Time to hit the nostalgia button for this one, folks. If you were way too young to experience the early years of the World Wide Web, there’s always an article or two about how that time went. The Internet was gawky, and painfully slow. While people complained about how tedious it was to connect back then, let’s not forget a good aspect when it comes to reminiscing about the old times: web design. The majority of web designers at that time only had experience with designing printed materials, as Mashable details:
Many websites today look the same because there is greater “emphasis on accessibility, applicability and UX at the expense of visual originality,” Kovar said. That’s not a bad thing, added the UX designer based in Prague, but it does leave web designers from the ‘90s like him pining for colorful backgrounds and Comic Sans. Although, that aesthetic wasn't embraced by corporate brands, with many like Amazon, AOL, and AltaVista opting for box grids and just a splash of color just before the new millennium. (AOL was the most vibrant of the bunch at the time.)
While there are many services archiving the web, like the Internet Archive with its influential Wayback Machine, Kovar organizes the historical snapshots to provide better context about the internet’s past. Want to see what porn, music, movie, and soccer websites looked like decades ago? Kovar’s museum has a sampling. The museum also has a collection of search engines from the ‘90s, many of which you’ve probably never heard of. After all, Rough Guides, the travel guidebook brand, didn’t include Google in the index of its internet guidebook in 1999. (Yes, people wrote books for internet tourists back then.)
Image via Mashable
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I was about to say all the sites changed dramatically except Google. But honestly, stuff like Yahoo, Amazon, CNN - they definitely resemble their old days.
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