Comments on: Question: Web Design History?

By: Zinni

Zinni — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:41:52 +0000

Samantha,

I know the contest may be over, but I wanted to let you know that you should search through Design Observer for an article on basically the exact same thing. There were literally hundreds of responses and they may be of help to you.

By: Samantha

Samantha — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:29:43 +0000

To Everyone who Commented on this:

Thanks for all of your input it is greatly appreciated.

I drew a name out of a hat for the book give-away and it goes to Dave at http://nemoorange.com/, who ironically graduated from the same college as me (JMU) but I have never met. Check out his site it is super rad. Thanks again to everyone who contributed.

By: Carina

Carina — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:04:41 +0000

I think a revolution is needed regarding the boring layouts of most websites – I won’t say that my solution was the best but I’ve tried at least! And be sure I’m improving ;) Shouldn’t navigation become a little adventure and shouldn’t websites entertain (& inform) their visitors?

By: Cre8iveBro

Cre8iveBro — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:37:21 +0000

This is just my opinion …, but I feel that “web design” as a concept is still fairly new. The internet was developed as a data-driven technology medium, not necessarily a design-driven or presentation-driven medium. For this reason, I believe that only now are companies and individuals realizing how important design aesthetics really are. Think about the resurgence of the internet after the dot com crash: companies felt the medium was vastly unexplored and the cutting-edge companies began to see the need for designers, not just to make the site pretty, but educated designers who could understand the psychology behind design. The psychology behind why to use what colors, what typefaces, etc. I think the field as a whole is still in the process of design exploration. In your class, you speak of designers who are still alive, and design has been around for centuries… It has taken up to the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s for us as a people to identify and understand the building blocks behind what makes good print design. The web is still very much in its infancy. Good design is on the way, but we must be willing to be the pioneers who lay the foundation for what is to be considered great design years down the road.

With all that said, there are individuals, and more numerous, collaborations of individuals that have made good design. Consider the Mercedes Benz websites. Redesign after redesign, they are hammering out some of the best design. And their use of multimedia elements has always been ahead of the curve and demonstrated well-thought-out and careful use of design elements on the web. Hovie Hawk at hovie.com is another designer who has remained a bit ahead of the curve, until recently. There is a timeline on the site of their previous site designs. He was using Flash back when we were up on dial-up and it never got in the way of the design or speed of the site, nor the functionality.

I am sure there are tons more designers who have made and broken some of the rules to help the web progress to where it is today. Another thing to consider is that just now, the web is being standardized. I am sure there were designs from back in the day that were great, but they couldn’t be viewed by the masses due to browser incompatibility issues. Give the web some time. I am sure your students appreciate the information you can give. And considering the class you are teaching is a fundamentals class, be sure they have that down and understand it in print medium before moving on to something as ever-changing as the world wide web. … again, just my opinion.

By: Nguyet

Nguyet — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:58:59 +0000

I feel more comfortable answering this question : What sites benchmark the progression of visual design on the web?

I think news sites especially NY Times and CNN really revolutionize the use of grids on the web. They’re good examples of bridging the principles use both in print and web.

Someone already mentioned http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com but I’m going to second that one too – it’s the first website I saw back in the day that uses the web as a medium to create atmosphere as well as presenting information. It was like stumbling into another beautiful world and I didn’t want to leave. It was the side of the web that I’ve never experienced before. Talking about user experience that is completely different than that of Flickr. For me, that site changed my view of what the web could be back in the day ;-)

By: Greg

Greg — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:11:01 +0000

Good to see you’re passing on knowledge, opinion and freedom of expression through design. You might want to check out Saul Bass. He designed everything from movie posters to seats in an airplane, until his passing in 1996. Enjoy.

By: Christopher Schmitt

Christopher Schmitt — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:16:53 +0000

I don’t think it’s too early to document Web design history. I’ve done in the past– and you can see history of evolving web design in the screencaptures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/teleject/sets/72157600490344231/

I included Zeldman, Lynda.com, Powazek and Yahoo.

