Web Design Museum 1991-2006

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/

by thinkingemote • 3 years ago

141 31 3 years ago

DMell• 3 years ago

I’m unsure why, but this just made me feel a certain level of sadness.

todd3834• 3 years ago

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

pavlov• 3 years ago

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.

accrual• 3 years ago

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. :)

sturadnidge• 3 years ago

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).

marban2• 3 years ago

Great series and format. I was featured in two of the books - good times.

vkdelta• 3 years ago

It feels like things mostly changed around 2009+ (mobile era) and have kind of had minor changes since then.

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

might that be because HTML5 had just standardized shortly before then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

makapuf• 3 years ago

Not sure, IE was dominant back then and far from supporting properly HTML5.

tannhaeuser• 3 years ago

More influential is the iPhone, responsive design, and CSS media queries I guess.

thanatropism• 3 years ago

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...)

gompertz• 3 years ago

Some of the flash websites would be very difficult to even replicate today. How unfortunate really, they looked so unique from each other.

neovive• 3 years ago

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.

leeches2• 3 years ago

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.

mostlysimilar• 3 years ago

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.

omk2• 3 years ago

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.

leeches2• 3 years ago

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.

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

Information density is inversely proportional to screen resolution advancements.

wildrhythms• 3 years ago

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.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

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.

8s2ngy• 3 years ago

One thing that stands out starkly from the early Internet is the personal touch that websites had in their design. You can see that the design was not a replication of some standard web design technique but rather an expression of the person's or the company's aura [1]. Even information-dense websites like [2] were laid out in such a way as to aid discoverability and choice on the part of the user. Now we have transitioned to an algorithm-based information delivery mechanism that optimizes engaging the user to spend more time on a site, not serving information.

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

marban2• 3 years ago

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.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

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

omk2• 3 years ago

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?

fbn79• 3 years ago

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

exitb• 3 years ago

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

jansan• 3 years ago

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/

zild3d• 3 years ago

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/the-pirate-bay-2005

Dowwie• 3 years ago

Why stop at 2006? 2022 is already history.

Web Design Museum 1991-2006

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