14 ms·

Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

420 points by panic 1y ago

theGeatZhopa 1y ago
haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic. Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP software). Like to remember the times, though. And never went the road of designing sites.
- larodi 1y ago
  Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for print, which was commendable, but web is not print. They did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web. Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834. IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try to do anything and everything with it before it was formally capable of doing it in a standardized way. > Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
    - larodi 1y ago
      I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I say standards were okay from day one. but actually some were. Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps. Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements. Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost. Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web. ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.
whalesalad 1y ago
I began my career learning from these folks. I loved sites like A List Apart. I got star struck one day when Zeldman emailed me asking for an enhancement to a WordPress plugin I had created. Felt like I’d come full circle.
- zeldman 1y ago
  Aww.
Brajeshwar 1y ago
> Jeffrey Zeldman — who turned 42 in early 1997 I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s. “View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion. Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)
- fauria 1y ago
  > Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion. Where is "View Souce" illegal?
  - yapyap 1y ago
    He’s probably saying it with a bit of a wink and referring to this https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wont-be-indicted-for-hacking-for-viewing-a-state-websites-html https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wo...
    - mojo74 1y ago
      Let's have a chuckle… https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker
  - jjkaczor 1y ago
    Heh - I have been in many corporate and government environments where the desktop browsers are locked down via centralized policies, and not only is "View Source" disabled/removed, but so are the "Developer tools"...
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  > I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s. But he was!
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Another seminal book for me, was Web Pages That Suck. They actually used to throw shade on Creating Killer Web Sites. Lots of big egos, back then. I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
- lifefeed 1y ago
  I loved that site too. Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.
- ericras 1y ago
  That book was seminal for me too and is the genesis for where I am today. Flanders' accurate criticism of "mystery meat navigation" was incredibly influential for me and still reverberates in my mind when I think about usability issues.
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.
  - unilynx 1y ago
    and not having sponsored links back then
  - oldpersonintx2 1y ago
    right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
vanschelven 1y ago
This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.
- paxcoder 1y ago
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- dcminter 1y ago
  He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use. I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
  - jmisavage 1y ago
    I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.
    - karohalik 1y ago
      It’s kind of ironic that Nielsen’s site and even his book layouts were often frustrating to use. But maybe that proves his own points.
      - deleted 1y ago
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- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.
alphadelphi 1y ago
Great books. One of the authors looks like now is a climate denier, so I wonder myself about the existance of technical approach detached from the scientific one
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Which one is that? Let me guess: the one who's into blockchain now?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic. *[EDIT] I’m wrong. Glad to be wrong. 'E's not dead. 'E's pining.
    - adregan 1y ago
      Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He posted on his site yesterday https://zeldman.com/ https://zeldman.com/
      - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        Maybe I’m wrong. I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago. Happy to be wrong. [EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong. Glad to be.
        DonHopkins 1y ago
        Also I'm happy to hear he's alive, and to infer that he's not the crazy climate change denying crypto bro!
      - throw290525 1y ago
        [dead]
vr46 1y ago
I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point. I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date. Still, fun times, what a great age it was.
- deleted 1y ago
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- mikepurvis 1y ago
  That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.
  - rudasn 1y ago
    There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow. I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
  - 1y ago
bluenose69 1y ago
The colour choices in the image with caption beginning "Jeffrey Zeldman's homepage, March 1997" are hard on my eyes. However, the point might have been to show folks how to exert control over colours and fonts, as opposed to actually communicating. The 90s were quite a different thing than whatever we call the present decade. A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant. Plus ça change.
- detritus 1y ago
  It was all about ads back then too, they just weren't so targeted.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  I don't think we can judge a screenshot of Zeldman's site using today's displays. You are not now seeing what people saw then.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  While black on yellow isn't necessarily the best combination, you have to take into account the medium of the times. On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.
