Black red and gray
www.daniloblackusa.com/I haven't changed my research page in a year, and most of it is three years old. It's starting to go bad.
The text for a new page is entered into Tinderbox, and I'm toying around with the HTML template. I want the serious-looking, classical modern look of Jan Tschichold's 1928 The New Typography. Clean, sans-serif, left-aligned, assymetrical. Black, red and gray. (The sketches look more Vintage Communist than serious modern so far, but that is a thin border.)
Legendary designer Roger Black echoes Tschichold in his cool 1997 book Web Sites That Work. "The first colour is white. The second colour is black. The third colour is red" (33). Black's money is with his mouth, the homepage of Black's company is all in the classic black, red and gray.
After seeing a little of Black's work (compare his homepage with Men's Health magazine), his colour scheme and his fonts become parodies on themselves. Which is not to say that they don't stand out compared to most other work.
What is worth noting is the other principles Black has learned in his 30-year career. Short, pointed text. Big fonts, big, closely cropped pictures. Tempting links taking you by the hand leading you in.
This page works at a quarter of the original size. No unreadable small print here. Look at the reading sequence. The red carries from the big "Hot" to the first slogan sentence. And the red "How it works" carries me into the article itself, being a visual continuation of the text, a red attention-attracting signal, and an echo of the exclamation point in the title.
Short to-the-point text, tempting links. As described by Black in 1997, and by George Landow in 1989. Know your hypertext tradition, there is much to be learned.
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