SAN GABRIEL VALLEY COVER STORY : Big Designs on Moooving Ahead : It’s called COW. And firms are lining up to do business with the four young founders who gained acclaim with an interactive Art Center catalogue.

Funny how things change.

Last year, they were four struggling art students, waiting outside the doors of ad agencies to show their portfolios.

Then they spent six frenetic months of their own time creating an electronic catalogue for their school, Pasadena’s prestigious Art Center College of Design, where they applied all the design, graphics and computer skills they had learned in class.

Their work impressed so many people that the Pasadena foursome decided to form a company to specialize in interactive design, an enterprise they christened with the whimsical name of COW.

Today, with one of their team still in school, all but one under 30 and no professional contracts to their name, COW has already won a couple of awards and has several firms lined up that are interested in doing business.

To be sure, the company hasn’t landed its first job yet, much less delivered on that job. But some of the people who award those contracts are expecting great things.

“I think they’re really smart, really talented, and I would love to work with them,” gushes Jonathan Wiedemann, executive producer of the new media division of Propaganda Films, the stylish Hollywood company whose top-notch directors and technicians have produced everything from Madonna music videos to David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.”

Hundreds of small start-ups are vying for recognition in the field of interactive media, so-called because users navigate their way through a computer program that prompts them for information about what they want to see. Electronic directories at malls and computer games are familiar examples.

But critics complain that much of the interactive media on the market today is confusing, boring or both, filled with large blocks of text, unappealing graphics and maze-like paths that leave users frustrated.

By contrast, many of these same critics say that COW has brought to the technology a sophisticated new level of design, learned at one of the top schools in the country.

Industry mavens praise COW’s style, which uses a lot of images and a minimum of text. Their program entices the user through a fast-moving blend of visuals, sound, type and graphics. The COW technique also uses film prominently, favoring herky-jerky off-center editing and hand-held cameras.

Consider the interactive catalogue that the foursome did for the Art Center, which funded the cost of their supplies. The user starts learning about the school by sitting down at a computer kiosk in the Art Center gallery and touching the screen to select from a menu of photo icons.

Depending on the icon chosen, the user is propelled through film, text, graphics and photos through the Art Center in Pasadena, the school’s Switzerland campus, its colorful history or the creative vision of its president.

Unlike some interactive programs, the team’s design makes it easy to switch from one path of inquiry to another. Another menu is overlaid in the background, where one touch brings it back into focus while the first one recedes. Users move through interviews with celebrated Art Center alumni, screen of student commercials or view prototypes of sports cars designed in classes.

COW’s interactive program brings the Art Center to virtual life in a way that would require an all-day tour in real time. All that’s missing is the smell of sage that grows amid the hillside campus’ sleek, modernistic buildings.

“They knocked my socks off,” declares Jeannine Parker, president of the International Interactive Communications Society. “I think they have an incredible future. They’ve already separated themselves from the pack. It’s not just how you present information, but how you give the user a way to navigate through it. They’ve made it much easier to navigate.”

Perhaps that is because of the blend of artistic background and computer literacy among the young entrepreneurs: Dina Temkin, 25 (film and editing); John Grotting, 28, (graphics), Bryan Dorsey, 25, (graphics and packaging) and Mateo Neri, 31 (graphics).

The last three are Art Center graduates. Grotting just received his degree this month. Temkin graduates this September.

Why the name COW?

“Because things are too complicated today, and we wanted something simple that everyone would understand, because that’s what we’re trying to do with this media, that’s our design philosophy,” Dorsey says.

In keeping with that, their logo is a toy wooden cow they assembled from children’s building blocks. Their office is in a California Craftsman house in Northwest Pasadena, which they like because it is funky, a far cry from the sterility of a commercial office. It is also Grotting’s home, and he tends to the group’s meager cache of computer and video equipment.

For now they want to stay lean and mean. It’s silly, they figure, to spend tons of money in a field where equipment and software becomes obsolete every six months. Ditto for hiring. COW anticipates assembling specialists in graphic design, film and editing as projects come their way.

Among the core four, there is a loose and easy familiarity. They finish each others’ sentences, with one expanding on a creative idea tossed out by another, such as the potential for film imagery in interactive design.

At brainstorming sessions they sit on the carpeted floor; there are no chairs or desks. The “grunge” riffs of KROQ radio blast from a portable radio while herb tea brews in the kitchen. All but Neri have earrings and long hair.

After their success with the Art Center catalogue, they decided to form their own small creative shop. Grotting had taken a three-year break from school to work as an art director at the international ad agency DDB Needham in Finland and hated it.

“It wasn’t creative. It was managing real big projects that were so mundane,” he recalls. “It’s interesting, the bigger the budget, the lower the creativity.”

