Posts about Web Design (RSS, JSON)

9AM — Classic Web posts “screenshots of classic websites and blogs from Dot-Com, Web 2.0 and the 2010s.” Spelunking in the Wayback Machine, indulging in old-fashioned web design is one of my favourite past times. So this is right up my alley.

10AM — The Neocities browse page features some absolutely wild web design and I’m here for it. Children, this is what the social web looked like before social media.

12PM — Kottke redesigns. I like the new vibe, two columns, dense typography—it gives quite the 2007-blog-days feeling. I’m not sure about “social media energy than blog energy”. The preview cards that we’ve known since eons from our favourite social-media sites add clutter to the site. I’m sure, though, people will pick it up and we’ll see them pop up in more blogs soon.

7PM — Search-engine optimisation for Google has tremendous effect on how websites are designed and built. The result is that most websites look very similar these days, but it also makes it easier to spot the content farms not worth reading.

6PM — Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational is a “historical record of foundational web development blog posts.” It’s wild how influential A List Apart was in those early days, it was the go-to source for me when I learned how to make decent web sites.

6PM — Why are today’s websites so bad?

But really the baseline of web design is so low because there’s a lack of tenderness, care, and empathy. It’s because we don’t see the making of a website as a worthy profession. It’s because we hope to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange by mulching people in between modals and pop ups and cookie banners.

Yeah, it is embarrassing.

5PM — Choose a password, but the requirements are getting more and more ridiculous. I created an account on a website the other day where the password length was limited to 20 characters but the site didn’t tell you and just cut off everything exceeding the 20 characters; so you create the account but your password wouldn’t work. Here at least, the requirements are clear.

9AM — Style your RSS feed with XSLT to make them look pretty in the browser.

5PM — With Arc Brower’s updated Boosts feature, you can customise any website by changing colours, fonts, or text size. By far the most useful feature is Zap, which removes content from a website by merely clicking on the element. It’s a great, intuitive tool to de-clutter enshittified websites like Twitter or Youtube.

4PM — The CSS Zen Garden turns twenty. The site was, and still is, revolutionary. It demonstrated that separation of content and design are not only possible but also the right, future-proof way to build websites. Case in point: Most, if not all, designs on the site still work in today’s browsers.

2PM — The Pudding examines dark user-interface patterns online platforms employ to prevent you from unsubscribing from their services; presented with the usual Pudding-esque playfulness.

5PM — Pixel Envy redesigns. Pixel Envy’s design hasn’t changed dramatically since 2013. I liked the old site, it still smelled like the good-old days of blogging. The new design is a little too modern and I’m not a fan of the three-column layout that puts headlines alongside the posts. But that’s just me, I’ll get used to it.

7AM — The Web Design Museum is an absolute time sink and the source of nostalgic feelings about me being young again and discovering the Internet. It includes some popular old bloggers like Kottke, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Jonathan Snook, and an early Blogger design.

5PM — Alex Hollender, who led Wikipedia’s recent redesign, summarises the work, its context, approach and result.

2PM — Rachel Binx on the sameness in today’s web design fuelled by UI frameworks:

Also, it’s BORING. It’s BORING AS HELL. Guh, bring back interesting websites, bring back the creativity that the web offers. Bring back frontend devs who aren’t afraid to get down with the mouse event handlers!!

There is so much room for creative expression on the web! Standardizing UIs makes sense for large software companies — but please, let’s hold the line with the WWW also being a space for you and me to make weird little sites.

Yes this. But there’s also a growing population of web developers who never built a website from scratch, that’s why even personal websites all look the same today.

5AM

Twitter’s recruiting page got a Marie Kondo treatment, now fully embracing minimalism.

9AM — Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:

• Content is readable on all devices and screen sizes,
• Clickable elements must be either buttons or links and look like buttons or links,
• The browser’s back button works, or
• Keep the page weight small.

These sound like guidelines for building good websites in general.

1PM — For Mozilla’s 25th anniversary, Jamie Zawinski reconstructed some early version of the mozilla.org website from 1998.

7PM — Wikipedia is getting a design update. The changes focus on the reading experience and navigating around articles and the site. It’s no fundamental overhaul—Wikipedia will still look like Wikipedia.

10AM — Jeremy Keith writes about five websites that were redesigned recently. I’m seeing more background colours, creative layouts, and serif fonts. It looks like the times of clean, almost sterile, often boring web design are behind us. For now.

2PM — Similar to my Stylesheet for a Calmer Twitter, Nick Herr explores user stylesheets for a calmer browsing experience. It’s a shame only a few browsers support user stylesheets natively. Obviously, Google wants their login forms plastered all over, disrupting our browsing experience as much as possible.

9AM — Ever wondered why Japanese websites look so different? Me neither. Sabrina Cruz looked into it anyway and found some interesting insights into how it is different and why.

The post doesn’t seem to have a permalink, here’s a snapshot on the Web Archive for future reference.