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Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

dolekemp96.org

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Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#2

Post by ssharp »

There is a link at the bottom of the page to:

http://www.4president.org/

This site has archives of campaign websites, website features, and campaign ads.

I think it's fascinating to see the paradigm shifts in web design indicated by these four-year gaps. And campaigns being a temporary thing, I think they perfectly encapsulate the design of the "era". I was going through the years and was thinking "sure, a lot changed from 1996 to 2000, so of course the sites will look a lot different but there is no way 2008 is that much different than 2012". Wrong. I think this is just what happens when you see web design evolve slowly over four years -- you don't think it's changed that much. Then you actually see a site in 2008 vs. 2012 and realize the difference.

The 1996 Phil Graham and Pat Buchanan sites look like classic Geocities-style design!

The stark differences in design of the nominated candidates vs. the ones who lost in the primaries. This gap seems to have been most apparent in 1996 and 2000, during the bubble, when top-tier web designers were probably insanely expensive.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#4

Post by Sumaso »

tocomment wrote: post #3

So what is it about this design that makes it look "dated"? It's not just the grainy images, right? Is it the smaller text? More compact style?

I was just thinking if they had some high res images, and bumped up the font size, it wouldn't be half bad.

Of course this comes from a person with little knowledge of web design.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#5

Post by RyanMcGreal »

tocomment wrote: post #3

So what is it about this design that makes it look "dated"? It's not just the grainy images, right? Is it the smaller text? More compact style?

I was thinking it holds up quite well, compared to my subjective memory of websites from that vintage. There are no scrolling banners or other dancing garbage (with the exception of one animated GIF that is relatively restrained), and the layout wouldn't look out of place today if the elements had a bit more room to breathe.

Even the markup is surprisingly clean:

* Most tag names are lowercase

* Attributes are double-quoted

* Some style attributes with CSS

I'm surprised to see FrontPage generated this code - I remember it being more gnarly than this. That said, I'm enjoying the historical artifacts:

* Table-based layout

* tags

* tag has background, vlink and alink attributes

* URLs apparently map to actual HTML files

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#6

Post by robocaptain »

One way it reads very different to me is the way all of the sources are (in parenthesis) directly after the statements. I don't read a lot of campaign websites but I've not seen one that has so many direct sources for this many statements.

It's quite refreshing actually.

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