7 ms·

Ask HN: Why did GeoCities have that crazy design aesthetic?

40 points by andrewstuart 2y ago

How did that crazy design aesthetic arise? Where did it come from?

28304283409234 2y ago
I don't understand the question. What crazy design aesthetic?
LarsDu88 2y ago
I was a kid in the 90s, and back then the fact you can have animated gifs on a page was a revelation. Likewise with crazy fonts, sound effects, and frames.
shams93 2y ago
I was on the pre-ipo (and post ipo) design team. So its partly my fault lmfao.
- shams93 2y ago
  But to answer where it came from? It came from the limitations of the web at the time - table based layout, low graphic resolutions, browser running under 16 megs (not gigs) of ram.
  - shams93 2y ago
    We also had a rule that no page could weigh under 26k, although pages by users of Geocities could be larger, all the pages that ran geocities had to be 26kb or less.
    - smegsicle 2y ago
      default/official pages were under 26k?
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    ...I don't know. You can have low-resolution 8-bit graphics which are better† designed. Look at classic Mac OS, or modern indie games with a retro pixel art aesthetic. --- † "Better" in this case means something akin to "what most people today would consider more professional." I don't want to judge.
    - krapp 2y ago
      The retro pixel art aesthetic is just that - an aesthetic. It's intentional and doesn't accurately reflect the technology it imitates, because it's about a vibe. The people creating Geocities webpages weren't professional developers or artists trying to adhere to a particular aesthetic, they were regular (mostly non-technical) people doing what they thought looked cool at the time, or just copying other sites and using the graphic elements or templates provided by Geocities.
    - TillE 2y ago
      Sure but we're talking about personal/hobby pages made by people who are overwhelmingly not artists and designers.
    - b3ing 2y ago
      Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
    - b3ing 2y ago
      Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one. 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.
    - JojoFatsani 2y ago
      Geocities was not for professionals. It was for amateurs.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  You worked on Geocities! 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!
TillE 2y ago
It was one of the few places (along with Angelfire) anyone could get a free web page those days, and the most interesting thing you could do with web design was add a background and some animated GIFs. 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.
- xyst 2y ago
  I remember angelfire, only because of the banner that was forced on every free site. And I think those sites loaded popups in the background. This was probably back before tracking existed and was just used to pump various dotcom business traffic statistics. Then came the creation of pop up blockers.
  - timeon 2y ago
    > 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.
b3ing 2y ago
There wasn’t much you could do honestly. 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.
- paradox460 2y ago
  Netscape composer was part of Netscape from 1997 on, and provided rudimentary wysiwyg 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
- jordanb 2y ago
  A friend described that era (looking back from the 2010s) as the "amateur web". Another thing worth mentioning is nobody really had any idea how to be responsive. 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.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Nobody knew about responsive design because there was no such thing as responsive design at that point. There were no mobile phones, no css media queries and pretty much everyone was viewing your webpage in 800x600 screens. Hell, was float even around then? All I remember from that time was tables.
cpach 2y ago
I was there. It was fun, it was a fad. The web was quite playful back then. Many of us made websites just for the heck of it, it wasn’t super commercial. MySpace, which came later, was similar with regards to aesthetics. Some computer magazines also had that “GeoCities look”. Alien Skin Software and their Photoshop plugins was all the rage. 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.
- kchr 2y ago
  > Alien Skin Software and their Photoshop plugins was all the rage. Not to mention Kai's Power Tools, and the other plugins by Kai Kruse!
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Neocities is still a thing I think
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Maybe it was a fad. Maybe. But I think it perhaps maybe expressed a real itch and one that's not been well served since. 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.
marssaxman 2y ago
Which of the million crazy design aesthetics to be found on GeoCities are you thinking about?
borplk 2y ago
I don't think it was super crazy compared to the other websites during that time. A lot of the websites shared similar vibes even outside of GeoCities.
sadops 2y ago
Creativity and lack of a developer monoculture.
whalesalad 2y ago
lol very cute to think the “crazy design aesthetic” was intentional. download a copy of windows 2000 and fire up microsoft front page and you’ll quickly know why it was so bad.
