Online service design, prototyped in Aldus SuperCard
Dec 1991

Before the Web and ZD Net, Ziff-Davis published its magazine content on CompuServe and wanted to expand its presence into other services. My first project at Ziff was to design ZiffNet for Prodigy, working with a small product management and technical team.

Because Prodigy was based on the NAPLPS videotext standard, it was extremely limited in its design capabilities, and one of the biggest challenges was building a similarly constrained prototyping environment. I tried out a lot of fonts before settling on Monaco 16 point as having the best match to Prodigy's fixed width layout system. There were similar problems with color handling and layout grids, but my prototype faithfully simulated to whole thing, down to the 2400 baud line delays.