years of wysiwyg*: 1994 — 2019

People:
Abdullah, Alena, Alex, Alexander, Andreas, Andreas, Andreas, Anna-Lena, Bärbel, Ben, Cem, Christian, Christian, Claudia, Dennis-Bendert, Dirk, Ersin, Eva-Maria, Florent, Florian, Frank, Gabriel, Goetz, Johann-Sebastian, Juliane, Juliane, Kerstin, Lars, Maik, Mario, Markus, Marvin, Monja, Nathalia, Nicolas, Nina, Norbert, Oliver, Oliver, Pattrick, Reinhard, Ricarda, Saskia, Siegfried, Simon, Sven, Svenja, Swen, Thomas, Thomas, Ulla, Wolfgang

Alumni:
Aileen, Alexandra, Alina, Andrea, Andreas, Andreas, Angela, Arne, Arne, Barbara, Bastian, Boris, Carola, Carsten, Catrin, Cheri Ann, Christian, Christiane, Christine, Christine, Claus, Constanze, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniela, David, Dirk, Dirk, Elfi, Enrique, Eva, Fabio, Finn, Frank Oliver, Frank, Georg, Heike, Heinke, Iris, Ivan-Alexander, Jakob, Jan, Jennifer, Jennifer, Jens-Peter, Jepe, Johanna, Jörg, Jörg, Jost, Julian, Karsten, Karsten, Katharina, Klaus, Knut, Li Ba, Marcel, Mareike, Mari, Maria, Markus, Matthias, Melanie, Michael, Michael, Michael, Miriam Alexa, Miriam, Mirjana, Moritz, Moritz, Nandita, Nane, Nicole, Nicole, Nina, Nina, Olaf, Oliver, Patrizia, Peter, Peter, Philip, Ralf, Renaud, Rüdiger, Samuel, Sarah, Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian, Silke, Simon, Simon, Simon, Stefan, Stephan, Stephanie, Susanne, Tai Jin, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Timon, Tom, Ulf

Projects
"What are you specialized in?" we've heard it over and over again and often avoided to answer bluntly. The truth is: Some areas are more dear to us than others, and in these we try to achieve maximum expertise and, if at all possible, some degree of virtuosity. But the topics are as varied as a full-stack development of a content management system, a multiplayer game to be played on stage, a dealer's manual, a truly large e-commerce system with worldwide customers and dozens of languages, a platform for language courses, always middleware for the supposedly standard solutions, a video platform, a portfolio, news magazines or portals, a design system or even a server infrastructure. But all this is only possible if you love digital communication and are not satisfied with half-baked solutions.

Maybe that's our speciality.

Megabytes:

The HD Floppy Disk. In the world shortly before the Internet, this was the available space if you wanted to communicate with the world. Digitally. With multimedia niceties. Thus the first digital Advent calendar was distributed this way by Microsoft Germany, the product catalogues of the following years and, for example, advertising for the then all new Sony Mavica – which (you guessed it) could store photos on floppys. Up to ten, to be precise.

One single smartphone photo from 2019 would fill two to five floppy disks. And one would be written in just 30 seconds!

16,384 times the bandwidth of 1995. Our first server was hooked up to – or rather dangled from – a double ISDN line. This meant 2x64 kilobits per second. Today it's two gigabits. Which means two billion bytes per second instead of the sad one hundred and twenty-eight thousand. But it's no longer just one server, either.

See also: 9.600

Telephone systems.

What can we say. We can‘t build all variants of digital communication ourselves, and even our third telephone system is still not the love of our lives. But at least we can put some software on it (ourselves) and configure it to death, so we can feel better about that. Or everything goes sideways and we have to reboot the damn thing. But luckily that´s our field of expertise.

Awards. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you… we thank the academy. And our clients. Because without them there wouldn't be any awards at all, even if we were the very best in everything. And we somewhat pride ourselves on the fact that we have never invented and produced a piece just for submission. This may or may not exist, but we never had the capacity to do anything like that. Or even a budget for it. All 102 awards are for real work for real clients. And we're confident it won't stop there.

Megabytes on a CD-ROM. In stark contrast to the contemporary floppy disks, infinitely large of course and therefore only ever entrusted with Herculean tasks. Huge glossy product catalogues, adventurous adventures, just tons of user interface, bizarre means of orientation and "authoring environments“ armed to the teeth. Unlike today, however, there were no frameworks or "standards" inside, and the products were unique pieces of digital handicraft. In later iterations we saw delicate beginnings of video, which however had – in obscure procedures – to be written as far as possible into the outermost tracks of the CD, so it wouldn’t drop frames. Oh, and of course it did. Because nothing was fast enough back then.

