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..." o

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.