WWW Design

Article excerpt

by Ken Coupland

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web has created a new field of design -- a new breed of designer -- which offers exciting opportunities and challenges for both creatives and clients. Here, six San Francisco-area shops, ranging in size from one man to a staff of 35, offer insights into planting roots in shifting sands.

As design and technology collide on the World Wide Web, today's Webmasters are being drawn from the ranks of highly motivated, creatively flexible, designers with finely tuned skill sets, a keen eye for the market and respect -- often bordering on awe -- for the communication potential of this new medium. A number of these brave pioneers are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the proximity of Silicon Valley, a high-profile marketing and advertising community and a vigorous graphic design scene, have helped establish a thriving local industry in emerging media.

"It's vigorous all right," says ad agency Foote, Cone and Belding creative director Robin Raj, who heads up that firm's Web site division. "There's so much of the right kind of talent, all resident in such a manageable area, that a new type of creative community is developing, content-wise and technologically. The velocity at which this is happening allows some crazy hybrids to occur."

Because Web sites demand equal parts of programming skills, marketing savvy and design smarts -- and no one has fully developed the formula -- there's room for operations of all sizes and kinds. Here, we discuss Web design with half a dozen very different Bay Area firms, from one-man shops to divisions of multinational advertising agencies.

Perennial Players in a Mercurial Market

With a core staff of 35 administrators, producers, engineers and designers, and growing, vivid studios, another South of Market developer, is something of a perennial in the mercurial business atmosphere of new media and has weathered several incarnations -- from book publisher to CD-ROM and Web site developer -- in its six years of operation.

Nathan Shedroff, 31, creative director of vivid, welcomes the latest technical innovations, but insists that to be effective a Web site has to provide "a compelling interactive experience." Shedroff, who has a background in information design, adds, "A site may look good and have some decent information, but if there's no real reason to go there and certainly no reason to go back there, what have you accomplished?"

Shedroff is quick to compare the various mediums in terms of what the Web is not. "The Web is not a publishing medium like books and CD-ROMs," he notes. "It's a communications medium, much more like the phone company than the newspaper, magazine and book businesses. That's sometimes a big hurdle for clients to get over."

To help clients comprehend the new medium, vivid's own site houses a Web guide. Along with ingenious Internet scavenger hunts, the studio has helped to orchestrate projects for clients as diverse as Sony and the NAMES Project and coverage of a live Internet feed of Bill Gates' Windows 95 bash at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus.

Shedroff, too views the Web as a new model for business. "The smart companies are looking at their businesses and asking themselves, 'How much of this can we do on the Web?' Some of them are building their beta test programs on the Web, and others are basing their entire tech support out there."

How does vivid find clients? "Most come through referrals," explains Shedroff. "It's a close community here. We do some promotion and public relations, but no advertising."

His advice for designers: "Don't be afraid of the technology, but also be aware of its limitations. And in the end what really matters is good design."

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