One of their first tasks is to draw up a business plan, meeting with lawyers, figuring out copyright laws and deciding which segment of the expanding interactive market they want to penetrate.

COW partners say they like interactive games and music discs but their ambitions lie elsewhere. They want to design new ways of communicating in business and education, such as kiosks that introduce new products or programs that teach students about World War II.

“We actually have in our biographies that we’re not game makers. We’re not hackers. We’re not interested in a game that’s going to sell millions,” Dorsey says. “Games are not solving problems, they’re just BS entertainment, and we’re into solving problems. We want to develop tools that are going to influence this medium.”

Grotting is the interface specialist, with a knack for designing ways for users to interact with the computer to get where they want. Last year, a computer interface designed by a group of Art Center students that included Grotting won first place in a competition sponsored by Apple Computer Inc.

Already, COW has had an impact on the Art Center, says school President David R. Brown. After seeing the success of the interactive catalogue, the school set up a “digital sandbox” for students to experiment with interactive media projects.

“They pointed the way,” Brown says. “It’s going to be very cool around here for awhile. We have an opportunity to become leaders in the education of design for interactive media.”

COW expects to sign off shortly on its first professional contract, creating seven interactive kiosks for Nissan Motors that would introduce customers to their line of vehicles.

The company also has made presentations to Celebrity Cruise Lines, PacifiCare health systems, Apple Computers, American Express and Propaganda Films.

They have been profiled in Daily Variety and in Online Design. And they have been courted--to no avail--by ad agencies and firms that would like to incorporate them into their stables of whiz kids, a hedge against future crashes on the “information superhighway.”

“They want us to educate them,” Grotting says. “They don’t know what to do with the medium.”

COW has little interest in being swallowed; its brain trust has other plans. A retired Art Center professor who ran a CPA firm for the entertainment industry is so enthralled that he undertook to raise $1.5 million in capital for them through his Hollywood contacts.

“This is the epitome of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’; it takes something static and makes it dynamic,” says Errol Gerson, who for 24 years taught business management to budding artists. “The implications for corporate communications are staggering. I was so impressed with what they had done that I broke my rules, which are, one, never get involved with a start-up, and two, never get involved with students.”

Another who was wowed is Richard Cassey, an associate at SHR Perceptual Management, a marketing firm in Scottsdale, Ariz., that works with auto companies and cruise lines.

Cassey researched interactive firms across the country and concluded that COW was “one of the top two.” He envisions hiring the group to design interactive kiosks for auto dealerships and travel agencies. Interactive books are another possibility.

“COW was the one that really impressed us. They break down the barriers of fear of the technology,” Cassey says. “Not many companies are doing that. Either they’re very creative but the stuff doesn’t flow, or they’re very technologically oriented but not creative.”

One industry figure, while admitting he’d like to lure the COW founders to his stable, says the Art Center students have yet to make the leap from small art school boutique to big player in the interactive field.

“Until they land a major gig and produce something under real world constraints and pressures, the jury’s really still out,” says the man, who requested anonymity. But Greg Thomas, an interactive media engineer with Apple Computer Inc. who has seen COW’s work, believes the group has what it takes. He predicts there will be shakeout in the interactive field in the next 1 1/2 years and that COW will emerge strong.

“I was impressed. They have good design skills, and the way the market’s going, we are always going to have companies that need interactive presentations,” Thomas said.

COW’s forays into interactive media began in April, 1993, when Dorsey had an idea to do an interactive yearbook with Neri. They were told Grotting would be essential to their team, so they enlisted his help. Kent Campbell, who has since left the group to work as creative director at another interactive company, signed on as producer. Along the way they hooked up with Temkin, whose film and photography skills brought visual punch to their designs.

But the group opted to pitch the idea of an interactive college catalogue to Brown, the Art Center president, instead of a yearbook because they knew it would be an easier sell--most students wouldn’t shell out the money or have the equipment for a CD-ROM yearbook.

Brown gave them an office, a $20,000 budget and free run of high-tech facilities for editing, photography and computers. The students even commissioned product design students Todd Bell and Bobby Chang to create the sleek wood-and-steel kiosk for the catalogue and hired others to do the music. Grotting estimates that the interactive kiosk would have cost about $400,000 if students hadn’t labored for free using equipment and labs provided by the school.

They worked six months, using volunteer student film crews, raiding the archives, sleeping on couches in the office after 18-hour days. The interactive catalogue, which later won a Design Distinction Award in Graphics from the 1994 Annual Design Review, was unveiled late last year at a design and media conference in Kitakyushu, Japan, a city that is gunning to be the interactive media capital in the 21st Century.

Brown says a headline in the local Japanese paper the next day read: “He touched the screen and the audience went ‘Wow.’ ”