JimDabell 1y ago
Some random asides on this slice of nostalgia: > Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions. This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board. > But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).” It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours. > the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout. There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then. > CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent. It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small. > As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS). Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS. > For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web. Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts. It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.
mjaniczek 1y ago
I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library systems etc...
- WillAdams 1y ago
  I believe it gets discussed a bit in some Cobol programming texts and ISTR it being discussed in _The Viewport Technician_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-technician https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-tec... Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.
plun9 1y ago
Now David Siegel has changed his opinion on climate change. He created a website with independent climate research: https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net
- alphadelphi 1y ago
  indeed, it is indipendent from scientific consensus
- oblio 1y ago
  LOL It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will. However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    funny that you would cite a Wayne Gretzky quote, considering where his politics are these days.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      Looking forward to being a citizen of the 51st State of America, where he thinks the puck will be?
    - oblio 1y ago
      I have no clue about his current politics, but that sports related quote is very much right. I don't have to follow or agree with someone overall to also think that "even a broken clock is right twice a day" :-)
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago
  Thank god the web design sucks, otherwise someone might listen to it!
- deleted 1y ago
hbarka 1y ago
I think it was more than three, I don’t recall the reference of 3 horsemen being used. Lynda Weinman and Seth Godin were influential (Godin from a marketing and SEO perspective). Also Krug and Allsop.
- meigwilym 1y ago
  Also Molly.com
ngneer 1y ago
I was doing web design in the early days. I recall the thrill of thinking how the possibilities were endless. This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still running, incidentally.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  Evolt finally shut down last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20240101/132688.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evo... However their browser archive, where you can download ancient versions of over a hundred different web browsers, is still online: https://browsers.evolt.org https://browsers.evolt.org And that was back when browsers had their own rendering engines and they weren’t all based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit!
donatj 1y ago
I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked. Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.
- squidbeak 1y ago
  It's still a pleasure to explore HTML and CSS on any creatively made site that isn't a js machine. Modern CSS is incredibly rich.
- simonw 1y ago
  Did you poke around in that CSS Minecraft thing recently? One of the best view source experiences I've had in years: https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main
tclancy 1y ago
I always wonder how old I will be before I forget you could only nest tables 7 levels deep in Netscape Navigator 4.
rchaud 1y ago
I liked Zeldman's designs and writing style the best of these 3 guys. Imagine my shock a few years ago when I visited his site again and saw a hideous Wordpress default theme on it. The article mentions that there'll be a new design coming soon, but I can't help but feel Automattic forced him to use their in-house design when he started working there.
sahil_sharma0 1y ago
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Corey_ 1y ago
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TechDebtDevin 1y ago
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telesilla 1y ago
>invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs The instant marker of my generation
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  I've got an invisible single pixel gif tattoo! It's right above my invisible embedded G4 tracking chip.
adregan 1y ago
The irony that web art history (design, ux, &c.) is so much more difficult to study and appreciate—compared to traditional forms—when it should be the easiest, always surprises me. I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it. I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.
mgr86 1y ago
> I'd argue that his pragmatic approach to web design — combining web standards with design flair — was what won out during the 90s and early 2000s. Certainly, of the three web design gurus in 1997, Zeldman’s website back then was by far the most interesting and exotic. -- I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.
eadmund 1y ago
> Useit didn't change its design over the years. By the Web 2.0 period, it was seen my most in the web design profession as being hopelessly outdated. Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend. I wish more sites adopted that style of design.
Maro 1y ago
Such nostalgia — in the seconf half of the 90s I was 15-18 years old, and I was reading these books trying to become a kick-ass "Web Designer/Developer". I quickly realized "Web Designer" is not for me, I have no sense for pixels, I need to focus on the "Web Developer" side. Learn "DHTML" and how to make things work on both IE and Netscape! IE back then had JScript, which was not exactly Javascript, or EcmaScript, which is what you said if you wanted to flex :)
subpixel 1y ago
“His current website, cuttingthroughthenoise.net, shows that he now has a variety of business and personal interests.” That is a funny way to not mention that he is a hard-core climate change denialist.
