Prof. Dr. Style: Top Web Design Styles of 1993 (2010)

To comment a bit on the introductory topic (interface design vs. graphic design), for a while there around when this was published, it seemed like we were going to finally understand the difference between UI design and graphic design, and I'd occasionally see Balsamiq sketch-style wireframes of A UI paired with Illustrator style guides as the input to customer conversations and after acceptance as the input to the implementation process (with answers to things like "what is this component called" or "is this something we plan on using more than once") but now it seems the trend has regressed with Invision prototypes made of static raster images -- worse even than the "here's a PSD, have fun" days -- and I have to ask for documentation of font faces, border radii, get the copy as actual text, etc., and determine what the intentions behind a design are by myself -- "Guess this color is 'primary', this one 'secondary' and uh this one is... just 'yellow'" "Oh... there's two slightly different shades of red between this and that page examples... I will assume that's a mistake, until I hear any different...".

I love how he extracts the underlying beauty from these "ugly" pages...

> They look according to the viewer's browser settings. This reveals the belief of the early 1990es that any visual design should be left at the discretion of the user.

> Page authors wouldn't define colors, fonts margins and line-lengths. In turn end users set their preferences for colors, fonts, links, graphics in their browsers, according to their needs or taste. Not a big deal, one can say, to decide if to see all the pages of the internet on a white or a gray background. But don't think about colors, think about the concept -- each user was defining the look of the whole WWW for themselves.

Reminds me of Kerouac saying more or less that anyone could make Paris look beautiful, but the real artist can make Topeka holy.

Quite a lovely style. I wish web pages were this lightweight today...

Simple and to the point, these sites! Just adjust the fonts and spacing and most sites would look much more modern.