Evolution of Web design | Hacker News Reader

Evolution of Web design

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41 pointscsomar14 comments

Nice. You missed "1999 Heavy", with its big swooping 3d-edged curves, 9-image table-based rounded buttons, "mystery meat" image-based navigation, and 400kb pageloads back in the day of the 56k modem.

I've kept my old eMachines box running in the corner these past 10 years, and it's still waiting for the NetZero homepage to load (using its NetZero dialup account of course).

Hah, I built one of those right around that time! A few years later, I went to design school and gradually came to understand the horrors I had wrought.

Someone should do design around the world too. In the US people still seem to love the textured background and serif fonts.

Eg http://www.remax.com/ vs http://www.remax.co.uk/

They also seem to like using posed photos of people:

http://www.verizon.com/ vs http://www.vodafone.co.uk

Anything else anyone's picked up?

Really, the FrontPage one is infinitely better than all the actual FrontPage sites I remember from the era.

I'd love to see what a modern, talented web designer could do with an old copy of Frontpage. It would be a bit like the chiptune musicians who hack on 8-bit sound DSPs :)

This is great! But are Dark and Grunge really the two latest? It seemed chronological up to Web 2.0, Textures, and even Minimal...but I don't understand why Dark and Grunge come after.

The Web 2.0 one looked like a bad attempt at the whole Web 2.0 look - the gradients should have been a lot more subtle.

I assume that's on purpose.

Agreed. I think the dark would come before web 2.0 and the grunge would be parallel or just after web 2.0.

I was always under the impression that Dark, Grunge, and Minimal coexisted with each other in this stage.

+1 for using straight markup to create the "Flash" iteration.

This looks like design trends of the non-designer. I've found that web design has improved greatly over the past few years, as best practices and technology have "aligned" with designers' vision.

I think part of it is also that designers and developers have come to see each other less as the "other" and collaborate more closely.

An increase in the number of designers learning CSS and developers learning rules of composition certainly hasn't hurt, either.

Where is last year's photo-realistic trend or the dark ages of 2000-2005 before AJAX and web 2.0?

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