Resources

Trend: Back to the Future

International Design Magazine

Remember what the early web looked like? If you've forgotten, you could use Archive.org's Wayback Machine to time-travel to 1996, when Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice and amateur web enthusiasts were still publishing "home pages." Or you could roam today's web, where designers are increasingly embracing the values and aesthetics of the Clinton-era internet.

This atavistic impulse is most apparent on the sites of a loose network of art geeks- including the programming ensemble Beige (www.post-data.org/beige), the artist collective Paper Rad (www.paperrad.org), and the web art club Nasty Nets (www.nastynets.com)-with a shared interest in reclaiming obsolete technologies. Their aesthetic, sometimes referred to as "dirt style," is visually hyperactive and almost willfully antagonistic: a riot of animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, underlined blue hyperlinks, images with borders, and old-school blink tags. Used now, the graphics evoke the noisy amateurism of the early web, but they're also a rejection of today's glossy, professional site design, which tends to efface the medium rather than celebrate it.

Beige co-founder Cory Arcangel, an art-world star who recently led a dirt-style workshop at New York media arts center Eyebeam, believes the aesthetic reflects a conscious decision to show the bones of the internet: "It's the true look of the web," he says. He insists the style isn't about nostalgia, citing as proof his own site, which has retained the same look and feel for 10 years. "I'm the sort of person who got into Nirvana two years ago," he says. "It's the same thing with design or technology-let's wait for the buzz to die down, and then see what's going on."

Read full article

To see how Swimming Hippo Digital can help with cross browser compatible website design, click here.