Vialogix Featured In The Observer

The Charlotte Observer’s Business Monday section featured a story on Web designers that showcased Vialogix Communications, Inc. The story ran in the April 19, 1999 edition, and is republished below in its entirety.

Relaxed fit Web designers find comfort in more casual settings

By David Boraks

It’s 10:50 a.m. and Paul Hicks is batting a Nerf Pong ball back and forth with a colleague, taking a breather from his work as a multimedia designer at iXL in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood.

“I get in a couple of games a day,” says Hicks, dressed in jeans and blazer—no tie.

“Some of the new people have felt uncomfortable with it. They ask, `Is this OK for us to do?’ ” Hicks explains. “Of course you have to get your work done. If you slouch, you won’t last very long here.”

Hicks, 34, and his colleagues are among a new breed of mostly younger creative workers who populate the region’s Web and multimedia design firms. They inhabit a world of digital work (and play) that barely existed five years ago.

These companies, along with start-up software developers and New Media publishers, are helping forge a new way of thinking about work: both the physical, such as office layouts, and the intangible, such as teamwork and collaboration.

The fun and games belie serious business: Atlanta-based iXL, for example, creates Web sites and multimedia presentations for some of the nation’s biggest companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank, Delta Air Lines, Budget Rent a Car, BellSouth and Eli Lilly.

With $64 million in 1998 revenues, the company has expanded quickly by buying local multimedia shops, including Charlotte’s The Whitley Group in March 1997 and InTouch Interactive last June. It’s one of thousands of similar firms nationwide in a market that is growing quickly.

Worldwide sales of just one piece of this business – Internet development services – were an estimated $7 billion in 1998 and are projected to reach $44 billion by 2002, according to research firm International Data Corp.

At these firms, the pace of work is often fast, with constant deadlines, making it all the more important that employees have a way to release tension and have fun, too.

“There’s always somebody trying to squeeze a baby out. You just kind of have to grab some (free time) as you can,” says Hicks, who has an associate’s degree in advertising design from Central Piedmont Community College.

At Vialogix Communications on North College Street in uptown Charlotte, designers and project managers sometimes toss Koosh Balls over a chin-high wall separating them. Or when they really need to blow off steam they head to the parking lot for some touch football.

“We have a lot of fun here,” says Christin Templeton, a 33-year-old project manager.

“I’ve worked at a couple of companies in Charlotte, but I’ve never ever had the synergy we have here,” says Templeton, who has an advertising agency background.

Work schedules at these firms tend to be flexible. Nobody punches a time clock.

At iXL Charlotte, employees, including Hicks, begin trickling in around 7:30 a.m. Finally, at 10 a.m., it’s time for “home room.” That’s what the designers call the daily stand-up meeting where they discuss the day’s priorities and offer to lend expertise or just pitch in to help meet a deadline.

Throughout the workday, informal conversations – work-related or not – are frequent, thanks in part to the big open room where designers work.

“Since it’s not cubed off, you can’t get up and get a coffee without saying hello to a couple of people,” says Hicks.

Most days, Hicks leaves the office around 4:30 p.m. He says others work 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Collaboration is the rule, not the exception, Hicks says. One of the best examples may have been the multimedia kiosk iXL completed recently for Volvo Trucks.

Many designers and engineers – including some in the firm’s New York office – had a hand in designing, programming and building the project, a virtual truck stop with a touch-screen computer that let truckers design their own vehicle.

The relaxed atmosphere at many Web and multimedia firms comes in part from the nature of their work. Many new “digital workers” work from project to project, creating Web sites, multimedia presentations or other products for corporations or institutions.

“You put a lot of creative people together and you have a very open, interactive environment,” says Roxanna Drake, a 28-year-old designer at iXL.

To keep the work on track and draw on everyone’s skills, these offices are often physically open, giving writers, designers and project managers plenty of opportunity to collaborate. There’s little chance of hiding in an office or cubicle and working alone.

At Vialogix, a half-dozen designers and developers work back-to-back at two rows of outward-facing desks they call “the bullpen.” The arrangement lets them lean back and ask one another questions about work.

Brad Haden, a designer and artist by training, says he likes being able to ask for Web coding advice from a coworker in the bullpen.

“So much of what I do depends on the tech side,” he explains. “I end up brainstorming with people I never would have otherwise.”

Other kinds of Web firms, including news operations such as The Observer’s charlotte.com or Cox Interactive Media’s GoCarolinas.com, work on a 24-hour cycle. Designer/producers at those sites push out fresh pages of information all day, as news happens.

