Strange Days
Were you online in 1997-1998? Think back to the websites that were popular then... if you dare.
Remember flashing, 24 point text; screaming red on lime green bars on black backgrounds? A hundred pixelated, animated gifs covering every other site page? Half of the net looked like a cheesy sci-fi thriller/horror movie- the other half looked like a paper out of MIT. Design-wise, the Net was a schizophrenic amalgam of serious scientific papers dovetailing sites that exclaimed "UFO's ATTACK L.A.!!!"
It was a dangerous wild-west of 'anything goes' and God forbid you accidentally click on the wrong link back when pop up blockers were still a thing of the future. You never knew when you would trigger a veritable hard drive locking cascade of porn pop-ups filling your screen with amazingly disgusting sleaze.
I remember the first time this happened to me. I was Googling for Haunted Houses at Halloween to find a few spooky stories for the kids. I clicked on a promising link for a Haunted House replete with dungeon. Suddenly a massive flood of images filled my screen- and kept loading until my hard drive locked up solid. Needless to say it was not the kind of 'dungeon' I expected- and it left me a bit more wise to the ways of the world. Yuck. I am sure that everyone who was online back in those days has an experience like this to recount.
It seemed the sleaze and the cheese would never end. In some places, it hasn't ended (see www.cyberspaceorbit.com for a taste of the good old days) It was a madhouse, and it was fun (besides the lack of reliable pop-up blockers). And strangely enough, a lot of the so-called 'conspiracy sites' have proved to be amazingly prescient and accurate, digging up nuggets of pure fact amongst the wierder anomalies. It was a time when graphic arts and net development was evolving at such a rapid rate that it was hard to keep up with in any realistic way.
With every new development a trend would begin -such as the obnoxious blinking text. At one point every single site on the internet had blinking text, I would swear to it. And (ooohh-aaaahhh) animated .gifs. I remember when JASC Paint Shop Pro came out with the Animation Factory. We all had to make some. Come on, fess up, you did make some cheesy animated .gifs in your graphics lifetime. Of course, mine were cool, and I am sure yours were too... uh huh.
These days, sadly, the internet has become corporatized and homogenized. The graphics and design techniques are slicker, yes, and cooler, yes. Multimillion dollar development and graphics corporations have bloomed like dandelions in spring. But the excitement in surfing; never knowing what was beyond the next click, is missing. While we all welcome the ease of the new web 2.0 and up, the personality and fearlessness of the individuals that helped design the net in the early days is greatly missed by some of us.
I think that with the popularity of flash, lots of that excitement is coming back. New flash web sites are creating an entire experience now.
Wow, I do remember using Paint Shop Pro to pixel edit the cartoon images I used to accompany each area of the first site I created back in early 1995. Thanks for a reminder of those bygone days.
Perhaps one of the problems is that sites like MySpace and free blogging services make it unnecessary for many to bother creating their own sites. Hence that "cookie cutter" look and boring predictability of content. I have to agree that stumbling across a passionate, eccentric personal site can be one of those great pleasures of the early 21st century. I hope folks never stop making them and, even better, don't clutter them up with those abominable pay-per-click text ads, the current plague of the Internet.
Chris
Yes Chris, the Corporate/Hollywood spin the net has taken is pretty bad. Don't even get me started on MySpace- probably the worst thing to junk up the net in it's existance. A lot of people seem to think they are putting themselves out there as radical and wild- but basically they are just following the same trend being pushed on them. Or taking the latest bad trend and unfortunately pushing it farther. Although I wouldn't create it, I don't mind flamboyantly bad design and generally find it funny- as long as it is truly individualized and unique.
Hi
Yes, I agree BUT there is an even nastier trend happening. At least back then the funky stuff loaded fassst now it seems that all this 'posh' and boring repetitive big biz design approach has resulted in the 'great divide' highspeed vs dial up. close to 40% in north america are on dial up and all this flash and dash is making them move on big time. I long for the days of simple loading and creative imagery outside the flash gaszzzz.
Regards
I agree lin, that Flash has been absolutely misused. Not by the creators- but by the users. Flash has always had great compression tools- seemingly completely ignored by many who use flash in production. I could go into it - but that would be a whole article in itself.
And you can thank AT&T and a host of corporate and government entities for the fact that the U.S. is still not wired with fiber optics- as we were promised and should have been by 2000 at the latest.
Apparently someone in charge decided that the American public would be dangerous if we had access to ultra high speed fiberoptic line. Heck- we might start downloading whole libraries of movies or even things of military application. So like a bunch of kindergarteners we were handed the dull scissors and told not to run.