Creative Genius: Tim Irvine

Although Tim Irvine doesn't have a crystal ball, he might have predicted the collapse of Boo.com simply from a design perspective.

"What I find frustrating are sites that are so reliant on technology and gimmicks that they don't connect with their users in any relevant way. I think Boo.com was a great example of that," says Irvine, creative director at Chicago-based Internet services company Giant Step. "It was a commerce site that was spending all of its energy on shouting about what it was doing. The shopping process was intimately tied to entertainment. I can understand the need to have a brand presence that's engaging, but you're doing it to the detriment of people actually being able to buy things. It was an odd play."

Irvine formed strong opinions about designing for functionality while he was a graphic design student at Notre Dame University. He then spent six years working for a print design company in Chicago. Toward the end of his tenure there, he worked on an intranet development project for a division of Motorola--his first job working online.

"I started to enjoy the immediacy of it," Irvine says. "You do something and you don't send it out to a printer and then hope it comes back all right."

He joined Giant Step a little more than four years ago on the advice of an old roommate who was working as one of the company's first designers. "I was able to take a leap of faith," he says. "I wasn't really so sure that I wanted to get into interactive, but the fact that I had a friend who was already doing it made it seem a little bit more credible."

Today, Irvine has been at Giant Step long enough to see his Web design work evolve from what was once content-heavy, information and entertainment-oriented eye candy into the real applications and transactions-based B2B projects he does today.

"We've developed competencies that allow us to effectively perform those tasks--whether it's information architecture or the fundamental understanding of users' behavior and needs," Irvine says.

Above all, Irvine says a well-designed Web site is sensitive to the needs of its users, not the needs of the company's marketing campaign. "If I'm trying to arrange a trip on Travelocity.com or use a banking site to access information about my account, I have a very specific task in mind," he says. "I don't want to be sold."

Some of Irvine's most recent projects include the trendy, fashion-oriented site his team designed for Vidal Sassoon (www.vssassoon.com) as well as the more utilitarian B2B site for United Cargo (www.ualcargo.com).

Although the cargo site certainly doesn't employ the same cutting-edge tools and front-end design work of a Vidal Sassoon, its architecture is nonetheless as impressive. Irvine and his crew spent weeks researching end users' traits and habits to build the most functional site possible.

"I'd say 70 percent of the effort, if not more, had been spent on that functionality," Irvine says. "That was before even thinking about pixel depth or how photographs or color would be added to the site."

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