about Roger Black on

Medium may be new but principles don't change

By Jeremy Schlosberg

As the traditional media world continues to wonder how to integrate with the web, at least one thing is becoming clear. The internet is not quite so revolutionary as to require media companies to throw out everything they once knew about content and design. So argues Roger Black. Black made a name for himself in the ‘70s and ‘80s at the design helm of some of the country’s most prestigious magazines, including Esquire, Rolling Stone and Newsweek, back in the days when content was called editorial and editorial was considered important. When the web was born in the early ‘90s, Black, sensing much opportunity, launched a web site design firm called Interactive Bureau in 1994. Among his major online clients: Discovery Channel Online, MSNBC and USA Today. Black's recent print clients include the San Francisco Examiner, Entrepreneur, Editor & Publisher and Reader's Digest. Interactive Bureau was purchased by web services company Circle.com in 1999, at which point Black became its chief operating officer. Last month, Black left Circle.com to co-found Danilo Black Inc. with Mexican designer Eduardo Danilo. The new company aims to offer content, design and technology strategy for media companies that operate across the platforms of print, broadcast and internet.



What is the real purpose of design when it comes to a web site? Are they supposed to be easy to navigate? Are they just supposed to look pretty?

I think we are now far enough into the use of the web that we can understand some of the behavior of the users and design to it.
The No. 1 fact is that people are looking for one thing usually. In a magazine people are browsing. On the web people are looking for what I call an information transaction, which might or might not involve buying something.
So your job as a designer on a web site is to open a clear path for people to their objective. Which sounds easy enough. But the fact is most web sites are trying to offer more than one thing, often a lot more than one thing.
And then there’s also the problem that people don’t all behave the same way. So you have to somehow design a way for people to easily find things in a clutter of other things.
And you have to provide different paths of navigation and access so they can go the way they like to go. Some people like to use search, some use the navigation bar on the web, some people like the drop-down menus. And some people like to thrash around aimlessly, or what appears to be aimlessly.



Lots of sites seem to think the answer is to clutter the screen with lots of information. Is this a good idea?

Most web sites suffer from providing too much information. There’s a tension in web site design between recommending things you want people to see and leading them along, and letting them decide for themselves.
Now I tend to work on sites that have an editorial bent of some kind. That’s why people come to me. So maybe that colors my point of view. But as far as I’m concerned, editorial is based on the word "edit," which by definition means to boil down, to reduce, to choose.
Web sites should make some choices for people. That doesn’t mean you eliminate all the other stuff you have. But you bring the content to the surface so people can find something immediately.
As you go through you want them to get some things almost inadvertently, rather than having a series of navigational spaces that they have to click through before they actually get something.
Why not put some content on every screen? Give them some value.
There is a certain amount of satisfaction that people get when they get lost on the net and then discover things they didn’t mean to find. In fact I think the entertainment value of the web has a lot to do with the unexpected stuff you find. You go to Google and they give you some wacky unexpected thing. And you get lost, and a half hour has passed.
Who’s to say that’s worse than watching some dumb TV show?
In school everybody at one time or another found themselves wandering through the library or the card catalog, or going through the encyclopedia at home, and just getting lost.
There is something entertaining in that; it’s just sort of fun. And we don’t do that much when we grow up. But on the internet that’s what people do. I mean, just going through the stuff people sell on eBay can be pretty entertaining.



But isn’t it easy for a site with a lot of information to end up looking like some cheesy sort of information flea market?

Yes, the danger on the web is that information can easily look junky and unreliable, which will make people think they can’t trust any of it. That’s another reason to have an editorial hand in there.



How does a web site create a sense of reliability and authority? Is this a matter of design?

I’ve always found that the big sites always look big. Whatever you want to say about Yahoo, it really is pretty well polished. It looks authoritative.
In graphic design there’s a lot of type and there are a lot of words involved. The link between the type and the design and the meaning is a key part of what we’re doing.
Every single word you put on your screen creates a sense of what you’re trying to project, even things like what you name a button.
I think people grasp pretty quickly when a web site knows what it’s doing. It has to do with the appropriateness of the language, the clarity of the language.
And a lot of it is just the type—having a variety of fonts and different sizes. There’re a lot of signals about professionalism versus amateurism with web sites. For instance, a more amateurish site may have only one font.
We forget how sophisticated people really are. They have a nose for this stuff. People have no problem differentiating between editorial and advertising.
They have no problem telling spam in their email box.
How fast did that take? It was amazing. Spam detectors are built into everyone now, it seemed to take no time at all.



