Web Design Museum 1991-2006(webdesignmuseum.org)
webdesignmuseum.org
Web Design Museum 1991-2006
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
34 comments
There's still plenty of creative websites around. They just don't perform well on modern content aggregators.
Refresh this one a bit:
https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
Refresh this one a bit:
https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
No surprise that you create something unique when all you have is tables and spacer gifs. Too bad that framework and pattern obsession have taken over.
I prefer the higher information density of earlier designs. The surface-level styles make them seem old, but structurally, these sites provided a lot more utility.
When I hit your homepage, I don't care about the fullscreen photo and bland headline. I'm blind to it, these things don't even register. Please give me a list of news headlines, a full product lineup, top support articles, etc.
When I hit your homepage, I don't care about the fullscreen photo and bland headline. I'm blind to it, these things don't even register. Please give me a list of news headlines, a full product lineup, top support articles, etc.
Information density is inversely proportional to screen resolution advancements.
I think it has more to do with adapting to touchscreens where the touch targets need to be much larger, so you end up with lots of white space.
I think many of the old designs would scale quite well. The elements on screen were absolutely huge when 20 inch monitors had resolutions like 800x600. Websites would've needed to redesign their CSS for wide/tall screens, but old designs could work.
I think it's just part of the evolution of the web. When CSS2 and CSS3 became widely supported and screens went beyond CRTs, their layout changed. The era of early mobile screens had websites that were very difficult to scale and adapt, so special mobile web pages were created (that often had a kind of slimmed-down look, later replaced by fake-iOS CSS and then more experiments). That then developed into responsive design because maintaining two websites was a pain; at that point, designs also happened to become flatter and less distinguishable, eventually leading to the bland sea of whitespace we see today.
I think it's just part of the evolution of the web. When CSS2 and CSS3 became widely supported and screens went beyond CRTs, their layout changed. The era of early mobile screens had websites that were very difficult to scale and adapt, so special mobile web pages were created (that often had a kind of slimmed-down look, later replaced by fake-iOS CSS and then more experiments). That then developed into responsive design because maintaining two websites was a pain; at that point, designs also happened to become flatter and less distinguishable, eventually leading to the bland sea of whitespace we see today.
I think a lot of this is the result of attempting to build a hybrid design for both desktop and mobile. Ends up sort of doing neither all that well.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/nintendo-2002
Incredible how much more personality and charm this has over the bland thing https://nintendo.com is today.
Incredible how much more personality and charm this has over the bland thing https://nintendo.com is today.
Excellent example of how colors have remained a tool for sales funnels. Red is used through out the site to make the user complete a purchase.
2002 was more about Nintendo expressing itself to users. 2023 is a deceitful salesman.
2002 was more about Nintendo expressing itself to users. 2023 is a deceitful salesman.
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I miss this era of web design. I'm glad it somewhat lives on in places like neocities, where one can still find actively maintained webrings and personal sites. :)
I’m unsure why, but this just made me feel a certain level of sadness.
I get a mix of feelings, sadness definitely one of them. Seeing these pictures almost takes you back in time but you know you can’t actually go back.
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened” -Dr Seuss
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened” -Dr Seuss
It’s nostalgia, a surprisingly powerful human emotion because it’s not as familiar as the everyday ones they talk about in kindergarten. When nostalgia hits, it’s later in life and you’re usually alone trying to understand it.
Yes, at 62 I find myself obsessing over my days at university collecting old texts on eBay and making playlists of old tunes. Nostalgia can take over your life but it does exercise your memory.
It's a bit of a shame that they rendered the screenshots using antialiased fonts, where the pixelated look would be more period-appropriate. You can actually see the jarring difference on this website that happened to feature some faux-Windows 95 images https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/windows-95-1996
Funny how most websites between 2008-2012 where filled with bevel styling faking a sense of depth. Then 2012 onwards almost everyone started appreciating flat design.
I wonder if the pixel density on displays played a role here. Flat design wouldn't look great on low pixel density but work brilliantly on retina displays. The opposite is probably true for beveled styling?
I wonder if the pixel density on displays played a role here. Flat design wouldn't look great on low pixel density but work brilliantly on retina displays. The opposite is probably true for beveled styling?
Some of the flash websites would be very difficult to even replicate today. How unfortunate really, they looked so unique from each other.
Great point! Ignoring some of its flaws (proprietary, upfront download, etc.), Flash ushered in an explosion of creativity, motion and fun and was way ahead of its time. My first web job was working with Flash and was the most fun I've ever had at work. The power and devX of using one tool to design, code, animate, and publish is still unmatched in the modern HTML/JS world. Think about it: we were able to build and deliver fully-interactive games and content — with music and vector animation — over dial-up Internet! ... that's 56 kbit/s! I feel that only now (almost 20 years later), are web standards, tooling, and browsers finally catching up. Yet the devX is still lacking.
