Video History Project

People

Joshua Davis

JOSHUA DAVIS pioneered web design in the early 1990s and is now a master of the medium through his commercial work for Kioken in New York and experimental projects such as PrayStation for which he won the Prix Ars Electronica 2001, the prestigious digital art prize. If it wasn't for Joshua Davis, the internet would not only look completely different, but function differently too. Since its emergence in January 2000, his constantly evolving personal site Praystation has become an icon of web design.

Now one of the world's most influential digital artists and web designers, Davis divides his time between PrayStation experiments and paying projects for Kioken, the New York web design consultancy where his commercial clients include Barneys department stores, Sony and Lucent Technologies. Born in San Diego in 1971, Davis is one of the first generation of web designers: pioneers, who taught themselves how to use the technology as it was developing, thereby defining the ground rules of digital design. Davis was introduced to the internet by a design student friend at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied illustration and art history.

After a year of working on illustration by day and HTML at night, Davis ran out of cash and was offered a job writing HTML for Pratt's web site. He dropped out of Pratt in his junior year to eke out a living in the then-fledgling field of web design. Davis has since become a role model for younger web designers: not only for the quality of his creative work on PrayStation but because of his willingness to share ideas and innovations by releasing source files to other designers. Joshua Davis talks about his work so far and his future plans. See Joshua Davis' work at: https://www.joshuadavis.com/ http://www.praystation.com http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com https://www.cyphen.com http://www.antiweb-chaos.com https://www.kioken.com.

Cite this record

"Joshua Davis." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/joshua-davis.

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Summary

Joshua Davis pioneered web design in the early 1990s and created the personal site Praystation, active since January 2000, and the experimental PrayStation project, which won the Prix Ars Electronica 2001. He has done commercial work for Kioken in New York, with clients including Barneys department stores, Sony and Lucent Technologies. Born in San Diego in 1971, he studied illustration and art history at Pratt Institute before dropping out in his junior year to work in web design; he has released source files to other designers and become influential to younger web designers.

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Last modified 17 June 2011

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