GoKawiilProf. Dr. Style
Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3)
Codeword
Every term I give an introduction to Interface Design studies to new students. 99% of them are under the delusion that the design of everything in the world is made in Photoshop or other Adobe products. In case the design is to be perceived on a computer, these Adobe files will be thrown into a room full of programmers who are longing to make it all interactive according to noble ideas embedded in the graphics. So the task is to show non-fictional challenges of new media and to explain why to study Interface Design. (To make it short here: interface designers develop projects that will be handed over to photoshoppers to put gradients on buttons.)
Most of the students will not be convinced and will choose to study graphic design. Even those who want to be web designers. Though 17 years of the WWW show that you need quite a different skill set for that. That's why the last 3 hours given to me to influence people who will not study the web, but will design it anyway, I spent on highlighting the real history of web design styles. By real history I mean essential design trends rooted in technologies, believes and needs of their time, from 1993 to today. Imported visual trends are left outside of this timeline.
Big emphasis in my talk is put on the mid 1990's, an era when the web was build and arranged and decorated by amateurs, when very web specific genres and looks were brought to existence, making it an incredible place to experience.
But what was earlier? How did the World Wide Web look before this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs?
Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their pages.
It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace browser.
But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google. Some semesters ago it was possible to make a life performance with this search. Pages of academics in style were top results. As of June 2010, the magic seems to be gone. To collect enough examples for this article I had to go till result page 110.
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