There was a whole school of Web "design" prior to about 2005 that was really mindblowing. It was essentially a marriage between experimental graphic design and some of the interactivity nascent technologies like JavaScript, the DOM, Shockwave, and Flash could provide. I don't want the Web to go back there but I do miss it and think we've lost a lot of amazing work to the ages.

I'm not sure where many of the people went either. There was a huge online collective of these folks called the Swank Army and finding almost anything about it now is ridiculously hard. I only have one person in my contacts from that era.