Blueprints for Web Sites that Work: The Interactive Bureau Brief
By Yvonne L. Lee
To many artists and publishers, Roger Black is design. He's also renowned for revamping and refreshing magazines. From 1975 to 1978, he worked at Rolling Stone as an art director and type designer. He received the National Magazine Award for his gradual redesign of the magazine. In 1982, he was art director at The New York Times Magazine. Other noted redesigns include Newsweek, the Toronto Star, The San Francisco Examiner, and Esquire. He also helped launch the designs for Smart Money and Out magazines. When he wasn't busy with North American publications, he helped launch or redesign publications in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Brazil.
Black's work gained a reputation for its sparseness, clean layouts, and bold use of serif fonts. His work with typography led him to work with Adobe in its development of PostScript.
As a pioneer in desktop publishing, Black was a natural candidate to design for the Internet. In 1994, in response to client demand and his own growing interest, Black cofounded the Interactive Bureau (www.iab.com) with David Berlow and Jock Spivy to offer Web design consulting.
Although the Interactive Bureau is a separate business from Black's print design firm, Roger Black Inc., it shares many of the same principles of using large type, high contrast, sparseness, and presenting content on every page. The company has built successful Web sites for the U.S