j45 2y ago
There wasn’t much basis to call it crazy at the time. 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.
xyst 2y ago
Give a suburban 10-12 yr old kid access to a computer, nearly unlimited access to internet (getting kicked off when parents use landline), and infinite time, and you get that “crazy design aesthetic”. 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.
- al_borland 2y ago
  I remember memorizing some ridiculous URL to a geocities site a friend of mine made in middle school or high school. He called Beanie Burn. It was a punch of pictures of Bernie Babies on fire, all done with animated gifs.
swatcoder 2y ago
It was a spontaneous folk culture, with countless untrained people inventing their own design language by learning to use "View Source" and "Save Image As..." on each other's pages. 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.
underwater 2y ago
The web of the late 90s immediately followed Windows 95 and the gaudy design of interactive CDs trend. The aesthetic of the time lent towards the skeumorphic and into the vividness and richness of colourful graphics, animations and non-grid layouts. There was a novelty-effect driving this trend. GUIs and colour displays were still quite new. And tools like Macromedia Director were only just unlocking those kinds of bespoke GUIs. The web was trying to recreate that feel with a more limited toolset. 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.
bdcravens 2y ago
Originally there were no design tools. You literally had a giant textarea and a save button. It wasn't even a rich editor. If you wanted any formatting, you had to learn the HTML. (in a time when there was nothing like Stack Overflow and no blogs or Youtube to learn from; Google wasn't even available early on, and the search engines were of varying quality) 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.
- rubidium 2y ago
  You got books from the library to figure it out. Better than google slop these days?
  - 1659447091 2y ago
    I spent a lot of time at Barnes & Nobles with a pen and notebook (most of them had a starbucks and newer book editions than my local library). I miss the consolidation of the information and explained what was going on and why while working in a linear fashion. I ended up using the same SQL book for almost a decade (1998/9-ish), kept finding something new in there. I don't miss the 1500+ pages and lack of cmd-F; on the other hand, I gained mad index parsing skills I never got in school.
  - themadturk 2y ago
    There were always O'Reilly books, which is where I tried to learn HTML.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    I eventually found what I needed online, but I do remember working out of a copy of HTML for Dummies that I bought at the college bookstore. (1996 is when I got started)
89vision 2y ago
Well, I was 13 and trying to learn html by piecing things together from "view source" and seeing what other people were doing on their page. We didn't have the benefit of stack overflow or what anyone today would consider a reasonable search engine. The dopamine rush was unimaginable at first, but quickly faded as i got pretty bored of static html. Once I found perl and cgi-bin, the dopamine was back, rinse and repeat over and over again for the last 25ish years. Those early years of the web were pretty magical for me and initiated a life long fascination of technology and problem solving.
- piva00 2y ago
  I think there are many like us out there in the world, yours is almost exactly my life progression into working with code. 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.
card_zero 2y ago
I was just browsing some geocities "homesteads" and trying to decide what aesthetic you have in mind specifically. https://web.archive.org/web/19970413002044/http://www8.geocities.com/homestead/homedir.html 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.geocities.com/Area51/6754/ 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.geocities.com/Heartland/2107/ 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.
- jchw 2y ago
  I went down a weird rabbit hole. On that second link I noticed an entertaining little logo for the "HTML Writers Guild" at hwg.org, which seems to have began in 1994 as a "guild" of people who write HTML, helping each-other make better webpages. 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/ https://www.somethingawful.com/news/html-guild-writers/ [2]: https://iwanet.org/ https://iwanet.org/ [3]: https://hwg.org/member/ https://hwg.org/member/
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Cause most people used the WYSIWYG editor that was the key “IDE” for publishing and that puts a ton of constraints on the design boundaries
relaxing 2y ago
A lot of responses so far about the technology but not much about the aesthetic. My observations/recollections: - 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.)
andrewstuart 2y ago
Is there anyone here in the HN community who was connected to Geocities in the old days? 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.
superkuh 2y ago
Because it was about the content and not what the page looked like.
ricc 2y ago
Kids and the desire to not be “proper”. 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.
nativeit 2y ago
The birth, life, and death of grunge.

