Multimedia design studio
"Wacky", "slick", "cool", "wild"... These are some of the words often used to describe the work of Tactile Media, a multimedia studio based in the Water Tower building of downtown Campbell, California. For 14 years, Tactile Media has applied its unique creative vision to projects involving graphics, interface design, application development. Catering mostly to San Francisco Bay Area companies, Tactile's client list ranges from startups to Fortune 500s such as Apple, Logitech and Sony.
For years, Tactile created only graphics for their clients' applications -- no programming work was involved. "Clients would come to us and ask us to design an appearance for their software," says Scott Rossi, Creative Director and owner of the studio, "but we didn't have many opportunities to write software." Now the studio finds itself building the applications as well, and Revolution has become their tool of choice. "We can build pretty much anything with Rev," says Rossi, "and because Rev supports a nice range of graphic formats, we can build apps that integrate nicely with our interface designs."
Rossi points to an ongoing relationship between his studio and Logitech, one of the largest peripheral manufacturers in the world. "We had developed a marketing application for them," explains Rossi, "that showcased several partner offerings for their customers. It wasn't very complicated, but we gave it a custom interface and a couple of fun visual touches. Logitech was happy with the result and eventually asked us if we could do something for their software installer."
The installer project was a big deal for Tactile since this would be one of the first things Logitech's customers would see after buying a Logitech product. "We really wanted to do a good job on this," Rossi recalls. "This was a chance to create a utilitarian application that didn't look like a typical 'Microsoft grey' program." What started out as front end with three screens turned into a seven screen application that had to integrate into Logitech's installation process, display content in 15 different languages, and include Windows-standard keyboard control and behavior.
"Creating custom interfaces can be a tricky business," explains Rossi. "If you replace standard controls with image objects, you can get a great custom appearance but you give up much of the built-in behavior provided by standard system controls. We basically had to write all our key-control routines from scratch, and fit them into our customized design. Since Revolution allows you to define your own behaviors, we were able to provide our non-Windows interface with standard Windows behavior." Two years after its initial development, Tactile continues to update the installer with Logitech as features and languages are added.
But Tactile doesn't just build installers. The studio uses Revolution to create multimedia presentations, software utilities, and marketing applications for the likes of Intuit, Gallo Wineries and RollingStone magazine. "Revolution is really so versatile," continues Rossi, "We don't just use Rev for our clients' projects, we also use it to get work done in-house as well."
For more information, visit Tactile Media.