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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

#161

Post by Yhippa »

KaiserPro wrote: post #155

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. C…

It seemed to really lower the barrier for creator to make some cool (and really funny stuff) so for that, I'm thankful.

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

#162

Post by stronglikedan »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #5

> 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 oth…

> I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s.

But he was!

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

#163

Post by vr46 »

mikepurvis wrote: post #42
vr46 wrote: post #18

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…

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.

I remember Shaun Inman, did he do Mint?

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

#164

Post by vr46 »

fowkswe wrote: post #112
mikepurvis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so influential and informative to me (wow, just did an archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.lin... ).

K10k! “Newstoday” - Miss that jingle!

Made a friend on k10k back in, maybe 2001, still friends. Texted her a few days ago. Never met yet.

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

#165

Post by DonHopkins »

soulofmischief wrote: post #114
DonHopkins wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Did I hit a nerve? You're choosing to deflect and patronize, but not provide any further credibility to your unwarranted comparison. That speaks for itself. > Don't you have some NFTs to shill at Denny's Applebee's Max? You have no idea who I am or what I support, not everyone is a little caricature in your mind. This kind of negative attitude has no place in this forum.

You haven't taken the opportunity to prove you're not full of shit by contributing anything constructive to this conversation. Go reply to my other comments or other people's comments if you disagree with anything I've said or have something to add, but nobody wants to hear financial advice or blockchain evangelism from you, so please stop obsessing about that, because it's not relevant or interesting or credible.

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

#167

Post by DonHopkins »

msla wrote: post #144
JimDabell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, Weird Al could see so far into the future that he called himself that on purpose.

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

#168

Post by jongjong »

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.

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

#170

Post by baw-bag »

KaiserPro wrote: post #155

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. C…

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.

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