How did that crazy design aesthetic arise? Where did it come from?
b3ing3 days ago
There wasn’t much you could do honestly.
CSS was created in 1999 but only the cutting edge version of browsers could support only link colors in 2000.
The editor was nothing but a text box, no WYSIWYG.
It was non-designers and people that were learning HTML putting something together.
There was no @font-face, so you could only reference fonts people might have on their computer.
On dialup you didn’t want to load too many images. So 1 background image that tiled 50 times would load fast.
You had to use nested tables to have any structure and again put that all in a text box with no live preview or WYSIWYG. And using tables you needed to understand to use transparent gifs to prevent it from not looking right.
Many people didn’t have image editors except MS Paint, so the graphics you got had to be grabbed from somewhere else.
PNG didn’t exist, I don’t think MS-Paint supported gif on windows 95 or 98, it might of not even supported jpg. It primarily supported bmp.
But with David Carson style of design (grunge design) or lack of traditional design in the mainstream for most of the 90s it kind of worked ok.
The tools were primitive, and skills were low.
sircastor3 days ago
> The tools were primitive, and skills were low
I agree 100%. If you were ignorant of crayons, you might ask why so many kindergarteners’ art pieces are done in colorful wax.
jordanb3 days ago
A friend described that era (looking back from the 2010s) as the "amateur web". Another thing worth mentioning is nobody really had any idea how to be responsive.
The technology for it barely worked (things like percent widths for table cells) but design professionals did not know how to deal with it at all. They all came from print. The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small.
malfist2 days ago
Nobody knew about responsive design because there was no such thing as responsive design at that point. There were no mobile phones, no css media queries and pretty much everyone was viewing your webpage in 800x600 screens.
Hell, was float even around then? All I remember from that time was tables.
jordanb2 days ago
Which is why I said:
> The only upside is that the number of possible screen resolutions were pretty small.
But there was 640, 800, 1024. Many websites would do fixed width 800px and then you'd have to scroll left at 640 or have big gutter margins at 1024.
cpach3 days ago
I was there. It was fun, it was a fad. The web was quite playful back then. Many of us made websites just for the heck of it, it wasn’t super commercial. MySpace, which came later, was similar with regards to aesthetics. Some computer magazines also had that “GeoCities look”. Alien Skin Software and their Photoshop plugins was all the rage.
Internet as of today is, generally speaking, more visually polished. On platforms like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Bluesky/etc the users have very little influence over the layout/typography. The style is cleaner, but there’s less room for personal expression.
TillE3 days ago
It was one of the few places (along with Angelfire) anyone could get a free web page those days, and the most interesting thing you could do with web design was add a background and some animated GIFs.
MySpace in the mid-2000s had a very similar vibe. It's just normal people doing fun stuff when there are few constraints or guidelines.
marssaxman3 days ago
Which of the million crazy design aesthetics to be found on GeoCities are you thinking about?
borplk3 days ago
I don't think it was super crazy compared to the other websites during that time. A lot of the websites shared similar vibes even outside of GeoCities.
shams933 days ago
I was on the pre-ipo (and post ipo) design team. So its partly my fault lmfao.
shams933 days ago
But to answer where it came from? It came from the limitations of the web at the time - table based layout, low graphic resolutions, browser running under 16 megs (not gigs) of ram.
shams933 days ago
We also had a rule that no page could weigh under 26k, although pages by users of Geocities could be larger, all the pages that ran geocities had to be 26kb or less.
Wowfunhappy3 days ago
...I don't know. You can have low-resolution 8-bit graphics which are better† designed. Look at classic Mac OS, or modern indie games with a retro pixel art aesthetic.
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† "Better" in this case means something akin to "what most people today would consider more professional." I don't want to judge.
krapp3 days ago
The retro pixel art aesthetic is just that - an aesthetic. It's intentional and doesn't accurately reflect the technology it imitates, because it's about a vibe. The people creating Geocities webpages weren't professional developers or artists trying to adhere to a particular aesthetic, they were regular (mostly non-technical) people doing what they thought looked cool at the time, or just copying other sites and using the graphic elements or templates provided by Geocities.
TillE3 days ago
Sure but we're talking about personal/hobby pages made by people who are overwhelmingly not artists and designers.
b3ing3 days ago
Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
And to do the pixel graphic style you need a pixel font which was impossible because you can only reference fonts people have on their computer, Fixedsys font was the best you could reference and some did do that.
b3ing3 days ago
Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
JojoFatsani3 days ago
Geocities was not for professionals. It was for amateurs.