Newtowner Navigates Digital Media All The Way To A Job With Facebook

By Eliza Hallabeck

It was a side project during his time at the University of Pennsylvania that would land Newtown High School grad Eric Fisher a job at Facebook, a social networking site that reached 500 million users on Wednesday, July 21.

Since graduating NHS in 2004, the road to working at Facebook, as Eric puts it, could not have been more complicated.

“I joined the small-but-growing Digital Media Design program at UPenn, which was supposed to teach me about computer graphics and visual communication,” he said this week by email. “Instead, however, I taught myself web design and development at the end of freshman year and pursued that outside of class.”

He completed a few large projects, like creating a site for selling and buying textbooks, www.betterthanthebookstore.com, a wordplay site, www.dailypennsylvanian.com/node/5229, and a social network for friends modeled after Facebook. Eventually a small team of students started working with Eric to create websites for clients in the Philadelphia area.

“I got a design internship at Apple after my junior [year] and went back after graduating to help develop and teach design principles for the then-new iPhone platform,” said Eric.

After Apple he was tired of the “big company political structure.” So he freelanced for a while and partnered with the CEOs of companies in the San Francisco Bay area, providing product design strategies and consulting. Eventually he took a job at Google, where he worked on its new search design, among other things, he said.

Again he, “realized I felt frustrated by the size and political structure of the company. Fortunately, Facebook called me,” he said, “and here I am.”

He works in a small team of product designers that are responsible for “everything you see on the site.” The team works with the engineers who build the features and the product managers who drive the process, according to Eric.

Daily work at Facebook includes attending strategy meetings, on topics ranging from Facebook’s News Feed and its homepage, and designing different images in Photoshop. Occasionally, Eric said, he meets with Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Vice President Chris Cox for discussions.

Compared to Google, Facebook is fast-paced and feels smaller and more straightforward, he said. Compared to Apple, Facebook “feels like college. Working here is like college, part two.”

Eric travels back to Newtown roughly every eight months to visit family and friends. His father, Rob Fisher, who “put together the lovely Great Ring Road sign you see when driving down [Route 34],” is a Sandy Hook resident. His mother, Judy Fishman, founding president of LMT Communications, lives in Newtown with Eric’s step-dad, Andy Wiggin.

 He keeps a portfolio of his work online at www.eFishDesign.com, and blogs about his current field at FishoftheBay.com.

A July 6 posting on FishoftheBay.com spoke to the different perspective people in the technology industry and consumers have with using social technology.

“Tech guys see it one way — open, connected, simple — and the rest of the world sees it another — scary, uncertain, complex,” Eric wrote. “People heavily engrossed in the tech communities have adapted to the change a lot more than the majority of the world. We’re used to having several different social services, check-in products, hundreds or thousands of friends, a constant stream of information flowing to our screens every minute. We strive to build products that make all of this feel simple. But the fact is, it’s not simple. And for the mainstream, it won’t be for a long while.”

Eric has a hard time considering himself as a designer; instead he describes himself as being obsessed with things that make sense structurally and organizationally.

“My real passion is in storytelling and designing spatial systems — i.e. architecture and print design — and it’s just so happened to be very closely tied to interaction and interface design in technology,” he said recently.

Working at Facebook allows Eric to connect his love of stories and his love of connecting people, he said.

“The trick is to get people to see the value in using the site more to curate their memories and experiences,” he said. “Technology-wise, I just like making things that people use every day to make their lives easier or more connected.”

Overall, he likes working for Facebook.

Helping People Record Their Lives

“I don’t see Facebook as a cool, nifty product, but rather a communication platform to help people record their lives with each other,” he said. “Growing up, I always wanted a lot of friends but had trouble forming strong relationships, so this way I feel like I’m satisfying that same basic need by creating systems that everyone can use.”

 Some of the things he finds himself explaining to people about Facebook include the fact that Facebook does not share personally or identifiable information with advertisers, he said.

“Rather, they simply target a demographic in the same way advertisers target specific keywords when you search on Google,” said Eric.

For example, if a woman listed as being interested in fashion signs into the site, targeted ads posted on Facebook could share online shopping websites; if a man interested in sports signs on, targeted ads could show sports-related content, or vice-versa. According to Eric, Facebook uses the information to help make the advertising more pointed, but that information is not shared with the third-party advertisers.

“We get advertised to everywhere we go today,” he said, “billboards, TV, movies, magazines, newspapers — so we can’t simply escape it. But if we’re providing a useful tool that actually advertises the things you like, then to me, advertising doesn’t seem like unwanted noise anymore. We’re just not 100 percent there yet.”

Eric is still not sure the technology industry is for him, and expects to be living in New York City at some point in the future, either starting his own company or leading the creative efforts for a startup, he said.

“Maybe I’ll go back to my first love of architecture. I’d ideally love to teach classes on design principles on the side as well,” Eric said.

For anyone thinking about having a Facebook page, Eric said it can be fun and for companies it offers a chance to keep “fans” informed of a business’s activities.

“My mom’s company has one and they’ve been able to create a much more personal interaction with some of the fans,” Eric said. “We’re working to make the product more robust, but in the meantime, Facebook does provide a nice distribution channel to get information directly from you to the people who want it.”

Having a personal Facebook site, he said, has also allowed him to keep up with hometown news posted on The Newtown Bee’s Facebook page while living in San Francisco.

Small World

The 500 million-user mark has also put Eric in a funny position at Facebook. He is the cousin to the actor, Jesse Eisenberg, who will be playing Mr Zuckerberg in the upcoming film, he Social Network. The film will tell a fictionalized story about Facebook’s creation in Mr Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room when the film is released across the country in October.

Eric has also been mentioned, not by name, in recent coverage of Facebook, including ABC News’s Diane Sawyer interviews with Mr Zuckerberg, available in different video installments at www.abcnews.go.com, for his relation to his cousin.

“[My family] heard he was playing Mark Zuckerberg before I joined Facebook, so it was even funnier that I got the job after the fact,” said Eric. “Apparently everyone at work had heard they just hired ‘the actor who’s playing Zuck’ and knew of me once I got there. The movie is definitely over the top in its portrayal of Mark though — I hope people don’t take it too seriously. He’s actually a really cool guy.”