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Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.

I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?

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I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds.

It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful.

Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.

Frankly, that was not an artistic example of the BBS scene. Here is one that had aesthetically pleasing features:

https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html

And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app:

telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23

Well sure, you can always cherry-pick good examples of anything.

But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?

Form over function. Fun, original formatting was more important than coveying information well.

Keep in mind that displays sucked. Unless you had a Trinitron or similar quality display, you probably had a crappy 14" 4:3 screen with awful dot pitch, wildly inconsistent colors, part of the screen noticably fuzzier than the rest, and you likely could only have 256 colors (and your browser might not even select them optimally). You'd select a different window and the VGA palette would reset, making the now-background window look like a Pollock painting.

There was too much awful going on for people to care. Besides, the vast majority of pages were simple black text and blue links on a white background. As long as you didn't use the blink tag, nobody got upset.

> There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.

You have to remember how primitive web technologies were in those days. CSS was released in December 1996 but didn't get good, consistent browser implementations until the early 2000s. Besides CSS your layout and styling options were frames, tables, <font> tags (and don't forget you can only use the pre-installed fonts on the user's system), or just bypassing HTML altogether by designing your page in Photoshop and exporting it as an imagemap (better hope all your users have 56k or ISDN or have lots of patience). Oh yeah, and don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.

> don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.

Don't forget: you couldn't (or shouldn't) bring your own 256 color palette, because the actual palette would be a compromise between all the applications open - so you were forced/encouraged to use the "Web palette", which contained a fixed set of 216 colors.

Consider the horrible MySpace pages, or the equivalent country-specific alternatives.

It's not that web designers were bad back them, it's that a lot of this stuff was not made by designers at all, and apparently lots of people have a really bad sense of design.

I don't mean that in an elitist way. I think it's great that back then my aunt or nephew could set up a website, however horrible the design was. I'm just saying there's a reason why designers get paid to design. It's not an innate ability, and people are much worse at it than those who are into design are inclined to think.

'Decent' design is kind of a default for many other things, mostly because we often defer to 'designers' when it comes to things like furniture, clothing, etc. But make a visit to your local print shop and look at the self-made wedding invites and the like to see how bad things can be. Or consider the many self-made powerpoint presentations! It'll make your eyes burn.

I think the novelty of the medium is what drove websites to have terrible design. To paraphrase Jurassic Park:

> Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should

Just like the early days of desktop publishing.

And today in "modern frontend".

As a frontend developer I'm part of it, but at least I don't encourage it or defend it :-/

What were we thinking?

Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.

https://vesta.astro.amu.edu.pl/Library/WWW/Tutorial1/content..., 1997

> You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.

Actually, when computers started to be used for these things, a lot of traditional media went nuts and threw out their design principles in order to take advantage of new technology.

Remind me when I get home from work tonight, and I can upload some scans of what happened to Marvel Comics letters pages, trade dress, house ads, credits/title pages, and even in some cases dialogue lettering, when they switched over to digital typesetting and color separations in late 1994/early 1995. Splashes of color and awful CGI artwork everywhere. In 1997, they switched to a retro-looking style that pulled back on most of the excesses... but it was still really gaudy compared to early 1994, and it wasn't until the 21st century that they remembered there are principles to good design.

Edit: Actually, I can show you what happened to the trade dresses now, since cover scans are widely available. Images are grabbed from https://www.mycomicshop.com

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #315, released in June 1994 (comics are dated two months in advance). Fairly tasteful trade dress. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/639727.jpg

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #322, released in May 1995. Look at that CGI X! (Edit: And the teaser lettering looks like WordArt!) But they're not done experimenting yet. It gets worse. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/861739.jpg

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #332, released March 1996. This is peak mid-90s gaudy. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/865533.jpg

And if you're wondering what other comics, that didn't have a recognizable symbol made out of simple shapes, used... well, let's have a look at Incredible Hulk #442, released April 1996. Yep, it's a CGI atom. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/865365.jpg

Or Amazing Spider-Man #411, released March 1996. Three dimensional Spider-Man mask! https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/882953.jpg

(and if you think these are bad, you should see the interiors)

But things got better, right? Well, here's Uncanny X-Men #346, released June 1997, the first month of Marvel's retro look. It's like they wanted to return to the mid-1994 look but didn't quite remember how anymore. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/844811.jpg

That's fascinating! Yeah, digital publishing tools really screwed with some classic designs there for a while. Great comment!

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