I'm excited for a bit of bang and pop and messiness and individuality to come back.
With it, I hope for return of websites. You can't display individuality on an endless scrolling feed of social media.
Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for, which was (if you like) 90s web design minimalism. That's the motivation all this gopher revival/gemini protocol stuff is about, at least from a design perspective.
I'm just trying to say there were different strains of "90s web design" which are not compatible with each other.
It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site)
Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react
Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint
One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.
This is really colored by who you're paying attention to.
https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc.
> Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for
This is an assumption, not data.
It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design.
To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life.
It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.
I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself.
Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.
It's messy, chaotic, and feels like something from the late 90's/early 00's, where you'd often see custom web pages using formatted images as elements of the page. But I love it. I can't quite make sense of it, as I adhere pretty strongly to brutalism/minimalism when designing my own content.
It’s not random. Still has a theme and a palette. I like it as well.