The Many Reasons Behind The Resurgence Of Dark Age Web Design

There must be a reason why 1990s web design is making a comeback beyond pure nostalgia. If you are a young web designer or developer interested in the history of what we used to call the World Wide Web, you must check out a Github project by Pavel Laptev, a young designer who has a lot of respect for what the web used to look like before hamburger menus, flat design, and development frameworks that make hundreds of server calls each time a new page is loaded.

Laptev does not use irony, snark, or sarcasm when he describes what he calls the Dark Ages of web design, which date back to 1994, a time when graphical web browsers were just becoming popular. Some people would argue that these times were actually a Golden Age of web design because there was a high sense of individualism. These days, it could be argued that the web is more like a tract housing project where the architectural style follows a cookie cutter formula.

With regard to layout, Laptev points out that table layouts, which in the early WWW days made perfect sense, are still being used despite being uncomfortable in terms of coding. When you log into your Gmail account, a table still greets you as a left-hand sidebar, and this is the case whether you use the mobile app or the web browser version.

As for the defunct web technology known as Flash, it is fine to shed a tear. As heavy and complicated as Flash was in its early days, once hardware and bandwidth started picking up speed in the 21st century, everything from 3D environments, games, digital constructs, and highly interactive animations was possible. Naturally, HTML5 and JavaScript are perfect replacements for Flash, but something happened to the sizable wave of creativity that the collective consciousness of Flash programmers left behind.

Finally, Laptev admits that animated GIFs did not look good then or now, but they were certainly fun. They were sort of the equivalent to modern emoji, and they certainly had their place in web design as long as they were not overused. For more information click here https://pavellaptev.github.io/web-dark-ages/.