40 points by andrewstuart 2y ago

How did that crazy design aesthetic arise? Where did it come from?

28304283409234 2y ago

I don't understand the question. What crazy design aesthetic?

LarsDu88 2y ago

I was a kid in the 90s, and back then the fact you can have animated gifs on a page was a revelation. Likewise with crazy fonts, sound effects, and frames.

shams93 2y ago

I was on the pre-ipo (and post ipo) design team. So its partly my fault lmfao.

shams93 2y ago
But to answer where it came from? It came from the limitations of the web at the time - table based layout, low graphic resolutions, browser running under 16 megs (not gigs) of ram.
- shams93 2y ago
  We also had a rule that no page could weigh under 26k, although pages by users of Geocities could be larger, all the pages that ran geocities had to be 26kb or less.
  - smegsicle 2y ago
    default/official pages were under 26k?
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  ...I don't know. You can have low-resolution 8-bit graphics which are better† designed. Look at classic Mac OS, or modern indie games with a retro pixel art aesthetic. --- † "Better" in this case means something akin to "what most people today would consider more professional." I don't want to judge.
  - krapp 2y ago
    The retro pixel art aesthetic is just that - an aesthetic. It's intentional and doesn't accurately reflect the technology it imitates, because it's about a vibe. The people creating Geocities webpages weren't professional developers or artists trying to adhere to a particular aesthetic, they were regular (mostly non-technical) people doing what they thought looked cool at the time, or just copying other sites and using the graphic elements or templates provided by Geocities.
  - TillE 2y ago
    Sure but we're talking about personal/hobby pages made by people who are overwhelmingly not artists and designers.
  - b3ing 2y ago
    Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
  - b3ing 2y ago
    Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one. 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.
  - JojoFatsani 2y ago
    Geocities was not for professionals. It was for amateurs.
andrewstuart 2y ago
You worked on Geocities! 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!

TillE 2y ago

It was one of the few places (along with Angelfire) anyone could get a free web page those days, and the most interesting thing you could do with web design was add a background and some animated GIFs. 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.

xyst 2y ago
I remember angelfire, only because of the banner that was forced on every free site. And I think those sites loaded popups in the background. This was probably back before tracking existed and was just used to pump various dotcom business traffic statistics. Then came the creation of pop up blockers.
- timeon 2y ago
  > 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.

b3ing 2y ago

There wasn’t much you could do honestly. 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.

paradox460 2y ago
Netscape composer was part of Netscape from 1997 on, and provided rudimentary wysiwyg 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
jordanb 2y ago
A friend described that era (looking back from the 2010s) as the "amateur web". Another thing worth mentioning is nobody really had any idea how to be responsive. 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.
- malfist 2y ago
  Nobody knew about responsive design because there was no such thing as responsive design at that point. There were no mobile phones, no css media queries and pretty much everyone was viewing your webpage in 800x600 screens. Hell, was float even around then? All I remember from that time was tables.

cpach 2y ago

I was there. It was fun, it was a fad. The web was quite playful back then. Many of us made websites just for the heck of it, it wasn’t super commercial. MySpace, which came later, was similar with regards to aesthetics. Some computer magazines also had that “GeoCities look”. Alien Skin Software and their Photoshop plugins was all the rage. 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.

kchr 2y ago
> Alien Skin Software and their Photoshop plugins was all the rage. Not to mention Kai's Power Tools, and the other plugins by Kai Kruse!
selimthegrim 2y ago
Neocities is still a thing I think
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Maybe it was a fad. Maybe. But I think it perhaps maybe expressed a real itch and one that's not been well served since. 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.

marssaxman 2y ago

Which of the million crazy design aesthetics to be found on GeoCities are you thinking about?

borplk 2y ago

I don't think it was super crazy compared to the other websites during that time. A lot of the websites shared similar vibes even outside of GeoCities.

sadops 2y ago

Creativity and lack of a developer monoculture.

whalesalad 2y ago

lol very cute to think the “crazy design aesthetic” was intentional. download a copy of windows 2000 and fire up microsoft front page and you’ll quickly know why it was so bad.

