His work and influence in the media of print and electronic delivery spans more than a decade, reaching back into the primordial days of 1-bit Hypercard stacks and the first designs for Apple’s QuickTime Starter Kit. He moved on to design CD-ROM titles, such as The Mayo Clinic Family Pharmacy. Then, in 1995, he put his mind to the task of demystifying the operation of automatic teller machines for Well Fargo Bank, the first of which can be seen in the Los Angeles area. Only last year his work went on exhibit to a huge international audience in the form of the interface for The Microsoft Network. Also last year, he designed and launched his own ultra-cool Web site.

Mok’s been there, designed that. Today, clients such as Microsoft, NBC, Harper Collins and Nintendo continue -- as they have for years -- to ride the elevator to the penthouse office on Townsend Street in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch to consult with Mok, the GUI guru, the don of design. But the name on the door has changed. The company has become Studio Archetype. Where, oh where, has “Clement Mok” gone?

Why would Mok dump his own name, especially considering its brand value and the role it has playing in building a company that will generate about $7 million in fiscal 1996? And why remove himself from the day-to-day operations of a company that is synonymous with his personal talent and style?

Until Cloning Speak to Clement Mok for a few moments and part of the answer emerges immediately. This is a man who does not know the concept of “spare time.” He remains very much the creative director at Studio Archetype, but also manages CMCD, his electronic clip media library. He recently started a new company, NetObjects, which creates authoring, design and data management software for Web site development. And he fills the gaps by lecturing at industry conferences and seminars, serving on the New Media Center’s board of directors and working on a new design book for Adobe Press.

Mok’s problem is this: With bits of himself spread so far and wide across the multimedia spectrum and his creative bandwidth stretched to the max, burnout becomes a very real possibility. How does an organization that is driven by the singular creative vision of one individual continue to expand beyond the capacity of that person? Short of cutting and pasting clones of himself throughout his business, how does Mok keep building while keeping what he built?

Threat of Success Mok’s is not a unusual dilemma. Hundreds of relatively small interactive design and production boutiques that were based on the ability of one or two talented people are -- or soon will be -- struggling with how to reach the next level of growth without killing off the founders with over-work. No shop wants to turn down work, but taking on too much, even one project too many, can cause a decline in creative quality and damage a firm’s reputation.

This is an issue Mok has wrestled with for years, ever since he spun off CMCD to market a line of royalty-free clip photography. The CD-ROM series offers 100 images per disc of thematically grouped visual symbols, such as “Just Hands” or “Just Tools.” Launched in an entrepreneurial burst of inspiration, CMCD proved to be such a success, it threatened to swamp his design business.

“A successful product doesn’t remain successful without a constant need for maintenance, nurturing and the demands for capital required to grow the business,” Mok says. As CMCD products took off, it became apparent that Mok would have to choose between running a clip-art business or a design firm.

In this case, his solution was to partner with one of CMCD’s clients, Photodisc, a Seattle-based purveyor of high-end digital stock photography, has engaged in an exclusive worldwide distribution agreement to produce four CMCD titles a year for the next five years.

Professional Makeover The inevitable restructuring of Mok’s company began with his decision to distance himself from the day-to-day business operations of the 40-person company so that he could concentrate on his design work. Over the course of several years, Mok solidified the operational side of the business, brining in Amanda North as vice president and “identity architect,” and Mark Crumpacker as creative director and CEO. When asked the secret to running a large and complex business, Mok looks at his two lieutenants and says laughingly, “Delegate!”

The process reached its apex about a year ago, when the swell of the company’s Internet-related projects became a tidal wave. “The nature of the new projects was about identity and marketing communications, and also product enhancement capability for clients and systems,” Mok recalls. “Those things required particular skills, a particular kind of infrastructure support, and they demanded we look at the organization and ask ‘Where are the strengths and resources to bring all of these together?’”

