Few can match Roger Black’s record of accomplishment when it comes to designing publications. Black has led redesigns at Newsweek, Esquire and Reader’s Digest. He has designed newspapers in Houston, Zürich and Singapore, and was part of the launch teams at Outside, Fast Company and Smart Money magazines. As Black has been known to say, “I’ve designed more magazines than you’ll ever read.” His web design projects range from Discovery.com and Barnesandnoble.com to MSNBC.com and Senate.gov.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES had been using a clone of Times Roman for headlines since the ’70s. Black went to the Dutch precursor, Kis (Janson), and got his partner at FontBureau, David Berlow, to build a bigger family, then design a sans serif based on ART’s Titling Gothic. Jim Parkinson redrew the logo. These front pages were designed under the direction of Joe Hutchinson, now at Rolling Stone. Much has changed at the paper with new ownership, says Black, but the fonts and the basic logic of the design carry on.
ELEGANCE WITHOUT EGO
Black puts his well-tested approach in perspective: “I’ve always been essentially old-school. My abiding theory has been that if you learn from the people who came before you, you don’t have to start at the beginning and go through their same mistakes.” His stock-in-trade is classic, elegant typographic standards: timeless serif type for print and traditional sans serifs for the web. His color schemes are minimalist—white, black and red … more on this later. His page designs, be they made of wood pulp or LCD pixels, are quiet and elegant typographic works of art. Like Fred Astaire with dance or Yo-Yo Ma with music, Black designs with seemingly effortless grace.
You might also say Black has taken the art out of art direction. For his clients, he is the welcome antidote to temperamental and unpredictable designers. He provides design without ego and proves that substance will always win out over style. Black has attained a state that in the online world is called scalability; his reach seems limitless.
DESIGNER BY HAPPENSTANCE
Roger Black grew up in west Texas and attended the University of Chicago in the ’60s. He got involved in underground publications—becoming a designer, he says, by default rather than training. Following a brief stint at a Texas ad agency, he went to another underground newspaper, this time in Los Angeles. He proceeded to Rolling Stone, becoming one of the principal creators of the RS look and bringing the heretofore underground publication into the mainstream. Emerging from Rolling Stone as an acclaimed art director, he joined New York magazine, then The New York Times and later, Newsweek.
NEW TOOLS, NEW PARADIGM
The advent of the Macintosh in the mid-’80s was a pivotal moment in design—roughly equivalent to the arrival of the spreadsheet in finance or sound in movies. When the first Macs appeared, Black fully embraced the technology. QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop became integral tools used for every project. Graphic designers had to relearn their trade, and Black was one of the first to do so. In the process he became one of the most expert—and most passionate—advocates for the melding of design and technology. When the web was born in the early ’90s, Black sensed a great opportunity and launched a website design firm called Interactive Bureau. Among the company’s major clients were the Discovery Channel Online, MSNBC and USA Today. Interactive Bureau was purchased by the web services company Circle.com in 1999, at which point Black became its chief operating officer. After two years Black left Circle.com to cofound a new firm, Danilo Black, with Mexican designer Eduardo Danilo. Their venture, thriving today, offers content, design and technology strategy for media companies operating across the platforms of print, broadcast and web.
BALANCE & CLARITY
Today, Black’s work stool is solidly balanced on three legs: Roger Black Studio, Danilo Black (both in the U.S. and Mexico) and The Font Bureau. His personal studio is a very small strategic design consultancy that works with big media companies. Danilo Black in Mexico is a full-service graphic design agency also serving the content industry. The U.S. branch of Danilo Black, DBUSA, focuses on narrative publishing, in print and online. (A good example of this work is FlypMedia.com, which DBUSA is helping launch and is now in beta.) Black refers to Font Bureau as his typographic home. “Over the years, by providing every possible typeface I could need, it has done a lot more for me than I have for it.”
