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There’s this new thing called the internet

Joshua Davis has no formal training in what he does. As a child he was diagnosed with ADD, and when Ritalin only made him worse, he had to learn to live with the disorder. He began painting seriously in high school, and then moved on to Pratt University to major in illustration. He was, and still is interested in children’s books. While at Pratt he wrote and illustrated a book and tried to get it published. His book was denied by the only two publishing firms he sent it to. "I was discouraged," says Davis, "but [some of my professors] told me everything would be OK. There was this thing called the internet now, they said, and you could self-publish with it."

Davis saw the potential of the internet and it changed his life. "I never did finish my degree - I left during my Junior year. I felt the internet was going to pass me by and I decided to continue to teach myself everything I could as technology progressed. But school also gave me a foundation in communication design, fine art, art history and myth." On his own now, he taught himself HTML and JavaScript, hoping to learn the technology necessary to publish his book. He never did publish it, but he discovered a whole new interesting world in which he could create art, and make money at the same time. With the release of Flash from Macromedia, Josh found the technology he had been waiting for to properly express himself.

Praystation

Davis’s first major project that he felt was personally and artistically significant was praystation.com, which went live in 1997. It was originally a spoof on Playstation, with a gaming theme, but he soon realized that idea wasn’t working. Over the next year the site morphed into his personal science lab. He would spend hours every day experimenting with Flash, and then when he was satisfied with his creation, he’d upload it to Praystation for anyone to look at. "Praystation took off because Josh was doing stuff that was unheard of at the time," says Presstube's James Paterson. "You'd go to show someone the thing that blew you away yesterday, and there'd be something new to blow you away all over again. Josh sustained this amazingly long run of experimentation, and all the stuff he was doing seemed to be things that other people wanted to do but couldn't. And then he offered open source just at the perfect time."

Praystation became the cult hit website for designers at the end of the last millennium. It was a source of inspiration for many Flash developers, and it pushed Davis into the spotlight as one of the young pioneering web designers. But the success of Praystation wasn’t enough for Davis. He felt like he needed another arena to express himself. He wanted a proving ground where he could translate his pen-and-paper illustration skills into animated digital graphics. So he started Once Upon A Forest (OUAF).

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