Both Crumpacker and North have been tested in e crucible of Silicon Valley startups, having served on the client side for companies like Global Village and RasterOps. Crumpacker, 33, who most recently worked for design firms Primo Angeli and Landor Associates, proudly admits that, in the course of his nine years working in Silicon Valley, he held nine different jobs. He feels his client experience provides a definite advantage. “It’s very stressful, but very valuable experience. And it is really critical, when clients are hammering on you to get something done in a particular time frame, to understand the kinds of constraints under which they operate,” he explains.

“We are now describing our company not as a design firm, but as identity and information architects,” North says. The term “information architect” has its genesis in Richard Saul Wurman’s seminal book, Information Anxiety, and refers to the way information can be structured to reveal meaning. It is a phrase that will become increasingly common as designers and writers become more sophisticated about communicating in an interactive, electronic medium, she says.

For North, the repositioning effort at Studio Archetype has everything to do with “strategic contributions, helping clients think through the whole process of communications, and then recommending the media types most appropriate for the communication programs they have. We help them think through the process, how they integrate all their communications planning. That’s a service we provide above and beyond what you normally think of when you think of a design firm.”

The name Studio Archetype, like most products of Mok’s shop, is the result of a thoughtful, considered process. It speaks to the recognition of the company’s core capabilities, and represents an attempt to get involved in the creative process early. The name of the game, according to North, is to understand client businesses, and their communications needs, then provide a strategic consulting service that integrates the power of the client’s brand across all their media communications disciplines. Reaching for a dictionary, North reads the definition of archetype: “An original model upon which all things of the same patter or type are based.’ We think that Archetype addresses our role as identity and information architects. And we believe that the work we do transforms our clients into archetypes in their fields.”

The volume of incoming work has inundated Studio Archetype with “more work than we could ever do, and has allowed us to chart our own strategic direction,” Crumpacker says. Studio Archetype now has the luxury of turning down work that it feels is inappropriate to its strengths, or presents the wrong production model. Crumpacker says that Studio Archetype can now control its own destiny, and steer the business toward a product mix that consists of 50/50 electronic design and traditional print projects.

With only a slight tinge of regret, Mok recounts turning down IVI Publishing in a deal that would have swelled Mok’s corporate coffers but turned his office into something resembling a digital factory. For Studio Archetype, taking on new work “ultimately comes down to producing work we can believe in,” Mok says.

Meanwhile, North, whose day-to-day job is an amalgam of new business development and coordinating strategic planning for Studio Archetype clients, spends a good portion of the day gently turning away business. North notes that 50 percent of inquiries for service are turned down. “Our goal is to service the needs of our ongoing, strategic clients -- to make certain the Sonys and the 3Coms are getting our full attention,” she says.

Going the Web Way Much of the incoming business is directly related to the phenomenon of the World Wide Web. The Web offers a new model of multimedia production opportunity that eliminates many of the flaws and risks of CD-ROM-based publishing, Mok explains. Since Web sites are essentially living, organic information entities, the need for updates, revisions, additions and redesigns is continual. As a result, it creates an opportunity for an ongoing relationship between production company and client that is preferable to the uncertainties of the project-by-project model.

“The Internet has opened entirely new areas of focus for us,” says Mok, whose firm has been rolling out Web sites for, among others, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Activision, Sony Pictures and Harper Collins Publishing at the rate of about one a month. Mok credits the information design experience garnered on an early medical CD-ROM for developing an understanding of how Web sites can be mapped in hyperspace.

Designing Web sites is only half of the equation for Mok, whose interests extend into more entrepreneurial realms. “From helping to produce products and services online, we can actually begin to expand the capability of an organization to do business on-line,” Mok says, with excitement building in his voice. “Currently, we are addressing transactions, the next hurdle to doing business on the Internet.”