- replwoacause 1y ago
  Whoa you weren’t kidding. Right from the first paragraph on the main page: “Humans are not destroying Earth or the climate. The widespread belief in anthropogenic warming is the result of political idealism, bad science, faulty data, social psychopathy, and greed. There is no climate emergency. The Apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously misleading propaganda tool and a socially destructive guide for public policy.” What a loon
  - pixxel 1y ago
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absurdo 1y ago
On the flip side, I cherish my torn and beaten up copy of The New Masters of Flash. RIP Macromedia.
- Brajeshwar 1y ago
  Nice. I don’t know anyone serious with Flash at that time who does not have that book. In the early 2000s amazon.com was not in my country, India, but they deliver books for a hefty shipping fee. I bought my first book and the first ever order from Amazon - "Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript" by Branden Hall for a whooping $51.97 (just checked my order history). After a few years, seating in the room with all of the authors, the whos who, and the father of ActionScript at the Macromedia office in Townsend was sureal for me. Spot them here https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/72057594081435036/with/112078486 https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940814...
tunnuz 1y ago
Zeldman was one of my heroes in the 00s. I would argue that the list could also include Eric Meyer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer).
- rglover 1y ago
  Still use Eric's CSS Reset 2.0 till this day. Have never found anything quite as simple and to the point.
tiffanyh 1y ago
I'm surprised https://alistapart.com https://alistapart.com wasn't mentioned.
- micheljansen 1y ago
  That’s by Jeffrey Zeldman
ExMachina73 1y ago
Lets be real. The pinnacle of web design was clearly zombo.com
- ok123456 1y ago
  It can do anything.
- xnx 1y ago
  > The pinnacle of web design was clearly zombo.com *is
gdubs 1y ago
Any article on 90s Web Design gurus would not be complete without at least a mention of Jeffery Veen. HotWired completely defined the aesthetic of the 90s web, breaking all sorts of conventions to create something totally new. Some point along the way I lost my copy of HotWired Style: Principles of Web Design – so I picked up a new one. It's an amazing time capsule of what that time was like, and even if the technology has changed it's still so interesting to me from a standpoint of working within constraints, and understanding a new medium for itself rather than just as a thing to host the previous medium. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1864 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1864
- giantrobot 1y ago
  I thumbed through the HotWired style guide so much I ended up having to buy a second. If it was possible I also would have worn out the WebMonkey and Jeff Zeldman sites in the same way. I poured over them all for style cues. I loved the bright look of the "HotWired" style designs. I found them to be really functional on top of just enjoying the aesthetic. You could get a lot of visual mileage out of a little bit of markup even without images. This was a great feature when most people were on shitty dial-up.
levmiseri 1y ago
Lovely window into the history. Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?
- dbg31415 1y ago
  The modern web is sleek and polished, but something’s been lost. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a clean CSS layout for the first time — text aligned perfectly without tables, seamless transitions — it was magic. But now everything feels uniform. Design is so standardized I can’t remember the last time a site genuinely surprised me or made me want to dig into the code or copy it for my own. It feels like we’re browsing the Walmart music section… efficient, predictable, and totally sterile. I miss the indie record store vibe — quirky, surprising, maybe even a little messy, but full of personality.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    Sleek and polished? Where? Not Amazon.com, not any newspaper/periodical site loading a bunch of ads shifting the layout, not Substack or Medium.com with its exhortations to log in or become a member.
fitsumbelay 1y ago
I'd've put Celement Mok on this list as well ...
erikig 1y ago
Every time I work on a website's UI/UX I have that image of Zeldman staring at me from "Designing with web standards" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designing_with_web_standards.png/250px-Designing_with_web_standards.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
90s_dev 1y ago
Can anyone help me find a specific HTML book? It was the first one I ever read, I've been looking for it on Amazon every few years and haven't found it yet. It must have been released around 1995 or so. It used Mosaic browser throughout all the examples, which looked so different than the IE3 that I was using. There was a heavy focus on forms and controls. And it was hundreds of pages. Familiar to anyone?
throwaway4736 1y ago
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dbg31415 1y ago
Krug belongs on this list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think
replwoacause 1y ago
Great article, a nice trip down memory lane. I still have my copy of “The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web” somewhere. I know Dave Shea wasn’t mentioned, but this book was my intro into design on the earlyish web.
rkaregaran 1y ago
Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff out without tables and spacers.
- amatecha 1y ago
  My personal website from those days landed me a job at one of the biggest web firms in my city at that time. Made my own design in Photoshop, laid out the page with tables and of course the trusty spacer.gif! Good times. Unfortunately the archive.org snapshots of my site aren't loading the images, even though they used to :(
qgin 1y ago
My late 90s web designing life was based entirely around Zeldman's "Pardon My Icons" collection: https://zeldman.com/icon1.html https://zeldman.com/icon1.html
- deleted 1y ago
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t1234s 1y ago
Seeing that Flash screen in the article gave me PTSD
krupan 1y ago
