If you’re looking for a model of the design firm of tomorrow, look no further than Fluid Inc., headquartered in San Francisco. Fluid provides a full range of services to clients who are creating e-businesses–everything from best-of-breed user interfaces and rich media content to the salt-of-the-earth Oracle back-end databases that power e-business solutions. • Tamir Scheinok knows both ends of the design spectrum. His official title is director of interactive media, but his job description may be defined more accurately as liaison between Fluid’s creative and engineering groups.

"The creative group is about conceiving and articulating the direction of a client’s project. The engineering group goes out and builds it. Our group finds the technologies that will support both the creative vision and the engineering requirements," explains Scheinok, who oversees a staff of six.

The job is not always easy. Fluid’s creative designers, like Hollywood storytellers, continually conjure up new ideas and concepts. Scheinok’s job is to bring these ideas to reality with tools such as Flash, Shockwave, HTML and JavaScript.

"In meetings, I’m involved in everything from discussions about the object model on the back end to the most esoteric visual design concerns on the front end."

Scheinok’s job is made more challenging because the company sells its expertise in the arenas of narrative and interactive rich media for broadband and wireless e-commerce applications–this is not exactly your standard HTML fare.

"We’re dealing with cutting-edge applications, but the future of the market is uncertain and its timing is uncertain," Scheinok says. "But it’s not our goal to be in the business of guessing which technologies, business models, service providers and delivery media will be successful."

That’s why Scheinok believes it’s vitally important that he remain a "technological agnostic."

"I know design shops that bill themselves as Flash experts. We have no one here with that title. I want our people to think about the interactive media, not the underlying application of the day. Our goal is to create true business applications and enhance the end user experience rather than provide entertainment," Scheinok says.

If there’s frustration in Scheinok’s day, it comes not from dealing with untested technologies, but from trying to squeeze the most out of old technologies. Most of Fluid’s clients require that the firm build Web sites for Version 4.0 and earlier browsers, a parameter that puts major restrictions on the work of Scheinok and his team.

Still, Scheinok wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. With film, animation and multimedia production experience under his belt, Scheinok is convinced he’ll have the opportunity to use it all, right where he is.

Eric J. Adams writes about traditional and Web publishing from  Petaluna, Calif.