All of that multimedia experimentation was a good time. I remember kirupa.com being the destination for tutorials and actionscript snippets, I built dozens of Flash sites. It was also popular for awhile to burn Flash packages to mini CDs, they would autoload as a multimedia brochure or portfolio etc.
I'm glad we moved beyond this. It was ultimately the wrong direction for the web, but we had some fun along the way.
I'm glad we moved beyond this. It was ultimately the wrong direction for the web, but we had some fun along the way.
This is great - basically an online version of the old Web Design Index series of books, which were a fantastic source of inspiration back in the day (for me at least).
Great series and format. I was featured in two of the books - good times.
The SpaceJam website from 1996 is still online, but it was moved to a sub directory so they can advertise the new movie on the main page:
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
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It feels like things mostly changed around 2009+ (mobile era) and have kind of had minor changes since then.
I call this Peak History.
> The five-minutes-into-the-future world being conveyed is thus utterly banal and falling apart at the seams. It reflects an understanding of an indefinitely near-term future seeping into the acrylic-concrete present; a postsingularitarian future of omnipresent intelligence that already exists in the already-banal network of sensors and vector embeddings scattered across folded-over and multiplexed EM energy carriers and leaks less and less surplus-jouissance as it develops. Whereas previous generations announced the end of the past as an end of history that pointed to a hopeful avenir, the indefinite concreteness of the future in Crystal Castles tells us we’ve reached peak history — almost all of it is concentrated in the next ten seconds, more people and more EM energy in more intricate a-centered structures of meaning and value, more than in the sum total of the previous 10,000 years.
> Indeed a case can be made that everything changed in the years between 2000 and 2009, and nothing in the decade that followed. Wi-fi, Facebook, dystechnic China, the Euro, smoking bans… This case would imply that like Alice with her bubbly dissociative energy, we have been enjoying our symptom — the symbolic deadlock that tells us she will never leave the abusive relationship, fraying European nations never give up on the single currency, Catalonia’s protests of independence will never be signified as cries of liberation used to be, Brexit will never happen and we will never give power to meaningfully right-wing political parties (for example in the upcoming European elections). These are, of course, all inevitability discourses — the thing of the world does carry on; Alice broke up with the band, after all.
(ob self-sourcing: https://asemichorizon.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/physique-du-r...)
> The five-minutes-into-the-future world being conveyed is thus utterly banal and falling apart at the seams. It reflects an understanding of an indefinitely near-term future seeping into the acrylic-concrete present; a postsingularitarian future of omnipresent intelligence that already exists in the already-banal network of sensors and vector embeddings scattered across folded-over and multiplexed EM energy carriers and leaks less and less surplus-jouissance as it develops. Whereas previous generations announced the end of the past as an end of history that pointed to a hopeful avenir, the indefinite concreteness of the future in Crystal Castles tells us we’ve reached peak history — almost all of it is concentrated in the next ten seconds, more people and more EM energy in more intricate a-centered structures of meaning and value, more than in the sum total of the previous 10,000 years.
> Indeed a case can be made that everything changed in the years between 2000 and 2009, and nothing in the decade that followed. Wi-fi, Facebook, dystechnic China, the Euro, smoking bans… This case would imply that like Alice with her bubbly dissociative energy, we have been enjoying our symptom — the symbolic deadlock that tells us she will never leave the abusive relationship, fraying European nations never give up on the single currency, Catalonia’s protests of independence will never be signified as cries of liberation used to be, Brexit will never happen and we will never give power to meaningfully right-wing political parties (for example in the upcoming European elections). These are, of course, all inevitability discourses — the thing of the world does carry on; Alice broke up with the band, after all.
(ob self-sourcing: https://asemichorizon.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/physique-du-r...)
might that be because HTML5 had just standardized shortly before then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
More influential is the iPhone, responsive design, and CSS media queries I guess.
Not sure, IE was dominant back then and far from supporting properly HTML5.
Why stop at 2006? 2022 is already history.
Guardando mi viene solo da pensare a quante ore sprecate per rifinire presentation html, css and js that could be used to create better content
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Today's web is strictly utilitarian: structured and standardized, it does what it needs to, and nothing more. Is that a bad thing? No, not at all; the current web generates employment and money and is an integral part of our economy.
[1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/mcdonald-s-1996
[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/yahoo-2010