Really, HyperCard, VideoWorks, Director, mTropolis, FutureSplash?

118 Clients: 3M Deutschland, Arvato, Athlon Car Lease , Aufbruch, BEGA, BikeRepair, Bio Planete, BRABUS, Bundesanzeiger Verlag, Cab Beer, Canyon Bicycles, Cap Gemini, CGI Group, Citizenoffice, Clear/Herold Hilft, Corilon, D’art Design Group, Danone Waters, DCIX, Dehn, Demeter Felderzeugnisse, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Welle, Die Produktion, DNA Involvement Marketing, Droege Group, E.ON AG, Elektror Air Systems, Ergon Bike Ergonomics, Erik Zabel, ESPRIT, Essence, everve, expert automotive, FAW, Felten Personalservice, Fleet Factory, Good Energies, Harsco, HealthAdvisory, Heartbreaker, Heinz, Henkel, Hering Schuppener, Huennebeck, IHZ, Initiativkreis Ruhrgebiet, Interamt, Inwerk, Irina Kalentieva, Jango Bikes, Jazzunique, Karstadt, Katusha, KaVo, Krombacher, Kumpan Electric, KW43, Lufthansa Cargo, Lufthansa HR, Media Broadcast, Microsoft, Miltenyi Biotech, Mind Marks, Multipower, Nanna van Blaaderen, New Media NRW, Now Company, Nuvinci Cycling, Oase Living Water, Office Kitchen Casawell, Open Grid Europe, Pay-At-Match, phorm, punQtum, RieseSchubert, RKG, Römerturm, Roto Frank, RP Online, RTI Sports, RWE AG, Sander Gourmet, Schoepfung, Schwarzkopf got2b, Schweppes, Shirts on the Fly, Siemens Electrogeräte, smart beach tour, SNI, Sony Europe, Sport Spezial, Strenesse, T-Com, T-Online, T-Systems, TDK Europe, TeamworkCity Ruhrgebiet, TGI, Thyssenkrupp AG, Thyssenkrupp Schulte, Thyssenkrupp Services, Tino Pohlmann Fotografie, Topeak, Toshiba, Total, Total Recall, Traube Tonbach, Triumph International AG, Universität Duisburg/Essen, vamos, Vattenfall, vitrapoint, Vivento AG, Vodafone, volvic, WACOM

5 Addresses. First stop: under the roof of the newly founded REMPEN & PARTNER WERBEAGENTUR in 1994: Breite Straße 13. Second stop 1996: same building, opposite side - and different address (because large building): Kasernenstraße 14. For a little more than one year in 1997 Kavalleriestrasse 16. Only temporarily, because the agency group is waiting for the Neue Zollhof in the Düsseldorf Harbour to be completed. In the first days of 1999 we are the first to move into the first floor. An industry first! In 2003, R&P and wysiwyg* split up and we leave the harbour again, if nothing else because we deem it to be sliiiightly overpriced. We land at Stresemannstrasse 26, where we now reside on two floors after 16 years and two renovations.

Burglaries. Dear burglars: it's not worth it, unless you need new video footage of yourself. Most of our computers are heavy and big, and the laptops are taken along or chained, and you actually just break the doors. Just leave them alone in the future, will you?

Thanks a lot.

9,600 Bit/s is for internet what C60 cassettes were for music. So-so, but everyone was in. So this was the standard for Spiegel Online, which wysiwyg* had the honour to launch in 1995/96. In order to see something immediately, the screen was at least orange-red after the first kilobyte of HTML. About ten seconds later the page - 10Kb - was complete. The line by line running GiFs were actually much more exciting than all the flash stuff ten years later.

 
 
 
 
With it’s roughly ten megabytes of 2019, the "spon" homepage would have taken two hours and 50 minutes via our 1995 modem. If the connection had lasted that long. (Wouldn't have.)

1 dot-com bubble we witnessed bursting, at that time still at close range in the chic Gehry buildings in the Düsseldorf Harbour. That felt a bit queasy, but since wysiwyg* hadn't been pumped up from 15 to 250 employees in just two years, there wasn’t that much to burst. But being the sole surviving "multimedia agency" in the Düsseldorf harbour in 2002 doesn't do all of your homework either, and we were still facing the splitting up, a relocation and the transformation into a pure web agency.

As a Cologne poverb goes: It always ends up well eventually. And as a Düsseldorfer would add: sometimes it’s a close shave.