Robert Hodgin

Co-founder, ECD :: San Francisco office

Robert is a co-founder and partner at The Barbarian Group. He heads up the San Francisco office and the Barbarian Labs. Prior to joining The Barbarian Group, Robert worked as a freelance designer, and before that held positions at Arnold Worldwide and Circle.com.

Since co-founding The Barbarian Group, Robert has focused on pushing the limits of motion-intensive interactive sites. He was the creative force behind some of The Barbarian Group’s most visually compelling sites. Lately, he has been delving deep into processing and java-based programming.

During “The Bubble,” Robert received wide acclaim as the creative and Flash force behind turbonium.com, the groundbreaking Flash-based minisite for the VW New Beetle Turbo. This site received virtually every award in the industry, including the Grand Clio, a Hatch Award and the Golden Pencil. Macromedia ran a two page ad in major publications, such as Wired exclaiming ” ‘How the (expletive deleted) did they do that?’ – perhaps the highest praise in the web industry.” He was also the art director and Flash developer on the first VW Autoshow minisite, also the recipient of several major awards.

Robert has also worked with such clients as Royal Carribbean, Converse and Footjoy, creating interactive, branded Flash experiences. He also worked with Macromedia, assisting in the development of Flash 5, contributing to the development look and feel, and to the libraries and tutorials.

Finally, Robert is the creative force and programmer behind flight404.com – an interactive, experimental Flash site. Robert has received numerous awards for this site, and has spoken at dozens of conferences in the US and Europe.

Robert has won several major design awards, including the Grand Clio, several Gold and Silver Pencils, several Hatch Awards, the NEWD (New England Web Design) Awards, the MIMC (Massachusetts Interactive Media Council) Awards and over five Macromedia Sites of the Day. His work has appeared in virtually every major design magazine under the sun.

Robert attended Rhode Island School of Design, where he received a BFA.

FlashForward 2008

Seven years ago, I got my public speaking feet wet when I spoke at FlashForward Amsterdam in November 2001. I believe it was 2001. The incident was still fresh enough that seeing assault-rifle armed guards at Logan airport was oddly equally terrifying and comforting. Amsterdam was great! But what wasn’t at all great was [...]

Advanced Beauty on Apple

That fantastic Advanced Beauty project, curated by Matt Pyke of Universal Everything, with audio from Simon Pyke of Freeform, now has a trailer on Apple.com. In HD too! Ooooh, shiny! Take a peek. The Blu-Ray will be released in November.

Flashbelt 2008 is done.

I am getting really lazy with my picture taking! This is the only decent photo (of the total four that I took) and it still sucks. Blurry and poorly cropped and poorly lit. Sigh. I will fix this slackery soon, I promise. Dave put on a fantastic conference. This was my first Flashbelt and it was [...]

Ode on a Mid-Life Crisis

During a conversation with Bill last week, I found these words coming out of my mouth.
“You have never heard of the Cocteau Twins? How is that possible?!”

SFIFF is nigh!

I have a piece in the San Francisco International Film Festival. Weird, right? They have a thing called Generator which is an amalgam of a bunch of digital art shorts. My Advanced Beauty piece is in there, along side the works of Lia, Toxi, Watz, and several others. Thanks to Matt Pyke for entering it. [...]

-r != r.

I stopped using -r when I noticed Rick using r. and went on to type out my whole first name. Im tired of doing that. Those extra 5 characters dont make things any better for anyone, so I am going back to -r and you can suck it if you dont like it.
-r

Radiohead reconsidered.

After 95% of the comments suggested I submit the Radiohead piece to the Aniboom contest, I went ahead.
http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=210097
I poked about a bit to see some of the other submissions, and there are some really well thought out storyboards up there. Im looking forward to seeing the final selections.

Visualizing Radiohead

As many of you know, Radiohead is having a video contest dealie. Lance pointed this out to me back in March and suggested that I give it a go. And a go I did give.
First, however, I will discuss why I have decided not to submit my entry.
After I started working on the piece, I [...]