If there is one complaint about Black’s accomplishments, it is the same one that befalls most superstars of graphic design: His assistants do much of the work. It’s been said Black devotes sporadic time to any one project he takes on and his staff designers are actually the ones who are hired. Although there may be some truth to this, there are also no nasty surprises when Black takes on a project. He delivers beautiful, elegant design—every time. He ensures that the designers who work for him produce the level of quality that has made him so sought after. He “makes everything crystalline,” says the design writer Steven Heller.
In fact, when asked about his typographic philosophy, Black mentions Beatrice Warde’s “Crystal Goblet” typographic essay (see the links at the end of this article). “My goal is to make text easy to read. There is nothing so stylish as clear, welcoming type that melts away and allows the content to come through. Beatrice Warde’s famous essay, ‘The Crystal Goblet,’ may present an unobtainable goal. The type never completely disappears. The design of a typeface, for one thing, carries a lot of its own culture and style. But if you pick the right font, set it the right size, in the right width and tracking, the type becomes one with the content. It can help it along. It can push it forward. And at the very least it can avoid getting in the way. That’s real elegance.”
Throughout his career, Black has had a particularly close relationship with two typeface designers: David Berlow and Jim Parkinson. Parkinson was the first to design typefaces and publication logotypes for Black and continues to concentrate on the latter for many of Black’s projects. David Berlow was introduced to Black when the latter was organizing a large type conference in 1987. “We met to discuss what I might give a presentation about,” recalls Berlow. “I don’t remember much about the conference, but Roger and I have been collaborating on projects ever since.” In fact, it was Black who provided Berlow with the encouragement, seed money and first batch of custom design projects that helped launch Font Bureau.
ABOUT THAT WHITE, BLACK & RED
Black is famous—some say infamous—for his color palette of choice. His 1997 book, Web Sites That Work, extols the virtues of the limited color scheme in publication design. “The first color is white,” it states. “The second color is black. The third color is red. Calligraphers and early printers grasped this over 500 years ago and experience has proved them exactly right.” Black contends that white is best for the background, that black is always best for type and that red is the proven winner for emphasis and drama. Is Black the Massimo Vignelli of color? Not by a long shot. But he has hewed to this limited—some would say too limited—color palette for a very long time.
In fact, when it comes to his personal website, it is—you guessed it—white, black and red. “I’ve taken a lot of heat since I suggested that the classic print color combination could work well on the web,” says Black. “No one followed this advice, and so most websites are white, gray or blue—or a combination.” But Rob Hunter, an intern at Roger Black Design who helped create the site, says, “Let’s rub it in their noses.” And so they have. Black’s take? “Big surprise, I kind of like it.”
NEWSWEEK: “Some say we have to redesign Newsweek until we get it right,” Black comments. These pages from the fourth redesign (starting with a major overhaul in 1985) were designed under the direction of Amid Capeci, whom Black met at Esquire in the mid-’90s. Black wasn’t happy with the third redesign, on which he only advised from the sidelines. The pages show the return (in a new weight) of Berlow’s Bureau Grotesque. Parkinson opened up his 1985 logo to work in smaller sizes and on the web.
TURNING TO TYPE
When asked if he has a similar narrow palette of typefaces, Black replies, “I’m not like Massimo Vignelli, who uses fewer typefaces than fingers. But I like the old printer’s dictum, ‘When in doubt, set it in Caslon.’ Sadly, Caslon and Times New Roman, its cultural heir, never have been successfully adapted for offset printing and digital outline fonts. Jack Stauffacher’s default font is always Kis [Janson]. And I could almost go along with him, now that we have FB Kis. But Matthew Carter, using 19th-century Scottish models, has made the early 21st-century default font Georgia. Font Bureau has released its cousins: Miller Text, Miller Deck, Miller Headline and Miller Display. You could do a lot worse.”
