"Help Me Redesign the Web" by Roger Black

“Help Me Redesign the Web” by Roger Black gives a brief overview of the graphical developments in which the World Wide Web has experienced. Web pages started out as a means for researchers and scientists to share documents and ideas. Users at this time were satisfied with the most basic and simple aesthetics which derived from computer screens and typewritten documents. Black said it best when he wrote, “Early Web users no more felt the graphical limitations of the hypertext markup language (HTML) than they had resented having only one golf-ball font on their old IBM Selectrics. They were so delighted with the Net that the look was irrelevant.”

The turning point of the web’s visual enhancement came at the Seybold Seminar in Boston in 1995. “New Media” was now born when John Gage, the Sun Microsystems evangelist, sowed off the Mosaic browser. This was unlike the traditional approach to designing in that it gave the designer abundant flexibility when creating a page. Black later goes on to talk about the dot-com boom in the lat 1990’s and the rise of search engines. He ends his article with suggestions for future designers to look past designing pages one at a time and start designing using interactive templates that work together in a design system.

I think this is a great article to read for anyone thinking about choosing Web design as a future profession. Black describes the early days of design and what it grew to become. I think his message here is to never remain satisfied with the current advancements; always look beyond it. I appreciate Black’s notion to welcome in the future; “For the rest of us, the possibility of richer forms for Internet media is welcome. Communications will continue on the HTML Web, but now more-compelling storytelling in text and motion pictures is being brought online by new "clients" like Flash and WPF.”

Article can be read: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/18650/page1/