Such nostalgia, and such a reminder of how awful so many websites are now with pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything and content that jumps around as JavaScript and images (ads) load. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years, and we don't seem to have anyone talking about it like those guys did.
cloudpushers 1y ago
Ugh, such a good read as we enter an era where we kind of have to build interactions from first principals or else we'll be stuck with a clunky search bar and lackluster AI adoption. Perhaps Nielsen's practices will enjoy a resurgence as it's easier to make personal sites for all sorts of different, non-commercial entities and happenings.
H1Supreme 1y ago
Although this article references the 90's, it reminded me of the truly vibrant web design scene of the early 2000's. I was a graphic design (print work back then) student / early in my career at the time. Sites like k10k, Newstoday, Praystation, and many others jump-started my interest in writing software by way of web design. Flash especially. There was a network of sites (like those mentioned above), that had feeds of interesting work done on the web. Much of it was purely an exercise in creativity. The single 1024x768 resolution target let folks go wild without the constraints of responsiveness that we see today. While I realize that the web had to evolve, I have a lot of nostalgia for web design from those days. The "design" part of it was really centered around artistic expression, and still had a lot of influence from graphic design.
rglover 1y ago
I badly miss this era. It was so happy, positive, and innocent. People were really just having fun making stuff and teaching each other. Nowadays it all feels very fake and vanity-driven. Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.
KaiserPro 1y ago
Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech) The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions. What it got right: Design once, looks the same anywhere reasonably powerful scripting language Vectors as a first party drawing primitive abstracted OS hooks This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life. There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom. The closest thing to it now is unity.
- Yhippa 1y ago
  It seemed to really lower the barrier for creator to make some cool (and really funny stuff) so for that, I'm thankful.
- baw-bag 1y ago
  I worked as a Nailgun operative in a Palette factory for a few dollars with people shooting nails at eachother for fun. I seen turtleshell.com one day and at the time I was like woah. Flash was my route out of garbage and I miss it on behalf of younger people. I remember making a circle and keyframes. Attaching bits of code to frames to make it do what I want. Remember living at my moms house in the bath reading Flash Math Creativity or Colin Moock's books. I spent so so long understanding the concept of an Object or a Class or functions that call functions. I feel that if I went back today, I'd be assaulted by package managers, dependencies, build systems, frameworks. No easy and beautiful way to draw a circle that weekend and animate it to an oval. It is a real loss. Stuff moves on and I am a developer, but my interest in motion (Penner! Keith Peters!) gave me a real solid feeling of what feels good with interactivity and motion and sometimes I open that ticket but it is rare. Everything is just the same now and I solve the same problems many of you do over and over again. It's boring. No creativity, no inspiration.
WorldPeas 1y ago
My two favorites in the 2000s (when these books were kind of dated already) were Lynda's books/cds and Steve Krug's "don't make me think"
jongjong 1y ago
I remember writing web pages using invisible tables and other HTML hacks. I also remember later using CSS hacks and different properties for each major browser... Sometimes you would use underscores in the CSS property name so that it would be ignored by some browsers and not others. You had to test almost every styling change you made with at least 3 different browsers. The standard wasn't being followed strictly by IE which was dominant at the time. Reading this article reminds me of how many opportunities there were to build useful tools and quickly gain traction and grow a community. Nowadays everything including people's attention has been monopolized and growing a community is not feasible for everyone. This rubs salt into the wound that it's also much harder to create viable, differentiated products due to high competition.
yarone 1y ago
Nielsen's "Usability Engineering" was my FIRST EVER Amazon.com purchase in June 1998.
atum47 1y ago
Back in the 90s I used to host my websites on geocities. We had this trick of displaying the website in a two frames layout, 0% top 100% bottom. That way the publicity banner would be invisible. Unfortunately none of my websites got archived successfully, part because of that. I made a fan website for the movie Matrix, I wish I could see it today. It was awesome. Lots and lots of effects.
- atum47 1y ago
  http://pagina.de/dr.enigma http://pagina.de/dr.enigma - apparently was indexed, but badly (I believe because of the frame tricks)- https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/pagina.de/dr.enigma https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/pagina.de/dr.eni... http://i.am/supermatrix http://i.am/supermatrix - was not. =( I don't have the original URL, just the redirects. GeoCities had weird URL patterns, thus the redirect links. Man, I would pay money to get access to those websites.
dzink 1y ago
They paved the way to the semantic web, which paved the way to Google extracting the data and building its own maps, shopping, and answers, and ratings and images and a bunch of other experiences on top of it and taking over traffic that would have gone to the web sites instead. Then AI scraped the same and now web traffic is becoming even less web. Flash made the web an experience - a place to visit and explore way before the metaverse. Web standards extracted the data. Now it’s pre-chewed and digested down to a AI answer.
djtriptych 1y ago
huge names. As a UI engineer of this era (late 90s early 2ks) I also read Raskin and Tufte. 37 signals had a lot of good writing in the early 2000s. But great set of UI/HCI thinkers for anyone interested.
sahil_sharma0 1y ago
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p3rls 1y ago
Is the author about to hit 40 out of curiosity?

