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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

Funny that TV graphics or magazine design in '94 weren't bad, but web design graphics were terrible.

It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, especially with flat design and whitespace techniques.

Let us not forget that you're talking about a time before CSS was available, let alone well supported--let alone _consistently rendered_. This is a time when "web safe color palette" was part of the day-to-day web design lingo.

I could see this being a fun challenge, though--how pleasant of a modern-look web page can you make using only HTML <=v4.0; only 256 'web-safe' color palette; limited font choices. One could demo their work via BrowserStack.

EDIT: I totally forgot to think about the fact that "whitespace techniques" would have been quite a bit more difficult given that a good 80% of your users were viewing on screens that were either 640x480 or 800x600. On a 640x480 screen, this comment takes up half of the space above the fold.[1]

[1] https://imgur.com/x0keeI1

Another thing often forgotten: font-sizes where relative to the system, meaning, they where usually bigger on Windows (depending on the system-wide font settings) and there was no rational for text-image integration.

This became even more severe, when pixels began to shrink with higher display resolutions, where Windows would adjust – i.e. increase – the font-size relatively, while Macs stuck to a positive 72dpi definition for the screen to keep images and text in balance.

E.g., you had an image and a few lines of text to its right. Size the layout so that the text will span vertically over the height of the image, when seen on an average Windows system. Now, on a Mac, it's just about 2/3 of the height … (Considering that all layout had to be done using tables, we may begin to understand that you had to be rather defensive in your approaches. Also, complex tables resulted in perceivable rendering times.)

You overestimate how much these organizations cared about having any kind of website. Back then it was just a "we should have that, get some programmers to slap it together" and kids (like myself) were hired to do all sorts of things that experienced professionals and designers would do later.

There was no established design technique for the web. And it wasn't until a bit later (late 96, 97) that I remember formal graphic design becoming important. And then designers were still for a long time dependent on somehow getting web developers to translate that into something that could work in browsers of the era.

>designers were still for a long time dependent on somehow getting web developers to translate that

Yep. Many companies had the workflow where graphics designers who had domain expertise in typography and layout -- but not HTML syntax -- would work on webpages primarily in Photoshop. The psd mockups would then be handed off to the programmers to turn into HTML. (Although, the programmers might use Dreamweaver instead of handcoding HTML.) I'm guessing Dreamweaver has sufficiently evolved so it can be a primary tool for graphics designers and let them skip Photoshop altogether.

I mean, sure maybe.

But I think folks forget that back then perhaps not even a majority of your users had a browser with 256 color support.

Honestly I kind of miss it - I found webpages far easier to get information off of quickly than today's pretty designs. The fact pretty much all webpages followed the "look and feel" of your browser was a feature, not a bug. Far too much control is given to web developers vs. users these days, and I think the exceedingly low signal to noise ratio is at least a bit caused by that.

Thing is that back then text did not really look that good on screens. The screen resolution was terrible, advanced hinting and anti aliasing techniques were cpu expensive and so on. Textures helped to hide that a bit.

Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now.

> Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now.

That's an excellent observation. IIRC, back in 1996 there were still radio ads along the lines of "And available online at w-w-w-dot-c-n-n-dot-com or AOL keyword CNN" (or, worse yet, some that added h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-w-w-w-dot...).

I'll try to avoid stewing on the fact the CEO where I work is very hands-on with our website, despite never using the web. It's 2017 and he has every button replaced with beveled images of buttons...

EDIT: to reconcile "very hands-on with our website" and "never uses the web", I should specify that he orders changes to the website via the following process: 1) has someone print out the website 2) that gets faxed to him 3) he writes on it with a sharpie 4) that gets faxed back 5) that fax gets scanned 6) resulting scan gets emailed to the web design guy.

> slash-slash

"forward slash-forward slash"

Haha, yeah, I remember hearing ads with and without 'forward'. What's really funny, I think, is how the people who needed that 'forward' clarification were exactly the people who'd have no idea which slash was the forward slash.

Also nice: Websites tended to keep evolving with the browsing skills of the client/sponsor. Say, a site started out complying to the usual rules regarding opening external links in external windows. Everything is fine. A few months later, the client is on the phone, "Where is my back button?" – After a few enquiries you find out it's about the external links and that the client had finally learned about the back-button. You try to explain, but to no avail. All external links in the site are to be edited so they will open in the frameset to the comfort of the client, who may now click each of the external links and go back by a single click on the back-button while proudly inspecting her website. A few months later, the client learns about the usual use of external links and possible legal implications. The links are reedited again...

>It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then,

It couldn't because the first wave of HTML pages were hand-written by programmers instead of designers. It was several years later that slick HTML editors "democratized" webpage creation by empowering designers-who-weren't-programmers to author webpages with better aesthetics.

TV and magazines were big business with specialized design experience for decades (over a century, in the latter case), the public web was brand new and mostly had developers or content creators dual-hatting as designers at that point, with very little tool support even.

The problem with the web up until about 2006-2008 was that the designers responsible for websites mostly came from print design. In the absence of other alternatives, it's not a bad source of talented visual designers at all. But the principles of visual design for a fixed medium don't translate well onto web pages. Since then we've had a generation of designers who understood the web as a primary medium, which helped things.

Actually, this became an issue just at the end of the 1990s. In the first years professional websites were usually designed and made by dedicated screen designers.

Edit: Usually, it was also the same person who was responsible for the design and who made the basic layout templets, meaning this person also understood the technical basics, which in turn allowed for some amazing creativity. (The standard expectation was that the [re]launch of a major page would add to the language and definition of the media in some way.) It was really more at the height of the dot.com-bubble that things became more standard and conventional designers took over.

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