Web UX Begins

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Command Line Heroes • • Web UX Begins | Command Line Heroes

Web UX Begins | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

Looking at the internet in 1995 is like looking back at awkward grade school yearbooks—all the weirdness and flaws stand out in stark contrast to what it’s grown into since. And web design took awhile to become a career—but it got a big boost in 1995. When the Batman Forever website launched to promote the movie, it showed people what was possible on the web. And it forever changed what we’d expect from a website.

Jay Hoffmann describes the quirky designs of the early web. Richard Vijgen explains how we went from a lack of conventions to a homogenized web. Jeffrey Zeldman recounts building the Batman Forever movie’s website—and sowing the seeds of professional web design. Jessica Helfand outlines the process and joys of designing a web page. And Kyle Drake shares how he founded Neocities in an attempt to recreate some of that magic of the early web.

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Y'know, of all the Batman movies ever made, 1995's Batman Forever, yeah, it's not at the top of a lot of lists. It was campy with strangely muscled outfits, and overblown acting. But it did boast one superb element. The website for Batman Forever was a breakthrough. The first standalone site ever made for a movie. When people visited they found full-screen backgrounds, videos you could download, message boards where fans could chat. It was a whole new arena of digital marketing. And it was a harbinger of things to come. All of a sudden the world wide web was opening up to whole new levels of design. Batman Forever's website launched on May 25th, 1995. We've been talking all season about how that year propelled us into a new future, because 1995 was the year the web took on a life of its own. And that new life was looking good because the internet after 1995, was one where design, user experience, suddenly mattered like never before. The look and feel of a webpage would determine success. And that inspired a lot of innovation, because a new army of web designers were asking, "What should a website even look like?" The answer, at first, was it could look like anything. I'm Saron Yitbarek and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. I wanted to know, how did that rush of 1990s web design change our online world? It was a period of extreme change for designers. And, looking back at that period today, the work can look a little weird, sometimes even cringeworthy, but that's because a foundational shift was underway. Before web designer was a bonafide profession, there was a lot of amateur action going on. If you're old enough, you might remember cobbled together websites from the mid '90s full of obnoxious banners, proudly positioned site counters, and scrolling neon text in all caps. Like I said, it was a weird time for web design. But nowhere was this weirdness flourishing more than at a little web hosting company called GeoCities. It was started by David Bohnett and John Rezner. And they both, basically, just wanted to create a way for people to just host any website, really. Jay Hoffmann is a developer at Reaktiv Studios, and he's been running a website called The History of The Web for the last few years. He says those GeoCities founders picked up on the fact that the web was going to be a place where user participation rules. The strength of the web was its ability to bring users of a website into the process itself. And there was a real belief that moving forward, the web was going to be a participatory medium. So, in other words, everybody was going to have a website, and everybody was going to have kind of a home base on the web, and that's what we would use to communicate to each other. Bohnett and Rezner built GeoCities so users could easily manage their own homepage for free. Users were like pioneers, citizens of a brand new country. They called themselves "netizens" and they were learning to imagine the world wide web as a territory they could inhabit. The web is this big community, it's this big space. And what you need to do is just find your place in it. And I think that was extremely powerful and it caught on very quickly. Those home bases needed to be decorated. They needed to be personalized. Once the idea had been formed that you owned a piece of the web, users were inspired to invent ways to show off a bit. I think what you would see is a lot of people experimenting with the medium. You would learn a little bit of HTML. You would come to a site and it would be this big, bold background that was green, or purple, or gold. And text on that that was maybe barely readable against it, but big, and there were some elementary tags that let you scroll text, so you would often see a little bit of scrolling text, maybe a random spot. Imagine a teenager who got to design their own bedroom. It's not going to be the lobby of the Ritz. In our teenage bedrooms, we took an early stab at establishing an aesthetic of our own. And that's exactly what was happening at GeoCities in 1995. It was being done by people that were younger, so they had kind of a different aesthetic. But it was also by people that were maybe a little bit on the outside of the mainstream, and willing to take a chance on some things. So you saw some really, really interesting experiments come out of 1995. One of those chance-takers was Jeffrey Zeldman. But he wasn't building a GeoCities homepage. He was creating something much more ambitious. The website for Batman Forever. I was working at a small advertising agency that had maybe 30 people total. And I was the only person there who knew anything about the web. Jeffrey Zeldman is a Principal Designer at Automattic, and he's often called the "godfather of web standards." But back in 1995, he was just a guy with some HTML knowledge at a small ad agency in New York. Warner Brothers came to us and said, "We want to do something on the web for Batman Forever." And my boss said, "Great, Jeffrey knows about the web." And I thought, "Well, I know a little