Randy Garbin: interactive director, diner maven
design people
It’s not every design studio that has a nationally recognized expert in something. Randy Garbin, our interactive director, not only knows web development, he knows diners.
In fact, Randy Garbin has waxed poetically about the great American diner to various exalted media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, USA Today, the Boston Globe, and his own publication, Roadside Magazine.
Randy started Roadside back in 1990, not long after he bought his first Macintosh. The new machine allowed him to combine his training in graphic design and his passion for food, travel, and history. He stirred all these ingredients at the counter of Henry’s Diner in Boston, Massachusetts, and dreamed up his free quarterly publication devoted to the great American diner. The first issue, dropped on the counters in about a dozen diners in Massachusetts and Connecticut, grew to a regionally-distributed exploration of America’s back roads and main streets that at one time had over 20,000 subscribers.
Roadside soon expanded its scope beyond diners and started to cover other travel and preservation issues. In its ten years, Randy featured stories about Yeungling Brewery, Edgefield Manor in Portland, Oregon, and an exploration of Pittsburgh’s 88 neighborhoods. In his half million miles criss-crossing the country, Randy visited more than 670 diners, dozens of brew pubs, scores of hot dog stands and a forest of roadside statues.
"The best part of it all,” Randy assures, “were the people I met along the way. You can go on and on about how beautiful a diner is, but if there isn’t someone there to run these places, what’s the point?” In 1996, Randy launched the companion website for Roadside, which he saw even then as potentially the more valuable aspect of the publication. “About a year before, I got my first look at something called the world wide web, and I thought my head would explode,” he remembers. “After some trial and error with the initial versions, I soon settled on what we now called a blog format. I simply answered the question, 'what sites do I visit most often now and why?'” That site was Macfixit.com, a simple but informative website by Ted Landau that helped Mac users troubleshoot their machines.
"Almost every day, Ted had another paragraph or so of helpful information. As publisher of the magazine, I gathered and sat upon all kinds of information that no longer had to wait for the next publication. We now had an immediate conduit to our readers.” It wasn’t long before Randy saw the results of the move.
"Within a year, we were selling 25% of all new subscriptions via the website, and we didn’t even take credit cards.” This all happened long before anyone heard of “social media” or “web 2.0.” In 2000, Randy sold the magazine to another company and eventually moved on to other pursuits focusing his design talents in the interactive arena, because he had already seen the future of design and publishing.
"I knew that newspapers were in trouble the day I found myself reading the Boston Globe online while the print version sat at my doorstep.” In 2008, Randy brought his expertise in content management systems and web design to art270. He knows html, CSS, and SEO like few others in this business. He’s managed projects big and small, and at the end of the day, he knows it’s about the people and the story they have to tell.
And when he finishes your website, as an added bonus, he’ll give you directions to where to find the best piece of apple pie in Pennsylvania.