Are screensavers the most trivial thing ever? Maybe not. In 2020, magazines and art museums are recognizing my screensaver work in the history of design. 

The best designs become things we take for granted. Screensavers are one of those things. The story of screensavers is my story as the Design Lead and Design/Dev Team Lead for the most popular app in the world. I designed screensavers that are still featured around the world. It’s validating to be recognized, but it’s not the best design work I’ve done, so it’s funny how things work out. The way I see it, if you consistently reach for higher standards and refining your craft, you’ll create a few notable things along the way.

Before screensavers were built into screens, my design work on After Dark and other screensavers turned a trivial curiosity into the most popular and profitable computer product in the world. We sold more screensavers than people bought Microsoft Word, Mac computers or even Windows itself. It wasn’t a $1 app. It retailed for $49.95 and sold to hundreds of millions of customers. However, it’s not recognized in museums for making money, but for being a cultural touchstone and influential design.

Eye on Design Magazine – Aug

Feel free to read about my work in a recent issue of Eye on Design (issue #5), a well-designed magazine about designers and design culture from AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts). Fascinating stuff about designers and every aspect of our work from the visual to the behavioral. I’m grateful to have my work featured in an article on p121-125. Get your own copy from AIGA at https://shop.eyeondesign.aiga.org/ 

Contributing to digital culture

My screensaver designs are recognized in museums as significant contributions to culture. Seem crazy? I used to think of culture as fine art, good books and great music. Jazz is culture! I could accept that movies and tv shows were a part of culture, but I assumed that computer stuff was NOT culture. I was wrong. For the last 50 years, our culture has become overwhelmingly digital. We spend our days working on computers. We find houses, doctors and people to date through computers. Billions are glued to their phones all day. We watch movies and listen to music that is processed on computers and then consume that content digitally. Digital culture really is culture.

My screensavers are a unique part of digital culture. While many digital products are just utilitarian tools, a screensaver with 40-50 animations is a digital art gallery that 100s of millions of people paid to bring into their lives. In a very real sense, as a product primarily bought for aesthetic reasons, screensavers were the first and best example a digital product that could be called cultural.

A business success based on great design

It’s a great startup entrepreneur story built on the power of great design.

I’ve done a lot of other successful work including inventing homescreen widgets used by over a billion users daily, but designing and creating screensavers that outsold everything is what I’m known for. I designed over 80 screensaver animations, the Magic and After Dark product lines, screensavers for Microsoft, Pointcast for Time Warner and the Inner Space screensaver game.

Design museums

• The Museum of Moving Images in New York City (NYC) had a significant screensaver exhibit featuring my work just a year ago.
• The Computer Museum in Mountain View, CA has featured my work on After Dark for years.
• The Het Nieuwe Museum in the Netherlands hosted the Sleepmode exhibit on the cultural impact of screensavers, featuring my design notes and animated work on wall-sized displays. I was their featured speaker at a design talk in May. Some images of the exhibit are shown below. Due to popular demand, Het Nieuwe extended Sleepmode for 4 extra months.
•   View the web magazine version of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Sleepmode exhibit on screensavers here.

The design significance of screensavers

Being a good designer means I love good design and hate bad design. Most people think of ugly software as bad design. Bad usability is even worse, like a bitter taste on my tongue. As a career designer, I can always imagine how products can be made better. I ponder: Why is this so complex? Why are the most useful features hidden away? Who did they design this for? Complaining is easy. My life’s work is doing something about it. I did something about it when I created screensavers. I envisioned software that everybody loved using, including people who hate tech and don’t know how any of it works. With screensavers, I wanted to show the world how to deliver powerful features with elegant simplicity.  To paraphrase Mark Twain:

There’s little difference between a product which does nothing useful and a useful product that’s unusable.

Therefore, I designed the screensaver product to be a) incredibly useful and b) an awesome experience. At that time, everyone needed a screensaver to avoid replacing $300-$900 burned in screens and it was the first app to password protect a computer. The 15-20x return on investment (ROI) made it easy to sell site licenses. However, features are like apples, a commodity that anyone can copy.

