Part 1: On early design and transitioning to the Web

Welcome, Jennifer. Thank you for your time. What brought you to O'Reilly & Associates before the Web explosion?
I was hired at O'Reilly as a book interior designer in 1992. Prior to that I had been working as a book designer for four years at Little, Brown. When O'Reilly first began publishing Global Network Navigator in early 1993, I was just in the right place at the right time. They needed a graphic designer, so I added web design to my list of responsibilities. Eventually, I turned my attention to the Web exclusively.

What did you think of the Internet and its future potential at the time?
Honestly, I had never heard of the Internet when I started working for O'Reilly in '92. Of course, O'Reilly was connected extremely early compared to most companies (and especially compared to Little, Brown, where they wouldn't even use computers!). I can remember my coworkers giving me little tours of this Internet thing (pre-Web), which at the time offered little of real value (some recipes, a dictionary, some scientific resources). What was there was difficult and clunky to access. I took to email right away, but at the time, there were relatively few people with email addresses, so it was mostly for in-house communication.

When I first saw the Web in early 1993, it was also fairly barren, but we could feel that the potential was great. Dale Dougherty shared his visions of an information-rich and commerce-driven space. I was thrilled to have a front-row seat and even contribute to the birth of the medium.

What do you think now?
I'm already using resources on the Web as nonchalantly as I'd use the yellow pages, a newspaper, or the telephone. After only five years, you can pretty much type the name of any company and expect that there will be a full-service website there for you. Having this amount of information available at all times is incredible. I'm thrilled to be taking it for granted.

It's been interesting to watch the Web expand (and contract!) and figure out what it's going to be good for. In many ways, these are the same issues we were dealing with back in '93 and '94. What's going to work? What will people want to do here? Take just the e-commerce corner of the Web: it looks as though people will buy books, but not pet supplies or furniture. But it's been fascinating to watch this weeding out process.

What were the design challenges you experienced then? And what are they now?
Like any designer who was accustomed to print, the biggest design challenge was realizing how little control I had over my designs. Finding out that there's no way of knowing how your design will look to the user is a hard pill to swallow for most designers getting started with the Web. After a while, I developed a feel for the range of things that can happen to a page and I've learned to design within that range.

Now that I've gotten used to the medium, I suppose the greatest challenge is dancing around varying browser support. Some headway is being made, but there are still folks out there with the Version 3 browsers that came on their computers three years ago, so it will take a while before really great web technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets can be relied upon 100 percent.

You started in print production, what is your advice to designers making that transition from traditional print to the Web?
The first bit of advice I give to any designer making the transition to web design is to LET GO! You have to let go of the control over fonts, alignment, page size, colors, etc--all the things designers have traditionally been responsible for.

One of the fundamental aspects of the Web is that the same page will look different to different users. This is maddening at first, and it takes a while to figure out which battles to fight and which are futile. You can't continue to bang your head against the medium for very long. As I mentioned earlier, you begin to get a feel for what will be fluid, and the good web designers design well with the fluidity.

Designers need to be more concerned with how the site works than over the fussy details of presentation. This means becoming knowledgeable about various web technologies and how to implement them in a way that will be successful to the greatest number of users. Designers also need to pay more attention to systems that enhance the usability of the site: its structure, interface, and navigation. This is what really makes or breaks a site.

Presenting this structure in a visually pleasing way is also important, but there is a definite shift from print where the visual design is the majority of the task.

Continued...