> 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.