Award-winning designer
Roger Black on
What Works on the Web
by Judith Broadhurst

"If you stick video and text together, nobody looks at the text. The reason for that is physical. The human eye — the whole visual response mechanism in the brain — is wired for motion."

Note: I wrote this profile in 1996 for Digicolor, a fancy design magazine published throughout Europe by Canon. The company Roger Black was working for then, @home, along with its big-time stakeholders lost the gamble that he talks about in this interview, even after merging with Excite to become Excite@home. They filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2001. It was their unrealistic expectations about how soon highspeed connections could be deployed widely enough for their company to survive that did them in as much as anything else. In this interview, Black talks about the risks they were banking on and offers interesting and unusual views about what works on the Web, visually, and why.

As one known for his vision and visual imagery, it's rather disconcerting to see Roger Black's office in the @home's building. The walls are as blank as the day late in 1995 when he became creative director for this ambitious new Internet service provider. There's not a single drawing, painting or photo. Not even framed copies of the award-winning magazine or newspaper layouts that have put him on the first-call lists of major publishers worldwide who want to revamp the images of their magazines or newspapers.

But the starkness fits the @home building itself, in Mountain View, California. It's as nondescript as most others that fade into the endlessly utilitarian look that characterizes the low-rise office park sprawl near the California coast known as Silicon Valley.

The lack of distractions forces one's entire focus on the mega-sized computer monitor that hovers a foot or two above Black's desk and the satellite signal converter box that balances on top of it. This is earthquake country, so the whole setup could topple without warning. That monitor and the @home project are Black's main focus for now, even though he can choose whatever projects he wants, practically when and where he wants.

Since he left his last staff job a decade ago, as art director of Newsweek, he has parlayed his reputation for clean, classical, yet contemporary and innovative design into an ever-expanding, worldwide design empire. The @home network is technically a client of The Interactive Bureau, one of his many companies. Among the others: Roger Black, Inc., in New York City; The Font Bureau, in Boston; and joint ventures worldwide, including Danilo Black in Monterrey, Mexico; Gerardo Black Wullner, in Dusseldorf; Roger Black Europe, in Milan; Feriche Black, in Barcelona; and Winter Black Associés, in Paris. [2002 update: see DaniloBlack.]

Black's empire is built on a solid foundation. The Society of Newspaper Design, the Society of Publication Design and the New York Art Directors Club have all bestowed awards upon him, and his designs for both Rolling Stone and The New York Times won National Magazine Awards. Esquire, Smart Money, Premiere, Foreign Affairs, Entrepreneur, Out, the Baltimore Sun and the San Francisco Examiner are among his credits in the U.S. He has also created new looks for Panorama, Epoca, Anna, El Periodico and Grazia in Europe, Reforma in Mexico, and La Republicca in Costa Rica. Newsweek is still his client, as are The Straits Times, in Singapore; Tages Anzeiger, in Zurich; and Svenska Dagbladet, in Stockholm.

There were several factors that influenced Black to commit so much of his time to one project. For one, besides his home in New York City's Gramercy Park neighborhood, he has a home in Los Gatos, California a small, idyllic town among the redwoods where houses start at half a million, within a half-hour drive of @home's offices. Another was his long-standing relationship with @home's acting president, Will Hearst III, grandson of the late publishing magnate, William Randolph Hearst.

But what intrigued him most was the lure, as he puts it, "of a front row seat at the invention of a new medium." Black had already made an impressive debut online with his design of the World Wide Web sites for the Discovery Channel Online and USA Today.

But the @home project, launched in pilot projects in the U.S. late last fall, gives him the chance to create the look for an entire network, because @home is not just a Web site, but an Internet service provider, or access network. Because it runs through a combination of fiber optic and coaxial cable rather than phone lines as other Internet services do, @home should be about 100 times faster than the average 14.4 kbps modem.

What Black and @home's sponsors — TCI Cable, the largest cable TV service in America, Cox Broadcasting and Comcast, the satellite network — are gambling on is that the cable companies will win the turf war with the phone companies over who ends up with the fastest access at a low enough price to capture the market for highspeed Net access from homes.

It's a high-stakes and high-risk gamble that depends on what happens with deregulation, whether widespread demand for Internet connections in homes ever actually emerges and wildcards no one can predict.

"If people are struggling just to stay employed or pay the rent, an extra $30 a month for Internet service [update: $50 minimum for highspeed access in 2002] may not be something they'll welcome," Black says. "Otherwise, there should be a very big revenue stream in two years."

Still, it will be a long time before enough cable is installed in enough places to turn this into an institution rather than speculation. "I think it will be the year 2000 before broadband becomes generally available, but it's probably going to pass the 50 percent mark in '98 [in the U.S.]," Black predicts.

But whether the increased bandwidth or data transmission speed by modem eventually goes through cable or phone lines, Black and other industry insiders are convinced that the momentum toward bigger and faster is unstoppable.

"The Internet is not going to compete with print on certain kinds of levels," he says. "But every bit of information and entertainment is being digitized — all movies, all TV, all sound, all the magazines and newspapers. Everybody's scanning in everything they can."

That's the other, more pragmatic reason he wanted to be at the forefront of the next era of media development, he admits. "The money is in this now; it's what all my clients want."

Although he'll continue working in print too, his present passion is the Web, not other forms of what we've tagged with that awkward term, multimedia. "I've never been interested in CD-ROM, but then I don't design books either. I like something that's current and live."

Black, who's 48, talks about the wonders of technology with the boyish enthusiasm and infectious energy of a high school student explaining his science fair project. It's the creative challenge that makes it so appealing and compelling, he says.