What was unique was the experience of After Dark. It’s useful features were combined with the most usable and fun content and interface that anyone had ever seen. Magic, the predecessor to After Dark, was released and iterated 24 times before After Dark 1.0. Relentless iteration can turn the bad into good and the good into the awesome.

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Raising users’ expectations

Screensavers were a key turning point in the expectations of users. When I was designing screensavers, most software was so hard to use that you needed to read a textbook before using it. No kidding. No googling for answers. When one thing crashed, you had to restart your entire computer.  Frustrating!!

These screensavers respected the idea that users want to know as little as possible to make things work.

By letter, email and in person, thousands of users have told me a) they loved my screensavers and b) it was the only software they didn’t hate.

My products weren’t just bought and used daily by hundreds of millions of anonymous users. I received thousands of fan letters and have talked to hundreds of users in person, including silicon valley billionaires who can’t wait to tell me how the product made them feel.  People loved these screensavers because they were designed to be loved. It boils down to quality of experience. Unlike everything else in computer tech, these screensavers offered fun engagement and powerful features that were effortless to use. That is why competitors with superior animation never made any headway. Users like eye candy and animation, but will LOVE a superior experience.

Whether you fondly remember screensavers or not, let me clear up some misconceptions first.

Misconception #1 Nobody needed a screensaver

This is just wrong. Older CRT screens and even the 2015 iPhone shown below can burn in. Many current screens don’t have the issue. In the time of After Dark, everyone needed them.

Misconception #2 Screensavers were for home use

My screensavers were the #1-selling business utility in the world, and that was by intent and design. We sold more copies than Word, Mac computers and even Windows itself. Why? Because it was worth it. Businesses spent a lot of money buying hardware and wasted a lot of money replacing $300-$1000 screens when *somebody* inevitably forgot to turn them off and a static image burned in.

Data privacy and security was the next keystone product feature. When I added screen locking to screensavers, there was no PC security. If you wanted to protect sensitive data and not replace expensive screens every year, you bought my screensaver that solved these problems for you. Most businesses saw a 10-20x return on investment (ROI). The trick was making it something that users wanted to install. Fortunately, we made the animations desirably engaging and fun, while designing the app to have the slickest user experience. Home users loved it, but they didn’t pay the bills.

Misconception #3 New screensavers are better because graphics are better now

The original set of screensavers were the best, even though graphics were cruder at the time. There was a restrained design ethos at play because screensavers engaged 10-20 times a day, 365 days a year. It’s a very subtle art to design animations that can be repeated endlessly without being boring or annoying. Imagine a big open office with 100 computers, where many are inactive and running a screensaver. If half the screens were visually and audibly blaring scenes from movie trailers, it would drive everyone crazy. Nothing would get done.

Designing the product so it was acceptable in an office allowed the product to spread virally. Users got a chuckle out of flying toasters and fish swimming around, but then it was easy to zone it out and get back to work.

Misconception #4 Screensavers were toys

Screensavers were like a likable co-worker. A funny co-worker is great, as long as he has a reason to be there (ie. actually does work and doesn’t stop others from working).  When hundreds of millions bought After Dark, they were inviting me into their daily lives. The screensavers’ job was to a) protect the screen b) protect data privacy and c) give users a few moments of joy every day. I loved bringing a little magical fun into people’s day, but I didn’t overstay my welcome.

Cultural influence

Over time, I moved on to other challenges while Berkeley Systems and others turned screensavers into unprofitable distracting toys. Fortunately, most users retain memories of the products I designed that made people happy while making an enormous amount of money.  I have seen my work everywhere. One outstanding experience was when my dev partner and I saw the movie Malice. In a particularly tense scene, the screen filled with After Dark’s Flying Toasters to establish a murderous plot point, but we broke out laughing at the absurdity of seeing our work fill the big screen. Other patrons were not amused.

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