Cameron's World's Nostalgic Website Pays Tributes to Greats like Netscape & GeoCities

Starry backgrounds, MIDI music, 3D animated GIFs, glitter, “under construction” banners, lots of clipart, a MIDI musical introduction, and even an emulation of the old Netscape browser: this is Cameron’s World, a throwback website that features a cornucopia of HTML design elements used at a time when internet was coming of age and browsing was an online activity known as “surfing cyberspace.”

Hosted at cameronsworld.net, this website has been garnering a lot of attention from web designers and internet historians who marvel at the level of detail that Cameron Askin has put into the project. Askin is a graphic designer based in Berlin; his motivation for designing this wonderful throwback project came from a Tumblr page that generates archived screenshots from old GeoCities web pages. Cameron’s World has all the aesthetics you would expect from old GeoCities and MySpace pages, but the site is actually optimized for various browsers and features a very fast loading time that would have been impossible in the final years of the 20th century.

Askin has described Cameron’s World as a love letter to a time when the web was just starting to feature graphics, sound and other multimedia elements. What is endearing about this website is how it captures the ultra-personal sentiment of the internet during those early days. The use of flashy graphic elements and garish fonts such as Comic Sans are endearing reminders of everything the that web promised at the time.

Self expression and a sense of community were two important pillars of GeoCities, a network of websites organized into neighborhoods that reflected the personality of amateur web designers who wanted to make the internet a very interesting place.

Askin has stated that the hilariously retro “Catscape Navigator,” which comes up when clicking on various links on the site, could be his next focus of his project.

Whereas some jaded web designers will probably laugh at the kitschy style and lack of cascading style sheets of Cameron’s World, internet historians appreciate the trip down memory lane. At a time when uniform social media profiles have become the norm of internet publishing, Cameron’s World is a nice reminder of how people used to approach the web: with flair, personality and a desire to connect with others in digital communities.For more information click here http://www.cameronsworld.net/.