420 points by panic 1y ago

haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic. Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP software). Like to remember the times, though. And never went the road of designing sites.

larodi 1y ago
Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for print, which was commendable, but web is not print. They did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web. Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834. IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
- brailsafe 1y ago
  There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try to do anything and everything with it before it was formally capable of doing it in a standardized way. > Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
  - larodi 1y ago
    I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I say standards were okay from day one. but actually some were. Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps. Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements. Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost. Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web. ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.

whalesalad 1y ago

I began my career learning from these folks. I loved sites like A List Apart. I got star struck one day when Zeldman emailed me asking for an enhancement to a WordPress plugin I had created. Felt like I’d come full circle.

zeldman 1y ago
Aww.

Brajeshwar 1y ago

> Jeffrey Zeldman — who turned 42 in early 1997 I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s. “View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion. Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)

fauria 1y ago
> Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion. Where is "View Souce" illegal?
- yapyap 1y ago
  He’s probably saying it with a bit of a wink and referring to this https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wont-be-indicted-for-hacking-for-viewing-a-state-websites-html https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wo...
  - mojo74 1y ago
    Let's have a chuckle… https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker
- jjkaczor 1y ago
  Heh - I have been in many corporate and government environments where the desktop browsers are locked down via centralized policies, and not only is "View Source" disabled/removed, but so are the "Developer tools"...
stronglikedan 1y ago
> I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s. But he was!

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

Another seminal book for me, was Web Pages That Suck. They actually used to throw shade on Creating Killer Web Sites. Lots of big egos, back then. I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.

lifefeed 1y ago
I loved that site too. Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.
ericras 1y ago
That book was seminal for me too and is the genesis for where I am today. Flanders' accurate criticism of "mystery meat navigation" was incredibly influential for me and still reverberates in my mind when I think about usability issues.

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.
- rchaud 1y ago
  I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.
JimDabell 1y ago
The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.
- unilynx 1y ago
  and not having sponsored links back then
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago
  right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago

vanschelven 1y ago

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

paxcoder 1y ago
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dcminter 1y ago
He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use. I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
- jmisavage 1y ago
  I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.
  - karohalik 1y ago
    It’s kind of ironic that Nielsen’s site and even his book layouts were often frustrating to use. But maybe that proves his own points.
    - deleted 1y ago
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ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.

alphadelphi 1y ago

Great books. One of the authors looks like now is a climate denier, so I wonder myself about the existance of technical approach detached from the scientific one

DonHopkins 1y ago
Which one is that? Let me guess: the one who's into blockchain now?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic. *[EDIT] I’m wrong. Glad to be wrong. 'E's not dead. 'E's pining.
  - adregan 1y ago
    Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He posted on his site yesterday https://zeldman.com/ https://zeldman.com/
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Maybe I’m wrong. I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago. Happy to be wrong. [EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong. Glad to be.
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        Also I'm happy to hear he's alive, and to infer that he's not the crazy climate change denying crypto bro!
    - throw290525 1y ago
      [dead]

vr46 1y ago

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point. I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date. Still, fun times, what a great age it was.

deleted 1y ago
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mikepurvis 1y ago
That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.
- rudasn 1y ago
  There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow. I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
- 1y ago

bluenose69 1y ago

The colour choices in the image with caption beginning "Jeffrey Zeldman's homepage, March 1997" are hard on my eyes. However, the point might have been to show folks how to exert control over colours and fonts, as opposed to actually communicating. The 90s were quite a different thing than whatever we call the present decade. A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant. Plus ça change.

detritus 1y ago
It was all about ads back then too, they just weren't so targeted.
jeffbee 1y ago
I don't think we can judge a screenshot of Zeldman's site using today's displays. You are not now seeing what people saw then.
giantrobot 1y ago
While black on yellow isn't necessarily the best combination, you have to take into account the medium of the times. On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.

JimDabell 1y ago

Some random asides on this slice of nostalgia: > Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions. This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board. > But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).” It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours. > the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout. There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then. > CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent. It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small. > As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS). Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS. > For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web. Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts. It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.

mjaniczek 1y ago

I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library systems etc...

