John Gnotek started as an apprentice in the high-end, boutique graphic design and production studio in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, while developing a freelance business aside. The studio was a group of top artists, designers, typographers, typesetters and account folk. Design work included annual reports for Masco Corporation, Masco Industries (pre-MascoTech), K-Mart; as well as numerous ads, brochures and packaging projects. Production included work for ad agency giants DMB&B, Leo Burnett, Campbell-Ewald, Satchi & Satchi and Ross Roy for all manner of advertising artwork. Though the majority of work was for the automotive industry--Pontiac, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, it also entailed a wide variety of divergent clients--FTD, Whirlpool, NBD, Mr. Goodwrench, Holley, AC Delco to name a few. The experience of working with masters doing top-notch work second to none was the first strike in the forging of CyberAlley.
The second strike was the freelance business. Gnotek Studio started meager, a few clients--Summit Place Mall, Grand National Advertising among them and a couple dozen projects. Within a few years the clients had amounted to dozens and the projects--hundreds a year. They included everything from production work for ad agencies to design work--logos, ads, brochures, catalogs, signage, mall directories, murals and more.
As the digital age first began to show promise as a tool in the graphic arts, the visionary studio was among the very first to jump right in--with a Lightspeed computer system, the precursor to Sun Microsystems. By today's standards, the Lightspeed was quite rudimentary, but in its day there was little like it. Even the Macintosh had not yet gained the graphic capabilities necessary for graphic reproduction. The Lightspeed was a great layout machine and the redesign of the Gnotek Studio logo was the genesis that sparked the conception of CyberAlley. The gestation was in the womb of the Macintosh.
Simultaneously John Gnotek invested time in the Macintosh. Though photo imagery was yet incapable on the system, the Macintosh was an excellent typography machine. Studio took full advantage of the ability to tweak type and layouts to no end. No compromise due to budgetary restraints! As the Macintosh system advanced, Gnotek Studio followed along and advanced too. When the work generated through Gnotek Studio surpassed the fare done at the mentor studio, John Gnotek went solo with Gnotek Studio.
Gnotek Studio was among the first studios to produce full color printed material directly from the Macintosh to film separations. The Rockwell International Suspension Systems Company brochure, designed and produced by Gnotek Studio, was one of the very first anywhere to do so. Gnotek Studio also broke ground with tranferring files directly to printers with Border Press in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, saving the rep an hour and a half of travel time for something as minor as a simple copy change. Likewise, file transfers became routine with output provider Mactypenet when a MB transfer yet took a complete hour.
Now this may all seem trivial today, hardy worth a mention, but the point is Gnotek Studio didn't follow anyone in producing material right to film, or file transferring with suppliers and clients, or communing online with other artists and designers around the country. Nobody taught this. Gnotek Studio broke this ground consequently along with others.
One of the Special Interest Groups on America Online back in the day when AOL was a community of a quarter million, was a graphic artists group hosted by Kai Krause (of Kai's Power Tools) and included guests from all the developing graphical software companies--Painter, Specular, Adobe, Macromind aka Macromedia. The big buzz soon came from a couple brothers in this group who created a dynamic new computer game called Myst. Myst was awesome, way beyond anything else of its kind at the time. But it was just a game.
At Gnotek Studio, the concept of Myst, that is of a virtual environment where one can move about and enter different buildings, served as a commercial model to conceive various new media concepts. If one could wander about a fantasy environment in a game, why not a virtual shopping mall in a commercial application where one enters a store and examines items? Same concept could be applied to an annual report, a catalog, even a brochure or ad. CyberAlley was born, but not yet named.
Multimedia and the Information SuperHighway (ISH) became the big buzz terms at that time, but overused and hyped beyond reason. Science fiction writer William Gibson had coined the term "cyber" meaning human/computer interaction. (This was before "cyber" became an overused and hyped beyond reason buzzword). ISH was out, though that was where Gnotek Studio was heading. So knocking ISH a bit, "Alley" was chosen. But not Information SuperAlley. CyberAlley. Of course at the time no one knew what CyberAlley meant, but it did allow for an ice-breaker upon pitching new media concepts. CyberAlley - New Media Communications was christened. The work is reflected throughout this website.
As Gnotek Studio broke ground in the digerati landscape and evolved into CyberAlley; CyberAlley likewise has grown and transversed the virtual plains of the cyberether. In like fashion CyberAlley has broke new, virgin ground and spawned iTales to develop interactive storytelling, including the concept of interactive movies via DVD for TV.