In print a reader knows where he or she is through obvious physical clues—you know you’re in the front of a magazine because you can literally see where you are. Can a web site create this same sense of location for its users?

There’s something reassuring about knowing where you are in a book. A lot of web producers will put site maps on their sites, as if people are even going to use the site in a linear way in the first place.
We quickly found that once they’re two or three pages into a site, people don’t know where they are any more.
I think that the constant reminder of some navigational order helps people in a way. One way of telling a professional site is that the navigation remains constant--those buttons will stay with you, they won’t change place or look from page to page.
But that’s about all we’ve got. There’s no GPS for the web.



How relevant to the web are design guidelines and design ideas from older media?

The medium may be new but human nature is still human nature. I once saw a quote from a competitor of ours who said something like, "We don’t use any references to traditional design on the web because it’s an entirely new medium."
I think that’s nonsense. It’s not a question of saying traditional or linear design models are useless on the web.
The human being is the same. Evolution isn’t going to change human beings because the internet came along. Not that quickly anyway. We’re not going to mutate before we get to our next deadline.
So I think design from other media is completely applicable to the web. Typography and the way people read are important. There’s a reason why navigation bars are on the left—when people read they start on the left. All the things we’ve already learned about how people think are very useful.
The internet is simply an artifact of culture. It is the thing being transformed by humans. The internet is not transforming human nature. Older models would not have succeeded if they didn’t relate to how people liked to do things.
That’s not to say the web isn’t fun and different in its own way. We’re in a stage now where we can also put motion graphics and video in, where we obviously can’t do that in print. So maybe there are other metaphors that can be used from radio or television or film that would also be useful.



Things have turned ugly for people who thought the road to heaven was paved with ad-supported content sites. What’s your perspective on the matter as a designer of content?

I think what we’re paying for is that the financial model for many sites was an entirely market-based model.
Venture capitalists got into this business hoping to make a killing in the market. And they created a lot of things with that as the goal, rather than the goal of creating a profitable business.
I think what happened is we had a lot of people rush into the internet as they would to a gold rush, thinking that if they got their stake in, there would be an enormous upside. The market believed growth was essential and getting there early was rewarded. And all of us responded to that.
Now the market’s turned and people are realizing that profit is important and that the seemingly old-fashioned ideas of what businesses are worth investing in and what aren’t haven’t changed.
Of course the smart people knew that all along. But as the dust has settled we’ve discovered that we don’t really know what the business model is for content sites on the web.
These things just don’t seem to make a lot of money. We should’ve known that earlier. If it’s advertising supported like most magazines or newspapers—well, there’s a fundamental supply and demand issue in publishing and broadcasting too.
Ultimately there’s a scarcity of space and time. On the internet we don’t have any scarcity. So it was only a matter of time before advertisers woke up and said, "Why would I pay you for this?" Or, "Why would I pay you this much?"
Media buyers were part of the problem in the misapprehension that happened. They’re the people who believed that this was a new advertising medium. What this is is a new communications medium.
It’s like the telephone. The telephone has turned out to be a wonderful marketing tool. One-on-one, it’s fabulous.
If we can think about advertising in that kind of context we’re going to be in better shape.
What you’re finding in your own site is a key: if you provide useful, reliable content that’s relatively interesting, you can create a communication link with people that’s very important to advertisers and ultimately to commerce.
What you’re talking about here gets back to old advertising principles: the quality of the attention you have is the key. If you make it interesting, you get them to come back, you create a relationship that the advertiser benefits from. That credibility thing rubs off on the advertiser.
The antidote to the bad news, that we have an infinite inventory of ad space on the web, is the good news that we can actually find the customers we’re looking for and we can track their behavior.

There’s that famous quote about advertising, the one that says we all know half of the money spent on advertising is wasted; the problem is, we don’t know which half.

That’s the thing about the web, at least potentially: now we can know which half works. And that’s a wonderful thing to be able to know.