"Trying to make a whole out of a mess or knit the media together is very interesting. That's the challenge.... Those of us from the print business and people from television come from a one-way medium, and we're trying to enter a two-way medium.

"Designers are control freaks, and media people in general try to elaborate a product that comes out exactly the way they want it and hits a certain response — something they can control. We're used to putting something together, extruding it through out network — mailing it or whatever we do — and people either take it or leave it. Media is a manipulative kind of business, on purpose.

"Design for the Web is quite different. One of the key differences is that we have to cede control to what the computer people call users and I call customers. Just the fact that we don't yet have a name for those people says something. They're not readers, they're not viewers or listeners. Eventually a name will emerge, but the point is that you must design so that they have control over what they see. You have to give them options and defaults and tools so they can tailor it to themselves, and put something together that's pleasing to them and not frustrating."

So we ask the obvious: Just how does one allow such latitude on the receiving end, yet control or influence people's reactions and actions?

"I don't know," Black replies. "That's what we're working on, and that's the interesting part.

"In the print field, it's all about the text. That's the personal connection with the reader. So I'm in charge of orchestrating the text, therefore I'm taking direction from the editor.... On the Web, there are still words, but it's not primarily a storytelling or reading medium.

"If you stick video and text together [online], nobody looks at the text. The reason for that is physical. The human eye — the whole visual response mechanism in the brain — is wired for motion. This has to do with food. If we're looking for food and we see something move, that could prevent us from becoming food. It's an evolutionary thing that's hardwired into us, as animals. We can't stop it. You'll notice on TV that when there's full-motion video going on the screen, they don't bother with many headlines until things stop.

"The other thing that's utterly disconcerting — and you see this on CD-ROMs — is two videos simultaneously. Adults looking at it start getting bewildered or even sick. So if you put video on a Web page and you hook up three or four at a time, kids have no problem with it. They'll look at one at a time or concentrate on just one. But it can actually make anybody a little older physically ill.

"So we don't actually put the video up [to load when the page does, automatically]. They have to launch it [choose to watch it by clicking on an icon]. If they don't watch it the first time, they can see it the next time, and if they saw it the first time, they don't have to watch it again. These are not television commercials."

Since the early '90s, online industry analysts have touted the coming convergence of commercial online networks, such as CompuServe, and the Internet. That is happening, but the convergence people didn't predict is of media, not methods.

Less than a year ago, the person in charge of "content" for a Web site was called an editor, as a parallel to print media terminology, and their experience was typically as reporters and editors for print publications. Now they're hiring people with TV backgrounds and calling Web honchos "producers," and the print, broadcast and techno types must learn to work together and think from each others' perspectives.

That's creating tension as well as fruitful collaborations. The computer types foresee the Web looking like video games, the TV folks say it's headed toward a variation of TV, and the print people are still trying to accept the idea that it's different from a paper page.

"Nobody thinks of television as radio with pictures anymore, yet that's what people thought of it when it started," says Black. Likewise, he thinks we have to quit thinking that the World Wide is some spinoff or adaptation of other media.

"The Web is a medium unto itself," he says. "It's characterized by the surfing, zapping culture, somewhat like soundbytes, and that's not all that bad.... Some of it's dreadfully boring now. There are aspects of entertainment that the TV people know about that lighten this stuff up."

Black and other graphic designers have already discovered several things that work and won't work on the Web, some of which are contrary to what one would expect and impose rather severe design constraints.

"One of the things about broadband is that you want people to get it fast. The big design temptation is that you have this big pipe, so you think, 'Let's fill it up!' If you shove all that video and sound and Java [animation] applets into the pipe, guess what? It's just as slow as before. It may be more vivid and interesting, but it takes just as long. So even in a broadband space, you want to get pages that are under 200K, even under 100K.

"We've learned from computer people that the only delay that people put up with is no delay. So if it's taking a minute to download a page, you're in trouble. People expect broadband networks to solve all that. They think it's going to be just like turning on a light. Well, it isn't. Nothing online is that fast."

He leaves the consideration of how fast things load to the technical staff, but others have suggested logos should be less than 20K or as small as 7K, for instance. Color is a key consideration too.

"You have to do a certain kind of lowest-common-denominator design, just like an ad agency has to make sure that an ad they produce looks good on different quality paper, so they may tailor the film."

That means you need to design for small [14"], low-resolution, 8-bit, 256-color monitors to have a chance of it looking good for the most people. "The problem is that it's a different set of colors in Windows than it is in the MacIntosh," Black says. "Everything looks darker on the Mac." In general, you can't expect what you design to look the way you created it by the time it reaches another computer.

"There's a big spectrum of what we call the client base — he machines [computers] people have," Black explains. "We can expect that at least half of them have 14.4 kbps or even 9600 modems. Plus, HTML [hypertext mark-up language, the current standard programming code for the Web] was designed to be loosey-goosey, and people can also set their machines different ways so that a page looks different with different hardware and Web browser software. This is frightening to someone who's used to making a page to look a certain way."

Ah, yes, back to the control aspect again, or lack thereof. But here's the good news if you're a designer: "In this medium, it's all about presentation. Web sites are developed more by art directors and computer engineers than editors.

"Most art directors are frustrated something-elses," Black chuckles. "I'm a frustrated editor. A lot of art directors are frustrated musicians or photographers or illustrators, and have always been irked that they're not in charge of their publications. So art directors who were wishing all along that they were in television or mixing rock 'n' roll albums now have a chance to try it out."

[Sidebar about what equipment and services he uses omitted.]

Copyright © 1996, Judith Broadhurst. All rights reserved.
Published in Canon's Digicolor magazine in Europe.

For Judith's more recent work, see the Recent Articles, Portfolio and Newsletter Archive sections.