WillAdams 1y ago
I believe it gets discussed a bit in some Cobol programming texts and ISTR it being discussed in _The Viewport Technician_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-technician https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-tec... Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.

plun9 1y ago

Now David Siegel has changed his opinion on climate change. He created a website with independent climate research: https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net

alphadelphi 1y ago
indeed, it is indipendent from scientific consensus
oblio 1y ago
LOL It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will. However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
- rchaud 1y ago
  funny that you would cite a Wayne Gretzky quote, considering where his politics are these days.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    Looking forward to being a citizen of the 51st State of America, where he thinks the puck will be?
  - oblio 1y ago
    I have no clue about his current politics, but that sports related quote is very much right. I don't have to follow or agree with someone overall to also think that "even a broken clock is right twice a day" :-)
ViscountPenguin 1y ago
Thank god the web design sucks, otherwise someone might listen to it!
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hbarka 1y ago

I think it was more than three, I don’t recall the reference of 3 horsemen being used. Lynda Weinman and Seth Godin were influential (Godin from a marketing and SEO perspective). Also Krug and Allsop.

meigwilym 1y ago
Also Molly.com

ngneer 1y ago

I was doing web design in the early days. I recall the thrill of thinking how the possibilities were endless. This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still running, incidentally.

JimDabell 1y ago
Evolt finally shut down last year: https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20240101/132688.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evo... However their browser archive, where you can download ancient versions of over a hundred different web browsers, is still online: https://browsers.evolt.org https://browsers.evolt.org And that was back when browsers had their own rendering engines and they weren’t all based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit!

donatj 1y ago

I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked. Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.

squidbeak 1y ago
It's still a pleasure to explore HTML and CSS on any creatively made site that isn't a js machine. Modern CSS is incredibly rich.
simonw 1y ago
Did you poke around in that CSS Minecraft thing recently? One of the best view source experiences I've had in years: https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main

tclancy 1y ago

I always wonder how old I will be before I forget you could only nest tables 7 levels deep in Netscape Navigator 4.

rchaud 1y ago

I liked Zeldman's designs and writing style the best of these 3 guys. Imagine my shock a few years ago when I visited his site again and saw a hideous Wordpress default theme on it. The article mentions that there'll be a new design coming soon, but I can't help but feel Automattic forced him to use their in-house design when he started working there.

sahil_sharma0 1y ago

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Corey_ 1y ago

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TechDebtDevin 1y ago

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telesilla 1y ago

>invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs The instant marker of my generation

DonHopkins 1y ago
I've got an invisible single pixel gif tattoo! It's right above my invisible embedded G4 tracking chip.

adregan 1y ago

The irony that web art history (design, ux, &c.) is so much more difficult to study and appreciate—compared to traditional forms—when it should be the easiest, always surprises me. I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it. I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.

mgr86 1y ago

> I'd argue that his pragmatic approach to web design — combining web standards with design flair — was what won out during the 90s and early 2000s. Certainly, of the three web design gurus in 1997, Zeldman’s website back then was by far the most interesting and exotic. -- I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.

eadmund 1y ago

> Useit didn't change its design over the years. By the Web 2.0 period, it was seen my most in the web design profession as being hopelessly outdated. Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend. I wish more sites adopted that style of design.

Maro 1y ago

Such nostalgia — in the seconf half of the 90s I was 15-18 years old, and I was reading these books trying to become a kick-ass "Web Designer/Developer". I quickly realized "Web Designer" is not for me, I have no sense for pixels, I need to focus on the "Web Developer" side. Learn "DHTML" and how to make things work on both IE and Netscape! IE back then had JScript, which was not exactly Javascript, or EcmaScript, which is what you said if you wanted to flex :)

subpixel 1y ago

“His current website, cuttingthroughthenoise.net, shows that he now has a variety of business and personal interests.” That is a funny way to not mention that he is a hard-core climate change denialist.

replwoacause 1y ago
Whoa you weren’t kidding. Right from the first paragraph on the main page: “Humans are not destroying Earth or the climate. The widespread belief in anthropogenic warming is the result of political idealism, bad science, faulty data, social psychopathy, and greed. There is no climate emergency. The Apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously misleading propaganda tool and a socially destructive guide for public policy.” What a loon
- pixxel 1y ago
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absurdo 1y ago

On the flip side, I cherish my torn and beaten up copy of The New Masters of Flash. RIP Macromedia.

