Ask HN: Why did GeoCities have that crazy design aesthetic?
How did that crazy design aesthetic arise? Where did it come from?
---
† "Better" in this case means something akin to "what most people today would consider more professional." I don't want to judge.
And to do the pixel graphic style you need a pixel font which was impossible because you can only reference fonts people have on their computer, Fixedsys font was the best you could reference and some did do that.
HELP! Do you have any idea at all where the backups ended up?
Can you think of anyone - any names - who might know how to find the backups of geocities?
It's classic Internet history lost to time. If only we could find backups!
CSS was created in 1999 but only the cutting edge version of browsers could support only link colors in 2000.
The editor was nothing but a text box, no WYSIWYG.
It was non-designers and people that were learning HTML putting something together.
There was no @font-face, so you could only reference fonts people might have on their computer.
On dialup you didn’t want to load too many images. So 1 background image that tiled 50 times would load fast.
You had to use nested tables to have any structure and again put that all in a text box with no live preview or WYSIWYG. And using tables you needed to understand to use transparent gifs to prevent it from not looking right.
Many people didn’t have image editors except MS Paint, so the graphics you got had to be grabbed from somewhere else.
PNG didn’t exist, I don’t think MS-Paint supported gif on windows 95 or 98, it might of not even supported jpg. It primarily supported bmp.
But with David Carson style of design (grunge design) or lack of traditional design in the mainstream for most of the 90s it kind of worked ok.
The tools were primitive, and skills were low.
The technology for it barely worked (things like percent widths for table cells) but design professionals did not know how to deal with it at all. They all came from print. The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small.
Hell, was float even around then? All I remember from that time was tables.
> The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small.
But there was 640, 800, 1024. Many websites would do fixed width 800px and then you'd have to scroll left at 640 or have big gutter margins at 1024.
I agree 100%. If you were ignorant of crayons, you might ask why so many kindergarteners’ art pieces are done in colorful wax.
Another thing that we didn't have back in the day was platforms. Nowadays, if you want a page, you either make an account on facebook, squarespace, shopify, etc. Back then there was no such thing, so you needed to learn html and build your website yourself.
The web 2.0 craze was largely about realizing how web is different than old cd-rom based distribution.
In some ways it's like the "sega sonic games needed crt-glow to look better".
I distinctly remember the "dithered sky-cloud" background aesthetic, and in many ways you couldn't see or didn't notice the banding and dots as much because it wasn't 4K 80" TV's for $1000.
Macromedia (RIP) Dreamweaver came out in 1997 and I was using it at school by ... 2003? I remember having to try to debug why someone's pages weren't working (it was because the filename contained a # ... and the MacOS9 permissions addon meant you could only edit files, not rename/delete them ...)
(yes, OS X had come out, but nobody used it yet - upgrading your OS is a stupid idea. In fact I explicitly begged my parents to go out and buy Windows 2000 to avoid the crap that was XP for "my" first computer)
What a trip to memory lane reading this whole thread, haha. These early days of the web were amazing for tinkerers, after I learned HTML it took me into learning CGI, webservers, networking, Linux, databases and so on just from trying to make a visitor counter display myself.
GoLive was released and for sale in 1996
Adobe pagemill was around as early as 1994
And finally, WorldWideWeb, the first browser, had a built in WYSIWYG editor, from it's first version
So to say WYSIWYG wasn't around is just flat wrong
Internet as of today is, generally speaking, more visually polished. On platforms like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Bluesky/etc the users have very little influence over the layout/typography. The style is cleaner, but there’s less room for personal expression.
It's trite cynical & limited to just chalk this era up as a moment in time. There's a lot of good reasons to believe it so, to be fair, but we have done so so so little to reenable & reunleash these chords that were struck in humanity again. The multimedia possibility of this all has been dwarfed by applianceized anti-usst software since, and little has tried to pierce the veil & enable deep user adoption, especially with regards to connected internet-centric experiences.
There's so many reasons to be dark & bad about but they all miss that we have tried so little since. We have been extremely well served by massified consumerized super platforms. Trying to beget agency hasn't been a longstanding work of many.
Not to mention Kai's Power Tools, and the other plugins by Kai Kruse!
I remember using the view source tool on various pages that people created and tweaking it as my own. The blinking and marquee tags were littered everywhere with a green and black matrix theme. And a marijuana leaf somewhere because I was feeling edgy af. Just hacking away via brute force until I got it just right.
We’ve now pivoted back towards simplicity and boxy designs being perceived as more professional. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that simple designs are inherently better. It’s more true that the current trend was a reaction to early web design. And that pivot became reinforced by the technology changes like CSS features and the death of Flash.
- Kids making pages were in competition for status and attention (via linkbacks), so there was evolutionary pressure to be extreme
- The technology was new, there was wild experimentation and few rules in place. Look at the user interface for Kai’s Power Tools, or Bryce 3D.