bit about HTML, but I don't really know how to build a promotional website for a major motion picture." But Zeldman was willing to learn. And what he created was revolutionary. The Batman Forever website wasn't just a digital brochure. It was an immersive experience. We created full-screen backgrounds, we had downloadable movie trailers, we had message boards where fans could discuss the movie. We even had games. It was unlike anything that had been done before for a movie. The site launched on May 25th, 1995, and it was an instant hit. Fans flocked to the site, crashing servers and generating more traffic than anyone had anticipated. The response was incredible. We were getting thousands of hits per day, which was huge for 1995. And more importantly, it showed the entertainment industry that the web could be a powerful marketing tool. The Batman Forever website was a watershed moment. It proved that websites could be more than just repositories of information. They could be destinations, experiences, entertainment. After Batman Forever, every studio wanted a website for their movies. And that created a demand for people who could design and build these sites. It was the beginning of web design as a professional discipline. But while Zeldman was pioneering professional web design, millions of amateur designers were experimenting on platforms like GeoCities. And their work, however amateur, was just as important for the evolution of web design. The early web was characterized by this wonderful diversity of approaches to design. Every website looked different because there were no established conventions. Richard Vijgen is an artist and designer who has studied the evolution of web design. He sees the amateur experiments of the early web as crucial to the medium's development. What you had in the early days was this beautiful chaos. People were trying everything, experimenting with every possibility. And out of that chaos came some truly innovative ideas about how to use the web as a medium. But that beautiful chaos couldn't last forever. As the web became more commercial, as businesses started to depend on their websites for revenue, there was pressure to create more predictable, more user-friendly designs. The commercialization of the web led to the standardization of web design. Companies needed their websites to work reliably, to be easy to navigate, to convert visitors into customers. And that led to the emergence of design conventions and best practices. This standardization was necessary for the web's growth. But it also meant the end of that experimental phase of web design. The weird and wonderful creativity of the early web was gradually replaced by more predictable, template-driven designs. By the early 2000s, most websites started to look pretty similar. You had your header, your navigation menu, your content area, your sidebar, your footer. It was efficient, but it was also kind of boring. This tension between creativity and usability has been a constant theme in web design ever since. Designers want to create unique, memorable experiences. But they also need to create sites that work for users and achieve business goals. When I started designing for the web in the mid-90s, I was coming from a background in print design. And I had to completely rethink everything I knew about design. Jessica Helfand is an artist, designer, and writer who was one of the pioneers of professional web design. She founded the design firm Winterhouse and has written extensively about design and digital media. In print, you have complete control over how your design will look. You know the exact dimensions, the exact colors, the exact fonts. But on the web, you have to design for uncertainty. Different browsers, different screen sizes, different user preferences. This uncertainty was both a challenge and an opportunity. It forced designers to think about their work in new ways, to consider the user's role in the design process. What I found exciting about web design was the interactivity. In print, the reader is passive. They look at your design, they read your text, but they don't really participate. On the web, the user is an active participant. They click, they scroll, they navigate. They help to create the experience. This interactivity opened up new possibilities for storytelling and communication. Designers could create non-linear narratives, responsive interfaces, personalized experiences. I was particularly interested in how you could use the web to tell stories in new ways. How you could use hyperlinks to create connections between different pieces of content. How you could use multimedia to create rich, immersive experiences. But realizing these possibilities wasn't easy. The technology was primitive, browsers were inconsistent, and users were still learning how to navigate this new medium. Everything was so unreliable. You would design something that looked perfect in Netscape, and then someone would view it in Internet Explorer and it would be completely broken. Or you would design for a certain screen resolution, and then realize that half your users had smaller screens. These technical limitations forced designers to be resourceful and creative. They had to find ways to create compelling experiences within very strict constraints. The constraints actually made the work more interesting. When you can't rely on fancy effects or high-resolution images, you have to focus on the fundamentals. Typography, layout, color, hierarchy. You have to make every element count. These constraints also led to some creative solutions that became standard practices in web design. Tables used for layout, spacer GIFs for precise positioning, image slicing for complex graphics. We were basically hacking HTML to do things it wasn't designed to do. HTML was created for academic documents, not for graphic design. So we had to find workarounds, ways to bend the technology to our will. This hacking mentality became part of the culture of web design. Designers were constantly pushing against the limitations of the medium, finding new ways to create visual impact within technical constraints. There was this