Peter Girardi is a consummate scavenger. He pores over the visual clutter of the digital bitstream, sifting out all the moments most people would regard as "garbage"-bad fax transmissions, the telltale marks of page digitization, and all the random effluvia of the Information Age.

This former graffiti tagger turned graphic designer isn't looking to rid the world (or the World Wide Web) of graphic litter. Instead, he incorporates "garbage" as a design element-using technology not to create something perfect, but something perfectly human. "That's the hallmark of our design," he says. "It doesn't look like it was created on the computer."

Creating texture and human warmth in a digital medium does not stand in the way of functionality. Funny Garbage, the firm headed by Girardi and partners Chris Capuzzo and John Carlin, holds this as the mainstay of interactive design. This approach has won major interactive design projects from Nike, the Cartoon Network, and the American Museum of the Moving Image.

Girardi turned early to computers; at Voyager, he routinely "hacked" Macintosh programs to achieve desired results for his work on CD-ROMs such as Maus, Painters Painting, and the Beat Experience, as well as Voyager's own seminal and award-winning web site.

Ever expanding, Funny Garbage has now taken its talents and aesthetic to a full range of print and other campaigns. "A lot of people think Funny Garbage is a web design company or a new media company," says Girardi. "We're a design company."