Ryan is the force behind Pomp&Clout, and the king of video flyers. What is a video flyer, you might ask? It’s a new promotional medium which is enabled by viral file-sharing. Pomp&Clout’s eye for graphics and ear for beats are a killer combination, leading to amazing music-related graphics. www.pompandclout.com

How did Pomp & Clout start?

It started because my friend Aaron Vinton and I wanted to do a collective site, showing both of our work. Shortly after, another friend, Sam Hyde joined as well. Then at some point along the way we all kind of took divergent paths. I guess you could say I do more “commercial” work. Aaron has moved towards experimental art/audio. Sam’s using his twisted humor and motion graphics skill to work more on comedy skits and animations… I held onto Pomp&Clout and began using it as my portfolio site.

What made you want to move in a more commercial direction?

I enjoy working on stuff that solves a problem or has a specific function. I still, of course, appreciate art and I think the stuff that Aaron & Sam are doing is amazing. But what I really enjoy working on are projects that go beyond the purely visual.

Could you give me an example?

A great ongoing project has been gwap.com. Gwap stands for “games with a purpose.” It was initiated by a guy in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He won a MacArthur Foundation grant, also called the Genius grant, to create this site. His idea was to use the human mind to solve problems that computers can’t easily solve. The basic premise is, let’s have people play this game, and then let’s get useful functionality from that.

Let’s take the ESP Game for example. You and a partner see the same image and are asked to type in a tag for it. When you agree on a tag, you move on and are awarded points. After just a minute of play, you’ve agreed on six or seven tags. We record those six or seven tags and associate them with the images. Now a search engine will have a better idea of what’s in those images. [gwap.com]

I think it’s a really cool idea. I’ve become the art director and designer, dealing with everything visual and interactive on the site. It’s very function-driven. These guys are straight-up engineers. They’re good at coding. It’s interesting to bring something different to the team. And they treat what I do as the end-all be-all of how it’s going to look.

How do you find most of your clients?

The majority of it is word of mouth. Various people I know have recommended me to their friends who are in need of design. I got started by doing logos. Now the projects are mostly web-related, like with Gwap. I work with engineers who are in need of designers.

Lately I’ve also been getting into a lot of music-related stuff. It started with these “video flyers” I made for promoting the Lovelife parties. People have seen them and hired me to do similar stuff. While the website work mainly comes from tech people who need a designer, the music/graphics work comes from people seeing something I’ve done and thinking it’s cool and contacting me about their project.

Could you explain the video flyers a little more?

I started throwing these dance parties in Providence almost a year ago, with three DJ/Producer friends. I came in to do the projections. It was something I’d dabbled in before that, sitting at the computer and throwing imagery up that I’d made or that I’d sampled.

I’d seen promotional videos that were done for these parties, which were kind of exciting but they were always just photos from previous parties. I wanted to try my hand at it, and try something different, something with a mini-narrative.

The first one I did was based on a thought I had at the club on the first night. The parties are in the basement. It’s kind of a weird space, but we tried to turn it into a positive deal. The slogan was, “In our basement, we will be together forever.” I remember being at the club and thinking that it felt like this sequence in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco walk into a club through the back entrance. So I sampled that video sequence and laid in all this motion tracking and spent way more time on it that I probably should have, putting together this thing.

In the end, though, a lot of people responded to it. I heard, “This is really cool, it fits the venue, it builds up anticipation for the party.” Which was exactly the idea, to get people excited about coming out. So I kept making them. They’re really fun, because they’re somewhere between a music video and a commercial. It’s obviously music-driven, because it’s an ad for a dance party.

Do you see your work moving more in that direction?

Currently, doing web design and identity design brings in the money. But I’d love to get more into doing music videos in the future. I’ve started getting inquiries from people who want me to do music videos or other promo videos. The music stuff is really fun and also really challenging.

That whole culture is very discriminating and expects everything to be incredibly fresh. You can’t fall back on old methods. But there’s a lot of room for experimentation. I once sampled this deep-sea documentary footage of fish swimming around. I thought it was really cool, so I came up with a way to use it. I can throw in all kinds of random stuff.

