About
Boring Part
First, let’s start with the obvious data points. Hi there, I’m Eric Hill (not the Eric Hill who has written “Fun with Spot”, nor am I in the NFL, nor a musician on CD Baby). There are a lot of us Erics out there, but I am a unique snowflake, I tell you.
I am currently at the very bottom of page 1 of Google results if you simply search for “eric hill” without quotes (it fluctuates between page 1 and 6 randomly). My number one goal in life is to beat the British children book author at the top of page 1. Not really. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my lovely wife, little baby daughter, Olivia, and son, Graham. After 11 years of friendship, my old pug co-pilot, Cyrano, left us on March 11, 2009. We miss him terribly and speak of him almost daily. I work in downtown San Francisco near the Transamerica in the historic Jackson Square district.
Work
I’ve been a professional designer for over ten years. In the 90′s, I was the second employee at Studio Interactive in Dallas, Texas, where we had a trendy loft in trendy Deep Ellum. You could see Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com offices from our rooftop – Cuban’s was a building absolutely covered in satellite dishes, most of which were probably for looks to impress potential buyers (which obviously worked). Studio Interactive got bought out by PricewaterhouseCoopers as the bubble began to grow and grow. A hard lesson I learned in the value of equity… Our firm served as the design arm PwC previously lacked when building Web apps.
By 2000, I moved to San Francisco as the bubble was just about ready to pop all over me and my loved ones. By 2001, I left consulting (by choice) and slid into the publishing world at IDG in a Web design capacity. Won some awards, but wasn’t really satisfied. I needed to recharge my batteries as consulting had nearly sucked me dry.
So, I went back to school when we thought we might live in LA and got my animation thang on again. We soon moved back to glorious San Francisco where I’ve found myself (recharged) in the Web world on very interesting projects: First, I helped in the rebirth of The Industry Standard, and am now working at a travel startup. All in all, life has been very good to me.
Tid Bits
I have a strange fascination with stressful cerebral Sci-Fi, and particularly horror films. To me, they are like wine from Texas. Many people are turned off by the concept with a shudder, but most folks simply don’t know what they are missing when they sit down and analyze it all.
I like to draw, design, and animate, and really enjoy the self flagellation of being a Cubs fan since 1984.