Post Tool Design has been speicializing in the strange and beautiful since 1993 when principals David Karam and Gigi Biederman discovered a mutual interest in pushing pixels as students at the California Colleges of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). Biederman was a fine artist and Karam a former music and computer-science student who had discovered graphic design. "There's this separation between applied art and fine art that happens in all art schools," says Karam. "And she was one of the only people I knew who wasn?t making that distinction. She saw the weird drawings I was doing and realized that the computer can do more than just type."

Indeed. For one thing, it can make type move. Spinning type is a Post Tool trademark and the company even sells a spinnable type starter kit called Ultratype. Post Tool's type tricks began with a corporate id project for an interactive television station called TeleTV. Now the leit motif turns up in everything from the company's own Post TV, an online art installation recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum Modern Art, to motion graphics work for the Limn Gallery and Lollapalooza. "Unless we just want the type to whoosh back and forth on the screen, we've got to think of how it can become part of the narrative," explains Karam. "We did an exercise where we made a letterform have a gesture to try to see if that could communicate something."

The pair's big break came with a contract with Warner Bros. Records in 1993 to create the company's first interactive press kits. These floppy-based presentations, essentially precursors to such CD-ROM music zines like Blender, were Post Tool's initial foray into motion graphics. Featuring artist bios, sample songs, and information for reviewers and other members of the press, the interactive kits soon took on their own multimedia momentum. "I was never interested in doing design for the sake of design," recalls Karam. "I wanted to explore the way that human beings interacted with the computer." Basic questions such as the role of the screen and the relationship of information to experience were answered and explored, ultimately leading the way to the foundations of the Post Tool aesthetic.

Other early Post Tool projects continued the theme, relying on physical properties as formal elements within a presentation to experiment with the human/machine interface. One piece took a cue from the videogame Defender, extending the virtual space beyond the boundaries of the computer screen. "We were using nature as a model," says Karam. "You had this wobbly object that you could control with your mouse. When it would bump into walls, the screen would pan and you would see more information"

Today, Post Tool continues to push boundaries, in content as well as form. One man's garbage is Post Tool's object d' art. Influenced by Josef Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, Karam and Biderman enjoy exploring the tensions of found art in their designs. "I like the idea of appropriated art; bringing together modernist ideas and junk, logical thougtht and the fantastic," notes Karam. Even the firm's name, Post Tool, was appropriated: "The name was on the outside of the building when we moved in - we took it," Karam says. "It's a perfect desciption of the computer as both a medium and a tool," he explains.

Karam admits he has to continually reconcile a hyperactive conscious with the bottom-line demands of e-commerce. His solution? To keep pushing at the edge of computer graphics. "I think designers are fascinated with the interactive medium and so many just reproduce the printed page," says Karam. "I try to build little machines that deliver information through their mechanisms."

Lee Sherman is a freelance technology writer living in San Francisco.