But they often try to do it with at least a touch of fun. GoCarolinas.com’s offices in a converted radio studio on North Tryon Street are filled with neon signs and colorful posters. They’ve replaced the radio station’s old “On the Air” light with one a little more appropriate to the medium: “On the Web.”

At iXL’s new South End offices, Web and multimedia designers work in a big open room with shiny wood floors in a converted 70-year-old mill building. A fluorescent-green inflatable space alien perches among the rafters and cutout characters from “The Simpsons” cartoon show stare out from exposed beams and ventilation ducts and white walls.

Big-screen Macintosh computers sit on every desk, bearing a variety of personal screen-savers, from leaping flames to characters from the animated movie “Antz.”

The lack of walls may mean less privacy, but employees of iXL Charlotte and other firms say the openness and constant activity create an environment where they can help one another.

It’s an atmosphere Mac Lackey, one of iXL’s executives, describes as “controlled chaos.”

“We work in an environment where there’s a lot of projects going on at once, so we’ve tried to set up a situation where we allow for a lot of collaboration, but where we can monitor all (the projects) and keep a sense of control over them,” Lackey says.

But it’s not all fun and games.

Multimedia and Web design shops are notorious for driving employees hard. Many work long hours and often go days without time off. There’s even a fledgling Web ‘zine called “Net Slaves” (www.netslaves.com) that’s trying to build awareness of the plight of Web workers. (In “Net Slaves” lingo, Web workers are the Cab Drivers, Fry Cooks and Wait Staff of the Internet world.)

Design firm executives are aware of this and often flinch at the suggestion Web work is not all glamorous. GoCarolinas.com declined to let employees be interviewed for this story, lest they say something uncomplimentary.

Many firms have ways of coping with the occasional deadline crunch. At iXL, the informal atmosphere helps. So does the compensation. Most employees who were working at the company as of Dec. 31 recently received options to buy stock in iXL Enterprises, which this month announced plans to sell stock to the public.

Stock options eventually could bring some iXL employees a nice windfall. In the meantime, they may give everyone at the firm an extra incentive to collaborate and make sure projects satisfy customers and contribute to the bottom line.

“It certainly gives you a big-picture view of the organization,” Lackey says. “Where your job might be to sit behind the computer and write code, you understand the implications of profitability.”

At much smaller Vialogix, there are no stock options. But there are free massages on Wednesdays and monthly happy hours where employees and clients join to discuss business trends and ideas over beer and snacks.

Sometimes, Vialogix gives its employees extra time off. The firm’s Bryan Skelton recalls a seven-week period last summer when he and co-workers worked long hours to complete a project for First Union. “They gave everyone an extra vacation day,” he said.

There’s always the reward that comes with working in an environment that values your ideas and creativity—and allows flexibility in your work schedule.

Dave Conlin left a corporate Web design job at Carolinas HealthCare System eight months ago to work at tiny Interactive Knowledge, a Web and multimedia design firm in Charlotte’s North Davidson Street neighborhood.

“The corporate climate was really one of the biggest factors,” Conlin says. “Here, I have autonomy, and I can actually directly affect things.”

Conlin, who has a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Georgia’s Savannah College of Art & Design, enjoys not having to create amid a corporate hierarchy.

“There’s not really a chain of command here and I have a lot of responsibility,” he says.

Conlin is 28, the average age for Web and multimedia designers at firms in the Charlotte area, employers say.

Their youth is yet another factor in helping to create open, collaborative environments.

“It definitely changes the atmosphere,” said Drake, the iXL designer. “The way business is conducted is very different from, say, how my father (an engineer) runs a meeting. It’s much more relaxed, probably much more open and honest.”

Do older employees agree?

“It’s more dynamic, more fun,” says Mike Dermody, iXL Charlotte’s creative director and at 42, one of the office elders. “They (younger people) are more open to things when they’re still at that stage of their careers. There are fewer doors closed and less baggage.”

Such an atmosphere is essential, he says, for successfully creating Web sites, presentations and one-of-a-kind trade show displays.

“How do you create and deliver an intangible product like a Web site, that has a whole lot of business implications?” he wonders aloud. “We’re constantly creating and reevaluating processes.”

Such an environment is not just good for the product, but for morale, too. In two years with iXL and a predecessor that merged into it, Dermody says, one designer has left.

All of the nearly one dozen people interviewed for this story spoke enthusiastically about their work, and all seemed unwilling to trade it for something else.

“I’m having a great time,” says iXL’s Hicks. “I feel like I have so much creative freedom and that these people want my creative input. . . . It’s very satisfying.”

Says Vialogix’s Skelton: “I love my job. My friends hate me.”