j45 2y ago

There wasn’t much basis to call it crazy at the time. 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.

xyst 2y ago

Give a suburban 10-12 yr old kid access to a computer, nearly unlimited access to internet (getting kicked off when parents use landline), and infinite time, and you get that “crazy design aesthetic”. 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.

al_borland 2y ago
I remember memorizing some ridiculous URL to a geocities site a friend of mine made in middle school or high school. He called Beanie Burn. It was a punch of pictures of Bernie Babies on fire, all done with animated gifs.

swatcoder 2y ago

It was a spontaneous folk culture, with countless untrained people inventing their own design language by learning to use "View Source" and "Save Image As..." on each other's pages. 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.

underwater 2y ago

The web of the late 90s immediately followed Windows 95 and the gaudy design of interactive CDs trend. The aesthetic of the time lent towards the skeumorphic and into the vividness and richness of colourful graphics, animations and non-grid layouts. There was a novelty-effect driving this trend. GUIs and colour displays were still quite new. And tools like Macromedia Director were only just unlocking those kinds of bespoke GUIs. The web was trying to recreate that feel with a more limited toolset. 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.

bdcravens 2y ago

Originally there were no design tools. You literally had a giant textarea and a save button. It wasn't even a rich editor. If you wanted any formatting, you had to learn the HTML. (in a time when there was nothing like Stack Overflow and no blogs or Youtube to learn from; Google wasn't even available early on, and the search engines were of varying quality) 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.

rubidium 2y ago
You got books from the library to figure it out. Better than google slop these days?
- 1659447091 2y ago
  I spent a lot of time at Barnes & Nobles with a pen and notebook (most of them had a starbucks and newer book editions than my local library). I miss the consolidation of the information and explained what was going on and why while working in a linear fashion. I ended up using the same SQL book for almost a decade (1998/9-ish), kept finding something new in there. I don't miss the 1500+ pages and lack of cmd-F; on the other hand, I gained mad index parsing skills I never got in school.
- themadturk 2y ago
  There were always O'Reilly books, which is where I tried to learn HTML.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  I eventually found what I needed online, but I do remember working out of a copy of HTML for Dummies that I bought at the college bookstore. (1996 is when I got started)

89vision 2y ago

Well, I was 13 and trying to learn html by piecing things together from "view source" and seeing what other people were doing on their page. We didn't have the benefit of stack overflow or what anyone today would consider a reasonable search engine. The dopamine rush was unimaginable at first, but quickly faded as i got pretty bored of static html. Once I found perl and cgi-bin, the dopamine was back, rinse and repeat over and over again for the last 25ish years. Those early years of the web were pretty magical for me and initiated a life long fascination of technology and problem solving.

piva00 2y ago
I think there are many like us out there in the world, yours is almost exactly my life progression into working with code. 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.

card_zero 2y ago

I was just browsing some geocities "homesteads" and trying to decide what aesthetic you have in mind specifically. https://web.archive.org/web/19970413002044/http://www8.geocities.com/homestead/homedir.html 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.geocities.com/Area51/6754/ 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.geocities.com/Heartland/2107/ 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.

jchw 2y ago
I went down a weird rabbit hole. On that second link I noticed an entertaining little logo for the "HTML Writers Guild" at hwg.org, which seems to have began in 1994 as a "guild" of people who write HTML, helping each-other make better webpages. 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/ https://www.somethingawful.com/news/html-guild-writers/ [2]: https://iwanet.org/ https://iwanet.org/ [3]: https://hwg.org/member/ https://hwg.org/member/

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Cause most people used the WYSIWYG editor that was the key “IDE” for publishing and that puts a ton of constraints on the design boundaries

relaxing 2y ago

A lot of responses so far about the technology but not much about the aesthetic. My observations/recollections: - 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.)

andrewstuart 2y ago

Is there anyone here in the HN community who was connected to Geocities in the old days? 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.

superkuh 2y ago

Because it was about the content and not what the page looked like.

ricc 2y ago

Kids and the desire to not be “proper”. 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.

nativeit 2y ago

The birth, life, and death of grunge.