By: Maaike

Maaike — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:46:52 +0000

Perhaps you should look up sites of past web design conferences and take a look at the lists of speakers. And don’t forget that apart from the web standards movement there’ve been many influential designers who used Flash. I remember being very impressed by Joshua Davis (www.praystation.com/www.once-upon-a-forest.com).
Other influential sites from the late 90’s would be http://www.superbad.com, http://www.theremediproject.com and http://www.jodi.org.
Good luck with your list :-)

By: G

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:43:07 +0000

Samantha,
How are you? I saw Jim today and he told be about your blog post. Then I saw your reference in your facebook page. Finally, I decided I will post my 2 cents although you know I am far from being an expert in regards to design, history or both for that matter! But, hey, that is the beauty of social networking, right? Anybody can express their opinion. Even me!

Honestly, I did no read all the entries posted so if I am duplicating someone’s ideas, I apologize.

As most people, I think that it will be hard to put actual names to the history of web design, since it is pretty much faceless. What we can put next to the milestones is, probably, company names (or website names).

Going back in the history of the internet (and you can probably use the Way Back Machine for documentation) I immediately think of the ugly FrontPage-GeoCities designs of the mid 90s, which immediately confirms that there were companies that were trendsetters and that everybody else followed.

Search engines had their styled more as a directory listing or a portal. Yahoo set a trend with the bulleted category listings and the ugly round-iconed first level navigation bar. http://web.archive.org/web/19980705015516/http://www7.yahoo.com
I remember this influenced my approach to User Experience and IA at the time as I thought it was a great idea to categorize things and allow for easy drill-down searches.

Talking about FrontPage style, well what a great example but Altavista.com, one of the big search engine players of the late 90s. Prominent left menu bar with ugly pictures as menu items, a long scrollable list of things and information and the always annoying animated gifs! http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavista.com/

And then it came Google. I remember the first time somebody suggested me to use google.com to search, and when I got to the page I was like… Is that it? Just a text box and a button? I think they did set a trend to go from the overpopulated site with millions of links in tables and columns all over the home page to a simple, non-overwhelming approach. From the Portal to the Search engine, from the “drill down and filter your results” to “just type it we’ll get it in a couple of pages”.

More milestones I can think of are the introduction of Flash sites and how they started getting more professionally designed and the Web 2.0 trend, you know, white backgrounds, rounded-edges boxes, pastel colors (shh, I’m colorblind, remember?), and so on…

A great resource for further research is the webbyawards.com page (http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=1), where they have the nominees and winners for many categories all from 1997 to the present with a special ART / DESGIN category. For instance these guys won the award the first time around in 1997: http://web.archive.org/web/19971224121250/http://entropy8.com/

Hey, this was fun. Hopefully we can see a coffee table book on the shelves with the history of website design (I have 2 of guitars!) and one of your designs is in it!

I certainly toast for that.

Best,

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:48:21 +0000

@Sam, I sort of feel like the web only became self-aware a few years ago. I’d certainly have to echo Nick’s notion of 2advanced as being one of the first sites that made me think of the web as capable of being beautiful, but I think from there, I’d have to compartmentalize into movements and pick a few that exemplify each. Often, as has been in other media, the site or work that epitomizes a movement may not be the one that started it, and may not even look good anymore in the wake of all those that came after and drove the idea into the ground. I’d point to A list apart and Jason Santa Maria as leaders in the information-driven format, Facebook as the first site to effectively and elegantly wrangle a metric crap-ton of information, regardless of how horrible it looks now, and so on.

However, none of these ideas was new to the design world. I think a real history of web design would be seen through a lens of usability and creativity, not aesthetics, because web design is more than balance, contrast, flow, emphasis, etc. — it is more dimensional than traditional design, so to me the aha! moments were the first time I saw form validation done via ajax, the first time I saw a file uploader with a progress bar and inline editing capabilities, the first time I saw muxtape give a flash audio player a javascript api so screen readers could play along, etc. WEB design is so much more than what a user perceives with his/her eyes–it is about designing the process of getting something done, whatever that something may be.

As for who’s keeping tabs, maybe the world of web design is so much more open than other media that it’s harder to follow. What percentage of design books just talk about the usual suspects–the Sutnars, Rands and Basses, all of whom made a career out of a hugely contributory body of work, vs. a web landscape where relative unknowns create miracles every day… I think every web designer out there can name the Paul Rands of our industry while being chased by a pack of rabid wolves without breaking a sweat, so nobody who actually cares needs any documentation to follow along. Once we get to the point where there’s someting to say, I’m sure it’ll be said– the rest of the world is just glad they don’t have to put on clothes to go shoe shopping anymore :)