complicated communication problems for clients. We work in all media including CD-ROM, print, and the Internet.
• We also teach seminars on how to manage the process of developing interactive communication projects.
• And we initiate commercial projects of our own (CDs, books) that are sold through retail channels.

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To define our business and project objectives, and make sure they are met.

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There are no "typical" days. But in general we spend about 25% of our time on client meetings and consulting; 50% on design and production, and 25% in business development, administration, and overhead.

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We both have highly diverse backgrounds. Ray has worked in instructional design, graphic design, and technology marketing. He can also program (though he prefers to have other people do it), and routinely uses many authoring, audio, and graphics tools. Amy has worked in scientific publishing, educational product development, corporate communications, and business development. Both Ray and Amy do project management, information/instructional/interface design, writing, user testing, media licensing, public relations, etc. for Ignition's projects.

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We both quit jobs at other companies, so we could concentrate on projects that we thought would be interesting and useful. We're making up these jobs as we go along.

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The work days in this business are about 16 hours long, because this is still a new technology and everything that can possibly go wrong, does. So we advise people to do what we do: work on projects because you think they're interesting and useful. Then you won't mind so much that you'll have to choose between sleep or having a life outside work.

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last update 1 August 1997 by eboling@indiana.edu
Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
URL = http://www.indiana.edu/~iirg/ARTICLES/working/kristof.satran.ignition.html