Video flyers aren’t very common, are they?

No, it’s new. It’s kind of sprung up with peer-to-peer video-sharing sites like Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook. Those sites have made it incredible easy to just throw something up and pass it around. If the video is cool, people will pass around the link, and a bunch of people see it who might not have otherwise heard about the event.

I do print flyers for the shows too, and I’m trying to make a cohesive set for each party, where the print flyer references the video flyer and vice-versa. We’re creating both a visual and a musical identity. We’ve also started a Lovelife blog, lovelifewith.us. That’s really fun. It’s the four of us, the three DJs and I, putting up links to things that we’re into and we think other people would be into.

Did you always know that you wanted to go off on your own and work for yourself?

I’ve always been interested in doing stuff online, and collaborating with other people. I freelanced all throughout college. In high school I ran a small shareware company called Melonsoft. I did the development, the design, the marketing… It was really exciting.

The internet makes it so easy for anyone to get themselves out there. What was Melonsoft about?

I started it in early high school, shortly after the first iMac came out. That’s how I keep track of time. The initial iMac, aqua one, the one that killed the whole “beige” thing.

I taught myself how to write software. I made an mp3 player, a drum-machine program, a piano program… It was all kind of music-related, actually. I’d figure out how to do something and quickly hack together a program that kind of worked and looked cool.

And it was all shareware?

It was all shareware. Anyone could download it, and if you paid you could register it. I had a serial number system worked out. It wasn’t much of a system. It was essentially a specific four-character string followed by any fifteen characters. I was kind of cutting corners. I actually found stuff on hacker databases, saying how to hack my serial numbers. So that sucked.

But other than that, it was cool. The software ranged from $5-$50. I was in high school and I was making decent money. It gave me the balls to just pay the overhead of a domain name and web hosting, put stuff online, and turn it into a business.

Do you have any advice on becoming an entrepreneur?

I would say that the most difficult part for me is handling all the business stuff. Not that I really have that much business stuff to handle. But make sure you have some sort of system in place, whatever it may be, to keep track of who’s paid you and who hasn’t paid you. I had a recent situation with a non-paying client… It turned into an altercation, over email, in which I was essentially threatened…

So yeah, keep on top of things, make sure you get paid on time. If you’re doing freelance web work, especially if it’s a new client, try to get paid half up-front. That ensures they’ve given you money and they know the situation and they know you’re not just working for free.

That’s one of the most difficult things, to actually get people to pay you and to realize the value of your services.

Exactly. And as far as the value of your services, when pricing a project, always try to overshoot. The client may negotiate you down. I think a lot of people coming out of school, especially coming from design or art backgrounds, don’t really hear much about how to price projects.

There have been times when I way undersold myself and afterwards thought, “What the hell am I doing?” And then at times I’ve charged way too much, and people just laugh in your face and walk away. So it’s kind of been an intuitive process and a lot of trial-and-error to figure it out.

It seems like a lot of people in our generation are looking for freedom in their work schedule, rather than the 9-to-5 thing.

If I went full-time freelance or started a one man studio, I wouldn’t feel the need to work anywhere but my apartment. I think that’s the beauty of this new web-entrepreneur culture, or whatever you want to call it. You can just work at home, do what you want, take days off. That’s ultimately what I’d like to get to.

Even at my current job, a lot of the work I do can be done from home. I can connect to the servers, or email stuff. It’s really unnecessary to physically be at your place of work. I think that’s the future. People can be wherever they want to be. I’ve thought about the possibility of trying to get an RV at some point, and just have a 3G card, and travel around and do freelance.

That’s awesome. Travel, work, make money.

Yeah. As long as you have internet access, obviously. That’s the big necessity. But you could even be in a remote location, do a ton of work, and then drive to a cafe and shoot it off. So someday, maybe that will happen. Right now I’m kind of riding both worlds, the freelance world and the office world.