Brajeshwar 1y ago
Nice. I don’t know anyone serious with Flash at that time who does not have that book. In the early 2000s amazon.com was not in my country, India, but they deliver books for a hefty shipping fee. I bought my first book and the first ever order from Amazon - "Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript" by Branden Hall for a whooping $51.97 (just checked my order history). After a few years, seating in the room with all of the authors, the whos who, and the father of ActionScript at the Macromedia office in Townsend was sureal for me. Spot them here https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/72057594081435036/with/112078486 https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940814...

tunnuz 1y ago

Zeldman was one of my heroes in the 00s. I would argue that the list could also include Eric Meyer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer).

rglover 1y ago
Still use Eric's CSS Reset 2.0 till this day. Have never found anything quite as simple and to the point.

tiffanyh 1y ago

I'm surprised https://alistapart.com https://alistapart.com wasn't mentioned.

micheljansen 1y ago
That’s by Jeffrey Zeldman

ExMachina73 1y ago

Lets be real. The pinnacle of web design was clearly zombo.com

ok123456 1y ago
It can do anything.
xnx 1y ago
> The pinnacle of web design was clearly zombo.com *is

gdubs 1y ago

Any article on 90s Web Design gurus would not be complete without at least a mention of Jeffery Veen. HotWired completely defined the aesthetic of the 90s web, breaking all sorts of conventions to create something totally new. Some point along the way I lost my copy of HotWired Style: Principles of Web Design – so I picked up a new one. It's an amazing time capsule of what that time was like, and even if the technology has changed it's still so interesting to me from a standpoint of working within constraints, and understanding a new medium for itself rather than just as a thing to host the previous medium. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1864 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1864

giantrobot 1y ago
I thumbed through the HotWired style guide so much I ended up having to buy a second. If it was possible I also would have worn out the WebMonkey and Jeff Zeldman sites in the same way. I poured over them all for style cues. I loved the bright look of the "HotWired" style designs. I found them to be really functional on top of just enjoying the aesthetic. You could get a lot of visual mileage out of a little bit of markup even without images. This was a great feature when most people were on shitty dial-up.

levmiseri 1y ago

Lovely window into the history. Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?

dbg31415 1y ago
The modern web is sleek and polished, but something’s been lost. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a clean CSS layout for the first time — text aligned perfectly without tables, seamless transitions — it was magic. But now everything feels uniform. Design is so standardized I can’t remember the last time a site genuinely surprised me or made me want to dig into the code or copy it for my own. It feels like we’re browsing the Walmart music section… efficient, predictable, and totally sterile. I miss the indie record store vibe — quirky, surprising, maybe even a little messy, but full of personality.
- rchaud 1y ago
  Sleek and polished? Where? Not Amazon.com, not any newspaper/periodical site loading a bunch of ads shifting the layout, not Substack or Medium.com with its exhortations to log in or become a member.

fitsumbelay 1y ago

I'd've put Celement Mok on this list as well ...

erikig 1y ago

Every time I work on a website's UI/UX I have that image of Zeldman staring at me from "Designing with web standards" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designing_with_web_standards.png/250px-Designing_with_web_standards.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...

90s_dev 1y ago

Can anyone help me find a specific HTML book? It was the first one I ever read, I've been looking for it on Amazon every few years and haven't found it yet. It must have been released around 1995 or so. It used Mosaic browser throughout all the examples, which looked so different than the IE3 that I was using. There was a heavy focus on forms and controls. And it was hundreds of pages. Familiar to anyone?

throwaway4736 1y ago

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dbg31415 1y ago

Krug belongs on this list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think

replwoacause 1y ago

Great article, a nice trip down memory lane. I still have my copy of “The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web” somewhere. I know Dave Shea wasn’t mentioned, but this book was my intro into design on the earlyish web.

rkaregaran 1y ago

Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff out without tables and spacers.

amatecha 1y ago
My personal website from those days landed me a job at one of the biggest web firms in my city at that time. Made my own design in Photoshop, laid out the page with tables and of course the trusty spacer.gif! Good times. Unfortunately the archive.org snapshots of my site aren't loading the images, even though they used to :(

qgin 1y ago

My late 90s web designing life was based entirely around Zeldman's "Pardon My Icons" collection: https://zeldman.com/icon1.html https://zeldman.com/icon1.html

deleted 1y ago
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t1234s 1y ago

Seeing that Flash screen in the article gave me PTSD

krupan 1y ago

Such nostalgia, and such a reminder of how awful so many websites are now with pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything and content that jumps around as JavaScript and images (ads) load. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years, and we don't seem to have anyone talking about it like those guys did.

cloudpushers 1y ago

Ugh, such a good read as we enter an era where we kind of have to build interactions from first principals or else we'll be stuck with a clunky search bar and lackluster AI adoption. Perhaps Nielsen's practices will enjoy a resurgence as it's easier to make personal sites for all sorts of different, non-commercial entities and happenings.

