In 1999, the Web was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world by Timothy Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Over twenty years later, the first ever website is currently being restored to its Web 1.0 (or maybe Web 0.9 Beta?) glory! Super cool!
I wrote a while back about “cyber space fossils” and the need to clean up the web, but as our society shifts and becomes more and more reliant upon the Internet, maybe it would be good for us to keep some pieces of the past alive. For nostalgia? Yes. But also for educational purposes.
The Cycle of Website Design
I was designing a site the other day, and I realized that, while my personal aesthetic had evolved from the overly busy, animated-gif packed days of my first GeoCities site, I just might be devolving as a designer, as my sites were becoming much simpler, cleaner, and starker, much like some of the very first sites on the Web.
I remember when I was in junior high and high school in the 1990’s, and bell-bottom jeans had a slight resurgence in popularity. I realized then that “style” is cyclical. Perhaps web design is just as cyclical.
And if so, then maybe keeping some of those old sites around, even if only as local installs or screenshots, might be a good idea, just so we can go back from time to time to see what worked, what didn’t work, and what might be popular once more.
How do you feel about the nature of web design?
Is there a cycle of what’s cool or is it a unidirectional progression from bad to better?
[via CNN]
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