Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cybercultural.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 204 posts

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

#81

Post by jeffbee »

bluenose69 wrote: post #22

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 anima…

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.

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

#82

Post by mgr86 »

> 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.

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

#83

Post by eadmund »

> 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 By the Web 2.0 period, it was seen my most in the web design profession as being hopelessly outdated.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.

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

#85

Post by deltarholamda »

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…

As I recall, Greenspun skewered Siegel. Siegel advocated a two- or three-stage "entry portal" to your site in one version of his "Killer" books, and Greenspun thought that was daft.

I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your photos and text blocks flying in as you scroll? It's cool the first time you see it, but after that? Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."

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

#86

Post by Maro »

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 :)

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

#89

Post by cut3 »

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.

That 2Advanced flash intro tho...

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

#90

Post by dasil003 »

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. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
Post reply on HN