H1Supreme 1y ago

Although this article references the 90's, it reminded me of the truly vibrant web design scene of the early 2000's. I was a graphic design (print work back then) student / early in my career at the time. Sites like k10k, Newstoday, Praystation, and many others jump-started my interest in writing software by way of web design. Flash especially. There was a network of sites (like those mentioned above), that had feeds of interesting work done on the web. Much of it was purely an exercise in creativity. The single 1024x768 resolution target let folks go wild without the constraints of responsiveness that we see today. While I realize that the web had to evolve, I have a lot of nostalgia for web design from those days. The "design" part of it was really centered around artistic expression, and still had a lot of influence from graphic design.

rglover 1y ago

I badly miss this era. It was so happy, positive, and innocent. People were really just having fun making stuff and teaching each other. Nowadays it all feels very fake and vanity-driven. Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.

KaiserPro 1y ago

Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech) The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions. What it got right: Design once, looks the same anywhere reasonably powerful scripting language Vectors as a first party drawing primitive abstracted OS hooks This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life. There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom. The closest thing to it now is unity.

Yhippa 1y ago
It seemed to really lower the barrier for creator to make some cool (and really funny stuff) so for that, I'm thankful.
baw-bag 1y ago
I worked as a Nailgun operative in a Palette factory for a few dollars with people shooting nails at eachother for fun. I seen turtleshell.com one day and at the time I was like woah. Flash was my route out of garbage and I miss it on behalf of younger people. I remember making a circle and keyframes. Attaching bits of code to frames to make it do what I want. Remember living at my moms house in the bath reading Flash Math Creativity or Colin Moock's books. I spent so so long understanding the concept of an Object or a Class or functions that call functions. I feel that if I went back today, I'd be assaulted by package managers, dependencies, build systems, frameworks. No easy and beautiful way to draw a circle that weekend and animate it to an oval. It is a real loss. Stuff moves on and I am a developer, but my interest in motion (Penner! Keith Peters!) gave me a real solid feeling of what feels good with interactivity and motion and sometimes I open that ticket but it is rare. Everything is just the same now and I solve the same problems many of you do over and over again. It's boring. No creativity, no inspiration.

WorldPeas 1y ago

My two favorites in the 2000s (when these books were kind of dated already) were Lynda's books/cds and Steve Krug's "don't make me think"

jongjong 1y ago

I remember writing web pages using invisible tables and other HTML hacks. I also remember later using CSS hacks and different properties for each major browser... Sometimes you would use underscores in the CSS property name so that it would be ignored by some browsers and not others. You had to test almost every styling change you made with at least 3 different browsers. The standard wasn't being followed strictly by IE which was dominant at the time. Reading this article reminds me of how many opportunities there were to build useful tools and quickly gain traction and grow a community. Nowadays everything including people's attention has been monopolized and growing a community is not feasible for everyone. This rubs salt into the wound that it's also much harder to create viable, differentiated products due to high competition.

yarone 1y ago

Nielsen's "Usability Engineering" was my FIRST EVER Amazon.com purchase in June 1998.

atum47 1y ago

Back in the 90s I used to host my websites on geocities. We had this trick of displaying the website in a two frames layout, 0% top 100% bottom. That way the publicity banner would be invisible. Unfortunately none of my websites got archived successfully, part because of that. I made a fan website for the movie Matrix, I wish I could see it today. It was awesome. Lots and lots of effects.

atum47 1y ago
http://pagina.de/dr.enigma http://pagina.de/dr.enigma - apparently was indexed, but badly (I believe because of the frame tricks)- https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/pagina.de/dr.enigma https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/pagina.de/dr.eni... http://i.am/supermatrix http://i.am/supermatrix - was not. =( I don't have the original URL, just the redirects. GeoCities had weird URL patterns, thus the redirect links. Man, I would pay money to get access to those websites.

dzink 1y ago

They paved the way to the semantic web, which paved the way to Google extracting the data and building its own maps, shopping, and answers, and ratings and images and a bunch of other experiences on top of it and taking over traffic that would have gone to the web sites instead. Then AI scraped the same and now web traffic is becoming even less web. Flash made the web an experience - a place to visit and explore way before the metaverse. Web standards extracted the data. Now it’s pre-chewed and digested down to a AI answer.

djtriptych 1y ago

huge names. As a UI engineer of this era (late 90s early 2ks) I also read Raskin and Tufte. 37 signals had a lot of good writing in the early 2000s. But great set of UI/HCI thinkers for anyone interested.

sahil_sharma0 1y ago

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p3rls 1y ago

Is the author about to hit 40 out of curiosity?