So wild! I was just thinking about 2Advanced today, Was anyone mesmerized by their site in 2006ish: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/2advanced-studios-v5...
Web Design Museum
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Web Design Museum
#32we are missing anti0rp / Netochka Nezvanova's m9ndfukc.org website here. I believe there were others from the same "entity" but can't remember the url.
Re: Web Design Museum
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it. Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser…
Yes, I loved Flash and ActionScript as a designer, but later viewed it as indistinguishable from malware as an IT support tech. It was frankly the worst, in terms of security whack-a-mole, and because it required patching so frequently, opened up a ton of genuinely malicious actors who could trick even competent people into clicking and installing malware.
The technology was, and still is, amazing. It's unmatched by anything in the modern days. Supposed modern replacements require you to write non-trivial code just to get started, while flash introduced programming very gently. You could get reasonably far with just `goToAndStop(frame)`.
The official implementation, on the other hand, was terrible. Thankfully Ruffle exists. It's written in Rust and at this point it flawlessly plays most of my flash game collection. Now if only we had open-source flash authoring software...
Re: Web Design Museum
#34Mid 90s sites have a nice look to them. Honestly in some ways they're easier to read then a lot of websites of today. Is there a reason why designers moved away from that - I'm not sure what to call it - magazine look?
I think a lot of it comes down to the much larger variation in screen sizes... back then, you pretty much had to work in 640x480 or 800x600 and were usually good... 1024 got a little harder, then it was all over when 1440p and larger became very normal. A lot of the designs were also somewhat flexible via Flash/Flex and not HTML alone.
Do people maximize the browser window on a 1440p monitor? I don't. Mine is usually around half the width of the screen because most sites don't stretch beyond that in a sensible way.
Re: Web Design Museum
#35Related https://thehistoryofweb.design/ The book is an interesting read. The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. Granted, this may be less due to the death of Flash and more due to marketers and UX professionals trying to simplify the journey from visit to purchase.
The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it. Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser…
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Re: Web Design Museum
#36The evolution of the McDonalds website is a great example of playful and whimsical 90s design aesthetic gradually replaced to become the blandness that it is today.
In that particular example, and probably many others, I think the progression corresponded to changes in the business itself. McDonald's rebranded, expanding their target demographic beyond kids specifically, and I feel like they lost all their character in the process.
Re: Web Design Museum
#37Mid 90s sites have a nice look to them. Honestly in some ways they're easier to read then a lot of websites of today. Is there a reason why designers moved away from that - I'm not sure what to call it - magazine look?
Three of the main reasons were wide screens, mobile devices, and HiDPI. When a layout only needs to work at 640x480 on a 96dpi monitor where you're guaranteed to have a cursor and keyboard a "magazine" layout can work fine.
When a non-trivial number of users have widescreen displays a layout designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio ends up either crowded on one side of the screen or floating in the center with large margins on either side. A layout filling a 16:9 aspect screen will end up being different than the 4:3 layout. This feeds into mobile as well, your 4:3 or 16:9 landscape layout for desktops either looks terrible or is broken on a mobile device in a portrait layout. The graphics that look good at 96dpi start to look shitty on HiDPI screens.
It's entirely possible to make responsive layouts that handle all those cases. CSS and HTML have lots of options for responsive layouts. The main limitation is time/money. It's a lot of work to build a "magazine" layout that is responsive and displays properly on all devices. It's possible just difficult. It's much easier to make a layout that looks equally bland and lifeless across all devices.
Re: Web Design Museum
#38What is the essence of the beauty I see in 90s websites?
To me, they are easier to reason about. Maybe because of a higher information density, that’s static and aligned such that it’s easier to track groups of components and their relationships; cohesiveness is probably the word.
Maybe it’s just nostalgia. But I don’t think so.
Re: Web Design Museum
#39Related https://thehistoryofweb.design/ The book is an interesting read. The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. Granted, this may be less due to the death of Flash and more due to marketers and UX professionals trying to simplify the journey from visit to purchase.
The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it. Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser…
I miss the creative explosions of Flash games. Even with Canvas and WASM today there is nothing which comes close.
My favourite casual puzzler was made in Flash and published in 2010, the same year, Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash".
Thankfully then the developers developed a sequel as an iOS app which took advantage of the iPhones sensor. In 2010 in looked for a short time that creative iPhone games could take the crown of Flash. The sequel died in the 32bitocalpse of iOS 9.
Re: Web Design Museum
#40Related https://thehistoryofweb.design/ The book is an interesting read. The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. Granted, this may be less due to the death of Flash and more due to marketers and UX professionals trying to simplify the journey from visit to purchase.
The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it. Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser…
Flash may have been a resource hog in the single-core CPU age, but we have computers today that are much faster, yet Google Chrome is the botleneck, using up gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to render a few tabs worth of text and images.
The modern "replacement" for Flash, things like WebGL and three.js are also pretty slow on modern machines. Speed isn't hamstrung by the tool, it's hamstrung by the people that made something with said tool.