Web Design Museum 1991-2006
webdesignmuseum.org
webdesignmuseum.org
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.
Refresh this one a bit:
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.
I think it's just part of the evolution of the web. When CSS2 and CSS3 became widely supported and screens went beyond CRTs, their layout changed. The era of early mobile screens had websites that were very difficult to scale and adapt, so special mobile web pages were created (that often had a kind of slimmed-down look, later replaced by fake-iOS CSS and then more experiments). That then developed into responsive design because maintaining two websites was a pain; at that point, designs also happened to become flatter and less distinguishable, eventually leading to the bland sea of whitespace we see today.
Incredible how much more personality and charm this has over the bland thing https://nintendo.com is today.
2002 was more about Nintendo expressing itself to users. 2023 is a deceitful salesman.
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened” -Dr Seuss
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?
I'm glad we moved beyond this. It was ultimately the wrong direction for the web, but we had some fun along the way.
> 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...)