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Web Design Museum
- johnchristopher 8y agoAnd boom, you are old.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoShhh. The nostalgia already did that. You didn't need to say it, too! I still really like some of the design trends back then. I think a lot of it was because they only had to work on desktop. I also like those old isometric pixel drawings that were so popular. It was fun to play with as a kid because you could pretty easily follow along with paint, albeit with a lot lower quality.
- nayuki 8y agoThe page screenshots look nice, but does the site let us look at the original HTML code and media resources that made up those pages?
- webdesignmuseum 8y agoThank you for your comment, but it is very difficult to reconstruct the HTML code or media resources of these old websites. For example flash technology is now completely dead.
- johnchristopher 8y agowhich is really unfortunate, there were some killer flash website with really subtle layout, animation and aesthetics that I haven't seen yet in any HTML5 websites.
- aasasd 8y agoWell-known sites probably have old copies stored on the Archive.org's Wayback Machine.
- DarkContinent 8y agoWould it be possible to incorporate some more recent websites as a point of comparison? To my mind web design has changed pretty significantly in the last ten years and it would be nice to see the progression.
- webdesignmuseum 8y agoLook at timelines outlining the development of the most important world websites over the past 20+ years. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline
- xtiansimon 8y agoI think what you're really looking for is some curation and webdesign criticism. A scattershot site like this is a resource. Maybe this is your opportunity to do some writing (nudge, nudge). I look forward to reading your Medium article. ehehe.
- booleandilemma 8y agoWhy aren’t they in order by year? Also, the page buttons at the bottom aren’t working for me (I’m using safari on iphone x). Nice site altogether :)
- webdesignmuseum 8y agoThank you for bug notification. On the desktop you can use filters by years. We are now working on the new version of Web Design Museum where it will be possible to filter sites by years also on mobile phones.
- wrycoder 8y agoExcept on Firefox/MacOS, once you select a year, you can't deselect it.
- cryptozeus 8y agoGreat idea but your website seems to be using very old style. Its not working properly on mobile.
- webdesignmuseum 8y agoWe are now working on the new version of Web Design Museum, which will be better optimized for mobile phones.
- czardoz 8y agoI hope the Web Design Museum will have it's own screenshot too.
- webdesignmuseum 8y agoYes, but until 2027 :-)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danielovichdk 8y agoLooking at these older websites (for me thats 1996—2002) I remember spending a lot of my time on figuring out how they really worked underneath it all. It was truly an exciting time where the differences in design and style for websites were big. Today, you don't really see personal websites anymore, and things have somehow become streamlined and pretty much just standard. There is hardly any wow effect on the web anymore, and that's sad I think.
- kickling 8y agoOn the other hand, Web standards makes it easier to use the Web.
- jdironman 8y agoThat must be why I have 3 dofferent browsers installed in case a website doesn't work on one of them.
- acdha 8y agoWhen was the last time you really needed that? I haven’t had to in years, and I work in .gov. The only thing I see is needing to enable Flash and that was awhile ago.
- reaperducer 8y agoI see it frequently in testing. But then, I'm on the web dev side. Sometimes if I see a web site I think might be too ambitious, I'll open it on each of my testing machines in different browsers, and about 70% of the time, my hunch is right, and it either fails on one or more, or the output looks significantly/unusably different.
- acdha 8y agoIt’s interesting because I also do a lot of web development and have really been enjoying being able to develop in Firefox and not need to worry much about things working in Chrome/Safari, with a little care checking caniuse.com for the newest things.
- Waterluvian 8y agoCompared to others, the Apple site from 2001 holds up really well.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoFunny to see them marketing their machine as a means to copyright infringement.
- dan-robertson 8y agoBuying music on iTunes or CDs and then burning it onto CDs to eg put into hifi systems or car stereos is not copyright infringement. It was a way to play music that was bought online and a way to make mixtapes of legitimately owned music. Saying that advertising a CD burner is inciting copyright infringement is like saying that advertising a knife’s sharpness is inciting stabbings
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoAh, ripping (eg CDs to iTunes) & mixing was and again is unlawful in UK.
- paulie_a 8y agoDoes anyone actually care about copyrights anymore? I've received a few notices and promptly reported them as spam or thrown a letter in the trash. By the time I was 17 I literally pirated a million dollars of software.
- bhauer 8y agoI don't know. Of the major companies represented, I think Ford from 2002 [1] looks the most like modern web design. [1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/ford-motor-company-2002 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/ford-motor-company-2...
- hegz 8y agoStill feels a little dated but if I had to guess when it was made I would say 2010.
- pcurve 8y agolooks like the site is crashing... Adobe's old web sites still look quite good.
- Eridrus 8y agoThis is pretty cool! Where are you getting these images from? I would love to see this expanded to different genres of sites too. I've noticed that (niche) fashion websites have their own aesthetic that is a bit divorced from the mainstream. I'm sure we're all aware that Asian design trends are also very different.
- xtiansimon 8y agoIn the day I collected screen shots of K10K promoted websites in FileMaker Pro. I suppose these images are screenshots sitting in someone's CDROM collection. :)
- wolco 8y agoThese sites are better lookin compared to their modern version. The facebook pic in the top banner is cool how it fades. Why is modern design better? It is just the mobile aspect?
- dplgk 8y agoModern design is not better. It is more accessible, less offensive and with no creativity or personality.
- forthispurpose 8y agoWow furthermore apparently that guy on the logo is Al Pacino
- hegz 8y agoWorks better on more screen sizes. All standard web tech; no flash/Java/browser specific things. Less clutter and visual distractions once you block adverts. Also much much easier to navigate with a consistent design guideline vs having every page randomly assembled with no oversight. Standardised components and design also makes larger websites possible without having to manage 1 billion pages and elements.
