Jaime Levy showing off Cyber Rag II (center), Photo by Michael Levine; from left: Cyber Rag, winter 1990; Cyber Rag II, summer 1990; Cyber Rag III, New Year’s 1991; Electronic Hollywood, fall 1991; Electronic Hollywood II, the “Riot” issue, 1992. Photo by Frank Miles.

Multimedia Artist Jaime Levy Was at the Forefront of Web Design Before Websites Even Existed

With her interactive floppy disks and zines, the Silicon Alley star was ‘basically making websites offline’

By Claire Evans

Jaime Levy’s real name is not Jaime. She won’t tell me what her real name is, only that her parents named her after a Beatles song, and that she hates the Beatles — wishes they’d never existed — and so she’s Jaime, a nod to Van Halen, of all things, and the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, her “idol” when she was just a punk kid growing up in the haze of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Jaime Levy is, in all things, self-made. And when what she wants doesn’t exist, she makes that, too.

As a graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in the early years of New York’s new media renaissance, she figured magazines would go electronic soon enough; in 1990, she started publishing her own interactive floppy disks, point-and-click magazines full of sound collages, rants, gig reviews, and games. The zines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood made her famous in the emerging cyberculture, and when the web finally caught up, she adapted her DIY interaction design to online publishing, becoming creative director of Word.com, one…