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about the flux

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Established 1996.

Making Businesses Look Good
Since Dial-Up.

Most businesses need design but don’t have a designer on staff.

Optiflux fills that need.

We specialize in branding, logos, graphic design and boutique websites, plus video and audio when the job calls for it. Think media ads, annual reports and newsletters. If it involves type, layout or a blank artboard, we can get it done.

Everything we make is pixel-perfect and handmade in Chicago, from a bunker just outside the city limits. We work mostly after dusk, straightforward by default and down a rabbit hole by midnight.

Runs best on strong coffee, great albums and clear and present deadlines. Do not expose to bad kerning, rush hour on the Kennedy or feedback that begins with “my nephew says.”

Optiflux Injected Design

Optiflux Injected Design

Conceived, conjured and forged from 100% human intelligence.

Technology keeps promising to make creativity easier, from online website builders to AI models that produce images on demand. But distinctive design still comes from human beings who have lived curious, energetic, inherently random lives, and it always will.

Why not consider partnering with us?

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Premature Memoirs of the Optiflux/MediaTribe

Optiflux began in the mid-nineties as a collective of analog, digital and performance artists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nic Rotondo spent six beautiful, meandering years there, steeped in architecture and laying deep underpinnings in Art History, Foundry and Philosophy. He graduated with a BFA in 1996, double-majoring in Interior Architecture and Art & Technology, which left him with strong opinions about both door swings and typefaces.

At SAIC he met Han Rhyu, a fellow student and a kindred spirit. Han became Nic’s original partner in Optiflux, and the two of them came up with the name together on New Year’s Eve 1995, in the Michigan Avenue offices of the architecture firm where Nic was just starting a seven-year run. The mood was right for a couple of imaginary thinkers, alone on the 14th floor of the Santa Fe Building, to alter their minds a bit and riff off each other as ’95 turned to ’96, and that’s exactly what happened. With fireworks going off over Navy Pier to the northeast, Optiflux was born.

Han and Nic co-owned the domain for a couple of years and stayed roommates through 1998, when Han evolved into the “digital nomad” he was always meant to be, leaving Chicago to make his way in the great wide world. That’s also about when Optiflux became Nic’s sole proprietorship, officially, on paper at least. Here’s how it went down. Nic had a band back in college called Comadisco, a name Han had always liked. When the two parted ways, Han offered Optiflux in exchange for Comadisco. They shook on it, and so it was.

All the while, Nic was working for that same firm, VOA, best known for designing that very pier. Over seven years his role grew from architectural design to marketing to digital media. He worked on projects for more than 60 clients, shaped the concept and look and feel of dozens of project-winning presentations, and built the first VOA.com after convincing the old guard in 1996 to buy the domain before someone else did. (Beating Voice of America to it, and the official trouble that caused, is a great story for another time.)

Alas, on May 22, 2002, his seventh anniversary there, Nic took his leave of the firm, giving up the safety of direct deposit every couple of weeks in exchange for the chance to do his own thing. But first, he spent the summer frequenting lakefront beaches, playing pickup basketball, shaking off the corporate malaise like a dog in from the rain.

By autumn, though, the bite in the air had him back indoors, tired of leisure. The freelance angle was the next go. He retooled Optiflux as a commercial design shop, cobbled together a studio, connected it to the ether, stocked it with the most righteous software out there… and established a solo orbit. A generous early network of word-of-mouth clients got the ball rolling. Less than a year later his first son was born, and Optiflux became a freelance sole proprietorship in every way that counts.

What followed was a twenty-year dip in the Optiflux story, and a happy one. Nic raised two boys. That early network grew into a small stable of repeat clients and one-off projects, which was plenty of work for the time he had. The rest went to Scouts and baseball, mostly baseball. He managed 34 teams over 14 years, and close to 400 kids called him Coach. Design settled onto a utilitarian plateau, practical work done in the cracks and shadows between his duties as a stay-at-home dad.

Late 2023 changed that. The nest was about to empty, one son finishing college and the other starting, and Nic had his time back. He spent it thinking deeply and often about what form Optiflux’s reincarnation should take. Ideas built to a head in September of ’26, when the will finally found the way. This website is hundreds of sketches, diagrams and maps from multiple sketchbooks, coming to life as the webOutpost he always pictured in his mind’s eye. The website maker finally has a website.

Over the years, word of mouth has led us to clients all over the country, a few of whom we have never met in person, an odd reality of the freelance design game. This time around, we’re hoping to build our reputation locally, here in Chicagoland. But we can serve your design needs no matter where in the world you find yourself, at least until the grid goes down.

Born in Chicago, Nic works the way he always has, communicative (but not too much), with a get-it-done approach and a blue-collar hustle that dates back long before he called himself a designer. In essence, Nic is Optiflux. The whole job gets the whole person, every time. If you have a project, he would love to hear about it.

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How We Work.

Pencil First, Pixels Second.
Analog Start, Digital Close.

Every Optiflux project begins in an analog state of mind. Story and layout, proportion and feel are all outlined and iterated in a sketchbook and pondered over on our daily walks, long before a screen gets involved. All ideas simmer, before they boil over.

A brand starts as a haystack of failed doodles, with the winning idea hiding in there like a needle. A website starts as boxes and arrows that only make sense to the person who drew them. Video gets storyboarded before it gets shot and cut. Audio is previewed on good speakers and bad ones, because your customers own both. Somebody is always on the receiving end, and we design with them in mind.

By the time anything gets built, the ideas are settled and the decisions are made, the sketchbook serves as the blueprint. The order matters. The thinking happens first, it happens slowly and it happens with intent, in the head of someone who seeks pride in the result. Then we move to the screen, where we bring decades of experience and the finest computers running the finest software available to bear on the work.

Websites are similar but different. The game has changed in the coding world, and the upside of working with AI is too big to ignore. Optiflux works nocturnally, which suits our newest colleague, as it never sleeps. Anthropic’s Claude is an AI co-worker that can read an entire code base before we finish our coffee. It’s also a great foil for debating outlines and sentence structure, or for going down a rabbit hole with. Most importantly, though, it writes native JavaScript, which means we don’t have to.

“Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”

— Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies

We’ll once again return to a fundamental process, a process more fluid and random.

Purging the mountain of brown thoughts, whose decay blocks our way.

To seek the color of being in a place where information flies and glitters, connections hiss and rattle, curiosity is our arrow.

Every medium has its own words, every mixture of words a potential for meaning.

To combine words, build and occupy places that are the consequence of those words, is our intention.

To mix the paraphernalia of the different media, to watch the meaning become navigable, to enter into it, to take a front-row seat as magic and technology merge.

Take a Front-Row Seat.

Tell us what you’re making, or what you wish someone would make for you.

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