- kartan 8y agoIt is impressive how design has changed thru the years. Just compare the 1996 Space Jam web https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/space-jam-1996 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/space-jam-1996 with its current design https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jcelerier 8y ago> The jamminest two minutes of trailer time that ever hit a theater. It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it. Click the graphic to download... Oh god if only the modern web was 10% as light-hearted as this was
- astura 8y agoIt's a site for a kid's movie.
- aasasd 8y agoYou might want to also exhibit secondary pages. The front page is often not representative of the overall experience with a site, since it has different objectives and techniques (that was especially true back before the single-page era).
- magerleagues 8y agoCDnow 1998 is the best one https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/cdnow-1998 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/cdnow-1998
- Izkata 8y agoY'know, seeing that tall/thin site with a side menu just reminded me: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
- k__ 8y agoSome really aged well, especially those with more extravagant designs.
- madrox 8y agoIt makes me sad that the web design museum is mostly made up of corporate sites. Companies didn't take the web too seriously in the 90s and early 2000s...at least as it pertains to design. If you wanted to look at good design back then, you went to fray.com, glassdog.com, 0sil8.com, zeldman.com, and others I don't remember. Oh boy those were the days...
- brandonmenc 8y agoFortunately Fray has all the old site up as an archive[0]. Also can't forget k10k.com and everything they linked to. [0] http://fray.com/index-old.shtml http://fray.com/index-old.shtml
- madrox 8y agoThanks for linking this! It's great that, for how avant garde this stuff was, it still works great in modern browsers.
- themodelplumber 8y agoMan, people still aren't as creative with their headings (see the simple icon overlap in the iTunes heading) as they were in the days when when you had to use images as headings to even use a unique font. Even though such capability can be abused, it's kind of depressing to still miss this option in most projects due to time, etc. from a graphic design standpoint.
- chrisco255 8y agoK10K is on the museum's page: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/kaliber10000-2003
- fireattack 8y agoIs this supposed to be "better" than company ones? I don't see much improvement to be honest.
- bennyp101 8y agoOh wow, glassdog.com that brings back some memories!
- dkyc 8y agoSpaceX (https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/spacex-2002 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/spacex-2002) is the one that really struck a chord with me. Not because of the design itself, but because it shows just how old the company already is, while only stepping into mainstream spotlight fairly recently.
- fuball63 8y agoThis surprised me too; I had to do a wikipedia lookup to confirm.
- colordrops 8y agoWhat's crazy is that blue origin is older.
- iamgopal 8y agoSo, it takes couple of decades for overnight success.
- ricardobeat 8y agoNote if any maintainers are here: some of the captures, like Habbo.com, are done with ClearType enabled, when it was in fact only available from 2006 with IE7. The blocky text rendering was a significant part of the look and feel of those websites.
- janwillemb 8y agoSome sites, like Time.com, prerendered parts of their text antialiased to an image.
- mattkevan 8y agok10k.com! Used to spend hours browsing that back in the day. Some seriously good design despite how basic the tools were. And pixel fonts for the win. I’m glad I no longer have to wait for Flash to finish loading, or to figure out the navigation of whatever site I’ve landed on, but things are less interesting now.
- fuball63 8y agoI was trying to read up on what this was, it said it was a site focused on pixel perfect design? What does that mean exactly, lots of images, spacers, and pixel fonts?
- mattkevan 8y agoIt was an early webzine and community that showcased cutting edge web & digital design in the late 90s and early 2000s. For me it fits into the same early 2000s movement pushing the boundaries of digital expression as The Designers’ Republic did in graphic design and Warp Records in Music.
- zwaps 8y agoMan, this was the time when me (and every computer literary teen) fancied himself a dev and webdesigner. And we were like, considered geniuses too - for being able to code some PHP and copy some cool designs :3 good times
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- golfer 8y agoSimilar to another site, http://www.versionmuseum.com http://www.versionmuseum.com
- keyle 8y agoWell now I just feel old. Thank you.
- reaperducer 8y agoTo me, what this illustrates is that too many companies today don't understand there is a big difference between a web developer and a web designer. Companies that have both are the ones with the sites that stand the test of time.
- halayli 8y agotabs where made of 3 images. left/right radius corner, and stretch background in between.
- rokhayakebe 8y agoGap looks about the same so many years later.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sdrothrock 8y agoIt's really a shame that so many of these exhibits are company homepages; it really puts a strange spin on the internet and makes me wonder how weird our look at history is compared to "what it was really like." For example, I remember the split frame layout (nav on top or left, body in remainder) dominating web layouts for a long, long time -- the CSS float to keep navigation "on top" was really just mimicking that for a lot of people. Similarly, pop-up windows were such a huge thing for a long time, whether it was for a music player, or for site navigation, or just links opening in little miniature windows meant to be hovered over the main page so that you never "left." The closest that any of those sites come to capturing the "feel" of the internet in that time for me is probably the Microsoft Games site. Incidentally, one of them looks really broken: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/true-is-true-2001 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/true-is-true-2001
- tremendo 8y agoMany of those sites were designed with such bandwidth, resolution and color constraints. I wonder if they could add some sort of toggle to see display those images in the original intended resolution, or what was common for its day. The jump from 640 to 800 to 1024! The Web-safe 216 colors. Modems from under 3+, to 14, 28, 33, 56 kbps, ISDN, T1 and broadband! you had to use lowsrc attribute in <img> tags while the better image loaded, or pre-loading images in javascript. Glad all of that is over, glad I lived through it.
- xtiansimon 8y agoAn obvious criticism about the implementation of this museum deserves to be mentioned--the postcard size of these screen shots misrepresents the websites visual impact. Page load time was a limitation, and a significant tradeoff in any design. Shrinking the page doesn't communicate the impact of sites like K10K to the visual landscape of website design.