Journal #8908

Posted 6 years ago2018-02-05 12:57:54 UTC
rufee rufeeSledge fanboy
Hey guys, remember the good ol' web designs from the 2000's? Yeah me neither or at least not in the way I would like to anyway.

Flashy gifs and horrible color matching aside what I like about the old way of doing things is that everything was small, font, buttons etc... I don't know if that was a result of low resolution 4:3 CRT's that everyone had those days or what, but it somehow leaves me something to desire in today's web designs where everything is blown out of proportion. I understand that mobile exists today and that sort of requires that everything is big.

TWHL is probably the only website I know and visit that still rocks the old design style, but that will change with v4. It's all fine and dandy I'm not here to cry over that :) times change and you need to as well.

Sooo whats this all about then?! I have a little personal/work project I'm working on that could benefit from the "old style" web design, specifically an admin page where you could fit a lot of information w/o having the need to scroll down as much for more. I've seen people using CRM software that looked like it was made in the 90's, tree menus, 12px font everywhere etc.. And it struck me that you can fit a lot of data on a 1080p resolution screen. And you can probably see where I am going with this, if not here's a little hint:
User posted image
I'm having a hard time finding inspiration for it and hoping some of you could help me? (pretty please :) )

This also serves as a discussion on web design. Now vs then, likes and dislikes.

5 Comments

Commented 6 years ago2018-02-05 19:05:39 UTC Comment #60156
I believe you should structure it well so "anyone" can read it. Find inspiration in old Roland, Yamaha, early Windows help documents and files for windows 3.11 , 98/98 , pretty much any company or software that worked with non techy people about techy stuff.
Commented 6 years ago2018-02-10 19:38:38 UTC Comment #60154
Im not in the mood to reread all but first sentence sums it up well. Remember? Me neither. I wanted to make websites, perhaps even for a living but i just hardly visited any. I do hate the scrolling hype nowadays tho
Commented 6 years ago2018-02-11 08:32:23 UTC Comment #60155
Well to make my point, there were amazing designs just a few and far between. Those that were good were not restricted to having a mobile version and could go crazy with pixel thick attributes and so on.

Kind of hard to find something nice today. Don't get me wrong, today's web is cleaner than it ever was.
Commented 5 years ago2018-07-27 06:42:08 UTC Comment #101401
Kind of late, but thought it might be helpful anyways. Check out these sites that have old school designs:

http://www.chiptune.com/ - This one is inspired by the Amiga OS, done with JavaScript
http://www.pouet.net/ - This is propably what you're looking for, packs a lot of info in just 3 vertical columns.
https://files.scene.org/
http://www.hitmen-console.org/
http://www.bitfellas.org/ - This one isn't 90s, but more like early 00s, reminds of a lot of clan websites, same as pouet with the 3 columns
http://tasvideos.org/
http://www.iquilezles.org/

Oh and then there's this as well: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

That one perfectly explains my view on web design.

"Good design is as little design as possible."

The quote comes from Dieter Rams and he sure is right.

But I can also understand why things got more "simplified", for one sites like bitefellas or pouet feel "bloaty" to new users, atleast they did to me when I first visited them. And then we have bigger screen resolutions than back in the days, which relates to the bloat argument: if the screen resolution becomes bigger, you can fit more stuff, but it all gets bloaty even faster.

And then there's the fact that personal computers in the traditional form, tower + monitor, are slowly replaced by smartphones and tablets by most people. I bet pouet or bitfellas are a bitch to navigate with a touch screen... But in my opinion, websites shouldn't "degrade" just so they match the hardware, which has technical problems ever since to begin with.
Commented 5 years ago2018-07-30 06:20:24 UTC Comment #101404
Whoa, thanks torekk :)

Yeah pouet was something what I was looking for also reminds me of a similar site I once used but since went away also purple :D

Yeah the move from desktop to mobile is the biggest factor sites like these don't exist anymore, mobile just doesn't have the screen space to display all the bloat.

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