Photo credit: Mark Stehle
Felice Macera is pretty sure nobody else at Penn has the same job he does: Artist for hire.
“I would venture to say I am the only person here who does everything that I do,” says Macera, who works as a photographer, graphic artist and web designer for departments and people throughout the Penn community. "There are several other departments--communications is one--that may do all of it, but they have different people doing all of that work, too.”
Originally hired as an assistant photographer at the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LSRM), Macera has in the years since picked up various other skills, from graphic and computer design to HTML.
In fact, Macera was there when HTML first arrived—back when the IT folks told him Web pages should never have images on them—and he’s followed the code’s remarkable evolution ever since. The world of the Web is ever changing, Macera says. And while that keeps his job interesting, it also keeps him more than a little bit busy.
Q. How, exactly, would you describe your role here?
A. I guess I would call myself an artist for hire. This facility here [LSRM] started out as part of the metallurgy facility. Back in the day, samples were prepared and photographed through microscopes, which involved film developing and things like that. To assist the scientists here, we had a facility where we could process their film, print their film, and do their slides and drawings and things like that. This was back when everything was done by hand. But that’s evolved, basically, into all the services we do now—event photography, all sorts of artistic stuff. The design work expanded to computer drawing and design to desktop publication, and then of course the web hit and we started creating web pages.
Q. What was your original position here?
A. I started here in 1984, and I was hired as an assistant working mostly on photographic work, or only photographic work. But then the person I was working under retired within a year after that, and I took on his responsibilities. Because I had a degree in art (from University of the Arts) I started preparing our facility to do more design work. We are an NSF-funded facility, so every three years we have to go beg for more money. That process originally started out as, you created these posters, so when the NSF site visitors came in you could present these huge posters to them. Those posters, 20-some years ago, were done by hand—actually typing things out and sticking them on a board. That was the process by which we started doing more [design work].
Q. So how did you first get involved with Web design?
A. I was forced into it when I was trying to evolve the facility to do more design. So we split the facility in half. I hired somebody for design work, a woman I had met in art school, and though she didn’t know anything about computers either, she taught herself. So we had things split in half, but then she went off to get her graduate degree and kind of dumped the computer work in my lap. Fortunately, most of it was pretty simple work. I got a quick tutorial in HTML. And back then, it was very simple to code. There were programs you could use—a lot of people used Netscape to write their HTML pages. You could just go into a page, copy from somebody else, and that was that. I was able to learn code when code was simple, and then I kept track of how things were changing, which many other people weren’t doing.
Q. So you had no formal training in HTML?
A. No, I just started coding by hand. Nowadays, obviously, nobody can code by hand. It’s just impossible, although you do still have to know what the code is going to do to fully understand it. … To be honest, in pretty much any industry you’re in, you’ve basically got a base of knowledge when you leave college, but then you get a job and you’re self-teaching yourself. For example, I had a basic understanding of photography before I came here, but I really learned photography when I started working here.
Q. How much has the Web changed over the years?
A. The story I always tell is this: When I first started designing web pages, my thought was, I am a photographer, and I want to see something pretty on my pages. But most IT people, and I won’t name names, were saying at the time that there was no place for images on the Web, and that Web pages were to be strictly text. That’s pretty indicative of how far things have come.
But actually, things have now come full circle. The Web started as text, and we were supposed to limit it because people had slow bandwidth, and you couldn’t overwhelm the pages. Then broadband came along and everyone suddenly had fast connections, so people were just overloading pages with images. Now, it’s gone back again, because people are using cell phones and PDAs, so the designers have to go back and re-code again.
Q. Do you see a natural connection between art and the Web?
A. Actually, the frustrating thing about looking at a lot of web design is when you see an artist thinking the Web is actually art. The Web is content, not art. It is a user interface. If you have a site that is, for the most part, being used for content and information, you can get lost in the art. People think the Web should be pretty. And it can be. But you shouldn’t be lost in the beauty of it. The Web, I think, is more of an evolution in print design. There is pretty print design. There are your nice magazines and then there is your basic newspaper. If you have a lot of content, then the page should be a newspaper—something you can easily thumb through and find what you need. But if you want a visual experience, you create a beautiful magazine—with less content.
Originally published Sept. 20, 2007.