What the Internet can deliver, and only a few companies are actually beginning to understand, is, according to Mok, “true enterprise computing.” For a design firm to compete successfully in this arena, it helps to have some very savvy technology partners. And this is one area where the relationships he has built working with start-ups in the hothouse of Silicon Valley will pay huge dividends. In fact, his first client as an independent was Connect, Inc., a company that will provide server and middleware management software for Studio Archetype projects that require the granular analysis needed to manage online transactions and extend the capability of doing business on the Internet.

Designing R&D For those ready to exploit it, this kind of opportunity will lead inevitably to a new kind of design firm, one that will combine the skills of traditional graphics designers with those of industrial designers, engineers and hackers. Studio Archetype’s research and development team is already a prototype. Stephan Bugaj, who leads the R&D effort, come to Studio Archetype from Gravity International where he engineered its virtual reality projects. Senior producer, Eric Wilson, who coordinates project implementation at Studio Archetype, formerly ran the multimedia lab for the New Media Group at Apple. Along with Mok, who will participate on a case-by-case basis, their job is to troll the Web looking for new developments, exploring up-and-coming technologies, and devising creative ways to apply them to client solutions.

While Mok is pushing the envelope of design and its integration into high-tech solutions and systems, it is up to Crumpacker to turn an analytic eye on his efforts. “My job is to identify our core strengths as a company” and build on those, says Crumpacker, who stepped into the CEO position six months ago. “To identify what it is we are good at doing, [we] make sure there is a viable business model there, and that things on a day-to-day basis at Studio Archetype are efficient, profitable and enjoyable. Then [we] use a portion of our profits to support the R&D effort and enfold those efforts so that they become useful for the majority of our clients in the mainstream operation.”

It’s Still My Company Driving the reogranization at Studio Archetype is the imperative to leverage Mok’s time where it can have the most impact. Mok is especially interested in projects that combine interesting design challenges with the opportunity to create new modes in which information and entertainment can be distributed, accessed and enjoyed. For Mok, those are “the projects that are the most fun.”

Intercast is one such fun project. The consortium of media companies, cable operators and on-line providers, such as Intel, NBC, CNN, Netscape and America Online, hired Studio Archetype to promote its new medium that links broadcast television, Internet access and PC computing functionality on the desktop. Convergence is here. And it was Mok who designed the interface and the demonstration that NBC rolled out for television executives, advertisers, the FCC, and of course, the “Today” Show.

According to Ken Bronflin, vice president of NBC’s Cable and Business Development ventures, finding Mok and Studio Archetype was the result of a rigorous search by media people at NBC. “We needed a powerful way to explain Intercast in a very short amount of time [and Mok] came with an excellent reputation and a reputation for getting things done. Which is important in the multimedia industry.”

Yet another “fun” opportunity recently presented itself in the form of “24 Hours in Cyberspace,” the ambitious undertaking by Rick Smolan and Against All Odds productions that occurred last month. The event had photojournalists posting their work from around the world while photo editors, art directors and journalists assembled stories for a one-time-only, real-time magazine on the Web.

Mok worked closely with Smolan to create the interface for end users. According to Smolan, that meant taking something incredibly complex and simplifying it to the point where “a photo editor could sit down in front of a machine and, using a point-and-click interface, could begin assembling a story from hundreds of thousands of pictures. We needed to create interactive templates that determined a finite amount of creative choices.”

“Clement and I inhabit the same general world,” says Smolan, who has known Mok since his days at Apple. “It has been interesting to watch him migrate to the head of the pack. One of the reasons I chose to work with him on this project is that he’s consistently sensitive to what’s coming next -- the zeitgeist, the wind that blows ahead of its time.”

In the Mix To Smolan, the extraordinary challenges represented by the largest one-day event on the Internet “demanded a mixture of art and science. Which is a good metaphor for what Clement does.”

When the dust settles from the reorganization, the bottom line will be that Mok is free to do what he does best: design, R&D, and what he calls the gardening aspect of running a business -- exploring creative concepts, developing emerging ideas and connecting those ideas with the people in his organization. Mok calls it being the “and” part of the organization. “Clement is this and that,” he says with a grin. Noun, verb, conjunction.