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

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

#141

Post by 508LoopDetected »

pavlov wrote: post #130
ftio wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you c…

8pt Tahoma, lowercase, and using colons for decoration, like this: :: news :: contact :: last updated 2000-07-31 ::

Yep! I'm guilty of continuing to use the double-colon separators to this very day. Just shipped an internal app for my company a few months ago that utilizes them in page titles.

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

#144

Post by msla »

JimDabell wrote: post #24
vanschelven wrote: post #10

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 He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.

It seems the next battle we'll have to fight is for fonts that actually present enough information to the user to disambiguate "Weird Al" from "Weird AI". Seems like we used to have these things called "serifs" but modern design knows nothing of such heresies.

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

#145

Post by eviks »

dasil003 wrote: post #90
vanschelven wrote: post #10

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.

I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve.…

Why didn't he say the same thing about links:

> he was saying that each browser should define how headers would be displayed to their users.

And let the user define the color and underline style?

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

#146

Post by krupan »

kristianc wrote: post #29
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.

"Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism"

Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years

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

#147

Post by krupan »

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.

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

#148

Post by cloudpushers »

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.

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

#149

Post by H1Supreme »

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.

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

#150

Post by replwoacause »

subpixel wrote: post #87

“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.

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

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