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I haven't heard nearly as many people wanting a return to maximalist 90s web design. People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn'

I haven't heard nearly as many people wanting a return to maximalist 90s web design. People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on. Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for, which was (if you like) 90s web design minimalism. That's the motivation all this gopher revival/gemini protocol stuff is about, at least from a design perspective. I'm just trying to say there were different strains of "90s web design" which are not compatible with each other.

__s 5y ago
Yeah, I recently made a portfolio site for a friend. Very minimalist: https://christinelopez.ca https://christinelopez.ca It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site) Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint
- CobaltFire 5y ago
  I actually really that that site design! One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Surprisingly, his site seemed to load faster for me.
  - __s 5y ago
    That's the thing. Computers have become so fast & bandwidth so wide that the bottleneck is primarily latency
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Interesting point!
kixiQu 5y ago
> People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on. This is really colored by who you're paying attention to. https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc. > Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for This is an assumption, not data.
- theo_sort 5y ago
  are you really saying that website you linked is a gen z design? looks like something out of 2004, looks horrible... or maybe it's not loading well on my phone. but that's not....
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    The website I linked is a list of members of a webring, because such a survey presents more examples than a single page can. The creators of the pages in the webring are predominantly gen z. The argument it is supporting is about which people want which strains of 90s web design to come back. If you look at a few pages in the webring you will see which strains these young people, at least, want. That's what I'm saying. Whether you consider it horrible is immaterial.
    - derbOac 5y ago
      So that site is interesting to me because it comes across as retro more than anything else. It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design. To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life. It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.
frostwarrior 5y ago
That's just rationality intertwined with nostalgia. I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself. Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  People care about things being slow, but our industry has done a fantastic job of covering up the fact that it constantly makes everything slower by convincing people they just need newer devices. It is sickening.

__s 5y ago

Yeah, I recently made a portfolio site for a friend. Very minimalist: https://christinelopez.ca https://christinelopez.ca It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site) Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint

CobaltFire 5y ago
I actually really that that site design! One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.
wrycoder 5y ago
Surprisingly, his site seemed to load faster for me.
- __s 5y ago
  That's the thing. Computers have become so fast & bandwidth so wide that the bottleneck is primarily latency
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    Interesting point!

kixiQu 5y ago

> People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on. This is really colored by who you're paying attention to. https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc. > Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for This is an assumption, not data.

theo_sort 5y ago
are you really saying that website you linked is a gen z design? looks like something out of 2004, looks horrible... or maybe it's not loading well on my phone. but that's not....
- kixiQu 5y ago
  The website I linked is a list of members of a webring, because such a survey presents more examples than a single page can. The creators of the pages in the webring are predominantly gen z. The argument it is supporting is about which people want which strains of 90s web design to come back. If you look at a few pages in the webring you will see which strains these young people, at least, want. That's what I'm saying. Whether you consider it horrible is immaterial.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    So that site is interesting to me because it comes across as retro more than anything else. It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design. To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life. It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.

frostwarrior 5y ago

That's just rationality intertwined with nostalgia. I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself. Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
People care about things being slow, but our industry has done a fantastic job of covering up the fact that it constantly makes everything slower by convincing people they just need newer devices. It is sickening.