The job brings Liz into contact with the leading forces in the creative industries. The enthusiasm that she feels for her role is shared by the rest of the team:

“I think that everyone who works for the magazine has the same general interest. It’s exciting to see all the new work that comes out and seeing all the developments. That’s what makes the job worthwhile.”

As well being in close contact with innovations and changes in the industry as a whole. Liz is pleased to have had the chance to initiate and develop an interest in new media.

“It’s the newness and potential, the undiscovered potential.” That excites her about the area. One of the potentials which is just starting to surface is a growing understanding about how information functions through interfacing techniques which are essentially “designed”.

“From a design perspective, most new media up till now has been print based. Potential to come will be about how to present information. I think things will become more community based and more localised. Information management really excites me as it brings together the skill of design and programming. This will move design to somewhere that it hasn’t been before which is very exiting.”

I asked Liz for an example of an interesting interface.

“Cartia.com. They’ve got this software called themeScape. It breaks sentences down into constituent parts and then looks for themes in these parts. The themes are then put into a database and translated into a map. Themes like sex are presented as mountains. So information is presented in a different way than you’d expect; information which would take up pages and pages are presented in a single map.”

As well as writing for Creative Review, Liz has been involved in a number of book projects. One such project was Re:Play which was published last year. It consolidates Liz’s interest in Game graphics which have recently enjoyed a global revival. When we were kids playing Galaxians and Space invaders, we weren’t aware that the bleeps and blocky graphics were getting under our skin, only to surface twenty years later in an explosion of enthusiasm that has seen exhibitions and other homages to the genre.

Liz believes that often the graphics of a game are missed out in the race to get games on shelves. This is a pity as when you’ve seen the quality of a game like Wipeout, you realise how good they can be when there’s more emphasis placed on design.

“The game design world is very cliquey. Doom has defined the way first person shoot-em-up’s look now. Everyone was so into Doom that many games followed the style.”

Now it’s the advertisers that are finally waking up to games as a way to reach a massive chunk of their market lost to this area of entertainment.

“Diesel sponsored G police and they’re doing a new snowboarding game where some of the boarders wear Diesel.”

Liz thinks that this interest in games as an advertising medium is a response to modern character design. Lara Croft for instance is a much more complex character than Super Mario and it is this complexity that attracts the advertisers. Lara is perceived as “sexy,” a trait the simplicity of the old school game couldn’t evoke. Liz spoke to the character designer who made Lara a while ago. He explained to her that as a means to prevent the game publisher from introducing cheesy scenarios where Lara meets a boyfriend, he made her character so that this was an impossibility. It is this independence that has made her the icon which attracted Lucozade, a soft drink to use her in a recent TV ad.

I ask Liz about her future plans:

“Nothing that I can talk about.”

Look out for RE:Play and Browser if you share Liz’s interest. There are also other publications in the pipeline.