The Artless Website: schwab.com
Article by
Glen HelfandJanuary 25, 2006
The design of schwab.com proves that smart, in the age of new
media, is more substance than style.
Design is not the first thing you think of when you enter into the
Charles Schwab website. Save for a pulse-taking graph of the latest
market figures and a blue pinstriped banner at the top, the
homepage of this top-rated Internet brokerage is almost
exclusively, but not overwhelmingly, text. The banner contains six
businesslike file-tab interface links to sections on accounts and
services, investments, mutual funds and other similar business
headings. What's quickly communicated here is financial
information, pure and simple. For a company that sees its retail
investors trade over $2 billion in securities each week, brains—and
ease of use—are definitely more important than beauty.
It is perhaps just those attributes that landed the site, which was
designed by the Web standard-setting firm Razorfish, in the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum's inaugural National Design Triennial.
Included in the exhibition next to the crisp homeyness of Martha
Stewart's hallmark packaging and page layouts, Razorfish's Schwab
work seems jarringly tame. Yet its presence in that kind of company
signals a paradigmatic shift in the way design enters into the
public realm and is evaluated in a cultural moment dominated by Web
commerce.
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First published in Gain 1.0:
AIGA Journal of Design for the Network Economy.