The renowned graphic designer Clement Mok had these words to say about my work with JMC Studios executive designer Jim McGreal. I was a partner with McGreal designing the World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia CD-ROM user interface for both the 1998 and 1999 editions. The citation below is from Internet World, printed 21 September 1998:

If you look at the CD-ROM development world, there's a project where IBM and World Book are putting together a reference title where the content viewing environment is not only visually very rich, but provides cues on a single screen. It's basically a single screen interface, so that you touch things and they come up as [daughter] screens or pages with more cues to go to other areas, other windows. So you're not really going from screen to screen--it's a fluid transition, from event to event. With the improvements in streaming data that will come over time, you will get that fluid state, where you're not going from page to page but from event to event within that container.

It's good that Mok noted the fluidity of the GUI for World Book, since we strove to keep distractions to a minimum while putting the most functionality into limited screen space. The GUI works at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 resolutions. The design is intuitive and familiar, visual but uncluttered. We think it sets the tone for reference works in general, not only for World Book but for our competition.