- The California ideology promoted an anything-goes culture of bohemianism, antiauthoritarianism
- Skate/surf culture aesthetics
- 90s irony/slacker culture promoted eclecticism, pastiche
- Barbara Kruger-style font work
- The Memphis Group, Factory Pomo
Later in the 90s there was a push for more restrained design (no black backgrounds, no broken typewriter font, no photoshop page curl, no blink/marquee.)
MySpace in the mid-2000s had a very similar vibe. It's just normal people doing fun stuff when there are few constraints or guidelines.
Then came the creation of pop up blockers.
There was one brief moment in time when pop up windows were generally seen as shady thing. Now they are back on most sites. Just not as separate window.
For starters, HTML, CSS and JavaScript couldn’t do everything it can today.
Next depending on the year, many if not most people didn’t have broadband or fast internet. Speed was even more important than today and keeping things relatively simple made sense. Similar to Craigslist too.
It was early internet, with not as many people on the internet.
Having something clear and to make your own easily (a website) was making a really hard thing very accessible to the most amount of people. In that way it was pretty successful in getting so many people going. There weren’t a lot of places to build your own website, let alone online.
Major user growth started around or shortly after Facebook launched.
Like MySpace would later for social network profiles and YouTube for videos, Geocities had broken through as the frictionless and free opportunity to host a personal site online, and its explosive growth outpaced any opportunity for "classically trained" designers or programmers to assert their own opinions about color, layout, structure, robustness, etc
Elsewhere in modern-ish history, you can identify comparable explosions in pamphleting, photography, manufactured food products, casette tape, synthesizers, home video, etc where people with no preconceptions are just doing wild stuff to see what's possible.
And frankly, a lot of stuff on npm, etc looks like that right now.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413002044/http://www8.geoci...
This person has just learned to use tables. The aesthetic is pretty mild, just a lot of glowy horizontal rules dividing text. Photoshop is mentioned. (It had no DRM, so a lot of us had Photoshop, and Kai's Power Tools, and similar software to make 3D text effects and GIFs with transparent backgrounds.)
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413015356/http://www7.geoci...
This person has an embedded MIDI file on every page, and a tiling background. There's a bunch of small banner/button graphics that represent spurious awards and club memberships, often with terrible 3D effects and drop shadow on text.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413022021/http://www7.geoci...
What we have really is a collision between the gimmicks of new graphics technology (and sound, because "multimedia" was a buzzword), limited bandwidth (hence tiles and small images), naivety, poor taste, and a sort of sticker-sharing scrapbooking sense of community that might have evolved from email groups or actual newsletters sent to friends by mail.
Going by Internet Archive snapshots, it seems that over time, HWG grew into providing various services including some sort of training and certification. You can see how the front page changes over time, and their services expanded and updated over time, but the core idea remained the same all the way through December of 2023.
It was apparently an amusing enough concept to be made fun of on Something Awful in 2011.[1]
But then, between December 4th 2023 and December 6th 2023, the page was replaced with a Wordpress instance, first hosting just some filler content, but in just a few days, it was molded into yet another crypto blogspam publisher. Lest you think I am being too harsh, the navbar at the top doesn't even spell "crypto" correctly as of this writing; it is truly a low effort operation. The "About us" still references the original guild, but everything else has been wiped clean.
So what happened to the guild members? Well, apparently, at some point rather early on, the HWG "merged" with the "IWA", the International Web Association, and while information about what exactly is going on with that organization, it does still seem to exist in some form[2].
It kind of gets weirder though, as if you crawl around you can find that some original HWG pages are indeed, still online at their original location, some of them last updated as far back as 2001.[3] Wow! This hints to me that the domain was not obviously hijacked or purchased, though it's unclear what the deal is.
[1]: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/html-guild-writers/
[2]: https://iwanet.org/
If you were advanced, you'd use one of the external editors from the time (Homesite, Hot Metal, Hotdog, or even Microsoft Front Page) and FTP your files in.
And I'd guess we are from very different parts of the world, in hindsight the initial web was truly magical, something that made people from many different cultures go along a similar path at the same time.
Most of these originated from kids, teenagers, or even young adults, who want to do something fun. And what is “fun” is basically the opposite of what we (I’m including myself here because I was one of those) see everyday from our parents and schools: Monochrome documents with business-y fonts and layout. Geocities and the like were our chance to do something of our own that is very much away from that.
Does anyone have any idea if any backups might have somehow survived?
Any names of anyone associated with running the Geocities systems or Geocities development? Anyone know who used to do the backups?
Geocities was such an important part of the early Internet.
Some archives have recovered bits and pieces of Geocities but it would be awesome to recover the entire thing.