And what motivates his choice of faces? “Assuming the text is readable, my main criterion is the associations a typeface evokes,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a cultural thing—Caslon is English and Garamond is French, even today. Sometimes a typeface reminds you of a time or a place—or a company that used it. For example, on The Washington Times I wanted to use Bookman, a great, neutral, sturdy news display face which The New York Times used for years but recently discarded. We tried it, but it still looks totally like The New York Times.”
A DESIGN PHILOSOPHY & PROCESS
Black’s classic design sensibility is prevalent in all his work. “Magazines must be easy to read,” he says. “Websites should be easy to use. Content must be brought to the surface. And when a design is completed, it should seem natural and obvious. It should look like it has always been this way. Its logic should be clear to the users. Like a language, it should suggest the next stage of development to editors, designers, publishers and producers. This way a good media design can adapt to change.”
Through many years—and many more projects—Black has developed a systematic process for media design development. He says he uses it as a structure for all of his projects. The process has five stages, familiar to anyone who’s tried to manage change:
1) Brief: Goals of the project, business proposition, audience, competitors, schedule and budget
2) Design: Two sets of sketches defining the poles of the design space described in the brief. Revisions and green light.
3) Prototype: Every key page (the templates) with real text and pictures. Go/no-go launch decision.
4) Implementation: Style guide, training, staff “shadow pages,” dry-runs leading up to launch
5) Assessment: 90 days after launch, meet again to review progress toward goals of the brief and set future design direction
His colleague Jim Parkinson has his own take on Black’s design process. “Roger knows more about type and arranging it than any designer I’ve ever worked with—the finer points, the little things that make a page sing, things few art directors even notice. When he calls me with a job, he has already done a lot of work on it. Maybe there is a digital mock-up or a pencil sketch or just a great idea that he needs to explain and have someone execute. He has spoiled me. He will say, ‘Let’s do this.’ And I do it.” Perhaps Black’s apparent effortlessness is infectious.
CATCHING UP
Black continues to call on both his process for media design development and his solid sense of typographic structuring for a number of clients. “We’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now,” he says. “On the print side, I’ve been helping Newsweek with design strategy—similar to what I did for the magazine last fall—helping it rethink its design and editorial direction, as news magazines slip into an identity crisis. I am a great believer in the value of text narratives. They are relatively cheap to produce and, with the web, easy to distribute. And there are some big advantages to reading stories in print. For one thing, you don’t have to have power or an internet connection. But it won’t work for magazines and newspapers to do the same stuff people can get faster online.”
WASHINGTONTIMES.COM: The controversial conservative newspaper hired a new editor, John Solomon from The Washington Post, to reshape the paper and its web-site. Danilo Black fielded a large team in New York and Monterrey, Mexico, led by Eduardo Danilo, Jorge Romo and Oscar Garza. Black was the account exec throughout, but Garza came up with the innovative home-page News Cube, which spins and rotates to reveal multimedia coverage and related themes for each major headline.
Recently, with Danilo Black designers in Mexico, Black completed the redesign of
The Washington Times’ website. The new site launched in early June and since then has received a lot of great press (see the link at the end of this article for a full description). Partly as a result of Black’s work and mostly because of a new editor at the paper, John Solomon, the number of unique visitors has nearly doubled to 2½ million a month. And Black does not limit himself to North American clients. He’s currently hard at work on sites for the
Sunday Times in Johannesburg and its daily edition,
The Times.
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Berlow’s view of Black’s abilities pretty much sums up the man and his work: “The general design community sees Roger as a classical type guy or as an adept marketer of his design philosophy. He’s actually a genius as a triple threat in design, business and marketing—always helping us to focus on the right things at the right times or on the right things that are forever.” Parkinson adds, “Roger can see the future. He is way ahead of you.”
www.rogerblack.com | www.fontbureau.com | www.daniloblack.com | http://gmunch.home.pipeline.com/typo-L/misc/ward.htm | www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jun/01/ a-new-look-new-opportunities-for-times-readers
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