Black started his career designing posters and exhibition stands at the age of 17. He had little formal training in design, although in 1928, returning from a project in Spain, he was able to spend some months in Paris studying art.

In 1933 he joined Bassett Gray, which became the Industrial Design Partnership (IDP; later the Industrial Design Unit). An early project of Black's was the design of the Kardomah cafes in London and Manchester; during this time he also worked in product design, and began to write pointed and cogent articles on exhibition design and other topics.

Black married Helen Evans in 1935. With the arrival of war in 1939 he joined the Ministry of Information, where he was made Principal Exhibitions Designer. The Design Research Unit (DRU) was set up in 1943, and in 1946 Black was involved in designing the 'Britain Can Make It' exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, their most significant early project, in which he tried to explain the role of the industrial designer with his 'Birth of an Egg Cup' display. This was in fact a sort of propaganda: the DRU was pushing for changes in the design world, lamenting that 'there has never been a proper marriage between the engineer and the artist'.

Black gained an international reputation when in 1951 he coordinated the 'upstream' section of the Festival of Britain. Over the next decade he designed everything from doorknobs to ocean liners. He married again in 1955, to Joan Fairbrother, and became Professor of Industrial Engineering at the Royal College of Art in 1959. Some of his well-known projects included work for the underground systems of London and Hong Kong and the small mammal house at London Zoo (1967). He was knighted in 1972.