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Roger Black Has Designs on the Web At his studio, Interactive Bureau, the Net graphic designer wants to put a more distinctive stamp on sites than today's "Yahoo-ized" phone-book formats Try this: Quickly surf through some of the most popular Web portal sites in succession: Excite, Snap, Netscape, Yahoo!. Just click on them. We'll wait for you. Ah, you're back. Anything seem familiar? Everything seem familiar? Designer Roger Black, founder and creative leader of New York's Interactive Bureau studio, calls the design theme you just witnessed the "Yahoo-ization" of the Web. Or, more specifically: "Giant lists of boring stuff." Cover the logos, Black suggests, and you can barely tell the major portals apart. COPYING THE LOOK. Fact is, Yahoo!'s design hasn't really changed all that much since its then-grad student founders started a simple online list of their favorite Web sites in their Stanford University campus trailer office. In part, the look is just practical, since the limited graphics and straightforward type load quickly. Even well-funded startups have copied the look. Sighs Black: "The logic is like, 'Hey, every home has a phone book. Let's make our new magazine look like a phone book, and we'll have one in every house.'" Web design is an emotional, personal, and chaotic field these days. Folks who couldn't spell portal last year fiercely debate how Web sites should look and work. But Black has earned the right to spout off about his pet peeves: He made his name in the 1970s as an art designer for such publications as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Newsweek, and recently gave The New Republic a makeover, too. In 1994 just as the Web really took off, Black and colleagues David Berlow and Jock Spivy started IAB studio in order to exploit the burgeoning field of interactive design. IAB has been tapped by USA Today Online, @Home, MSNBC, America Online, and, most recently, Drugstore.com. Black has joined the fairly thin of ranks of Web designers who can command between $150,000 and $1 million per project. And business continues to boom: IAB's current 50 employees will grow to 100 by yearend, he says, and billings will top $10 million. "We're in a very lucky point in time as designers," says Black. "The conventions aren't set, and there's so much flux. I'm enjoying a need from my clients that's much higher than it ever was in print."
Like a lot of commercial Web sites, AOL has struggled to find good designers. Many young and relatively inexperienced Web designers today have no background in graphic design or education in classic design principles. "Their emphasis tends to be on technology rather than the thinking process," Raines says. When AOL hired Black's group to redesign its Children's Channel, what Raines says he liked best was that Black "challenges your assumptions. He says, 'Let's tear this apart and start over.'" Indeed, the Children's Channel has a much freer, more explosive feel than many AOL pages. "READERS ARE SKITTISH." Black likes to cite studies he did at Newsweek almost two decades ago for informing some of his thoughts about Web design. The magazine conducted studies to follow where readers' eyes went. "They look at big, color pictures first, then headlines, then what's in the upper left-hand corner. They don't read that much. They skip around nervously." On the Web, he says, it's the same phenomenon, but "wildly exaggerated. Readers are skittish as all get-out." Right now, though, he thinks Web-site hosts have minimal expectations. "If [people] come and click three times, you count it as a success." As the Web matures, the actual absorption of that data and the quality of time spent on sites will get more attention, he predicts. Although Web developers feel like they're drowning in data, Black feels developers are only beginning to analyze people's "clickstreams" -- the paths they take, the buttons that intrigue them, where they get lost, what words turn them off.
Design is also critical to resolving the potential conflicts between information and commerce. Web sites are wildly experimenting with everything from so-called sticky ads that follow you as you click through a site, to ads that appear midway through text, almost the way a television commercial interrupts a broadcast. "It's like television in the 1950s, where the risk of putting advertisers in charge of news is enormous," says Merrill Brown, editor-in-chief of MSNBC. "No one has solved the problem of integrating advertising and commerce into news sites yet," but Brown believes Black is on the right track. Before launching MSNBC in 1996, "I spent a lot of time interviewing [designers] on both coasts," says Brown. "Roger Black was the only person I could find in the United States of America who understood Web design and journalism." Perhaps one of the biggest design issues looming for the pioneering sites is so-called scaling -- expanding information and features. The portals' category listings, for example, eventually become unusable if sites are buried dozens of folders deep. In another twist, if you look at Amazon.com's site, the line of category tabs across the top of the home page has been growing to accommodate Amazon's new business areas such as music and auctions. If it keeps expanding, Amazon will run out of room to add buttons, and every button adds clutter to what was once a very simple design. It looks as if Black and other designers will have plenty of work ahead of them for some time to come. Hamilton is a Business Week contributing correspondent in Silicon Valley _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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