sense that we were all pioneers, that we were figuring this out as we went along. There were no textbooks, no established best practices. We were making it up as we went. This pioneering spirit led to rapid innovation in web design. New techniques and approaches were constantly being developed and shared within the growing community of web designers. The web design community was very collaborative. People shared their techniques, their code, their discoveries. There was this sense that we were all working together to figure out what this new medium could do. But as the web matured, some of that pioneering spirit was lost. Professional web design became more standardized, more predictable. The weird experimental energy of the early web was gradually marginalized. By the early 2000s, web design had become much more homogenized. Most commercial websites followed similar templates and conventions. The creativity was still there, but it was more constrained. This homogenization made the web more usable and accessible. But it also made it less diverse, less surprising. Many people began to miss the creative chaos of the early web. I grew up with the early web, and I loved the creativity and the personal expression that you saw on sites like GeoCities. Every site was unique, every site had personality. Kyle Drake is the founder of Neocities, a platform that aims to recapture some of the creative spirit of the early web. He launched Neocities in 2013 as a spiritual successor to GeoCities. I wanted to create a platform where people could experiment with web design again, where they could create personal websites that expressed their individuality, not just follow templates. Neocities has attracted hundreds of thousands of users who are interested in creating more personal, experimental websites. It's a throwback to the early days of the web, when anyone could create their own little corner of cyberspace. What I think we've lost in the modern web is that sense of personal ownership, that feeling that you could create something that was uniquely yours. Everything now is so templated, so algorithm-driven. This tension between personal expression and commercial efficiency has been a defining characteristic of web design since 1995. The amateur creativity of GeoCities and the professional innovation of sites like Batman Forever both contributed to the evolution of the web. Looking back at those early days, what strikes me is how experimental everything was. We were all trying to figure out what the web could be, what it should look like, how it should work. That experimental spirit led to some of the most important innovations in web design. Techniques and approaches that were developed in those early years still influence how we design for the web today. The Batman Forever site was just the beginning. After that, web design exploded. Everyone wanted a website, and everyone wanted their website to look unique and professional. But even as web design became more professional and standardized, the technical challenges remained significant. Designers had to work within severe limitations. You had to design for the lowest common denominator. Slow dial-up connections, small screens, limited color palettes. If you designed something beautiful on a Mac and then looked at it on an IBM, it would look totally different. All hope would be drained from your face because it would look totally different. Even designing a large page size would increase the upload time for users on a dial-up connection. And that would make your bounce rates skyrocket. But amidst all those early frustrations, there was also a phenomenal opportunity for the designers who didn't cling too tightly to the past. Serious limitations forced us to rethink basic principles. I was interested in how stories, and narrative, and photographs, and history could be interwoven using interaction as a social construct, as a connective tissue between constituent groups. And that, in a sense, has always been my interest. And what I was excited about then, as now, was inventing new ways of seeing. And in the end, new ways of seeing is exactly what we got. The shift from printed page to digital screen meant thinking of user experience in dynamic new ways. It meant re-imagining what a retail experience could look like. It meant new interactive designs with feedback and engagement that were simply impossible before. What we've inherited is a radically transformed design world that emerged after that initial disruption of 1995. The question is where do we get that push to discover new ways of seeing today? Many of us miss the 1995 moment when GeoCities made avant-garde web designers out of amateurs. And we miss the moment when professionals like Helfand were forced to reinvent themselves. We miss the pioneer phase of web design. So, how do we recapture that sense of experimentation? How do we make room for our own weird and wonderful? Hi, my name is Kyle Drake and I am the founder of Neocities. Growing up, Kyle Drake liked... Weird fan fiction. And he got into... Connecting to weird servers all over the world. And his favorite websites were often... Weird and '90s looking. Now that's a lot of weird. You might not be surprised to hear that Drake was an avid member of GeoCities back in the mid '90s. More recently, a company he helped to start was sold and he had the chance to take a break, and look back through the old websites he designed in the '90s. I said to myself, "Wow, I love these sites. Why don't people make websites like this anymore? This is actually really cool." So, just as sort of a weird couple-week project, I sort of threw together the initial Neocities. Neocities launched in 2013, offering people the chance to revisit those experimental glory days of web design. He didn't expect too much, just to offer users the chance to build in a way that's less defined by algorithms, and more defined by personal creativity. He wanted to give people something very simple. And yet rare in the 21st century, a truly blank canvas. It went viral, and we got a ton of support, and people started using it. And it's just sort of snowballed organically from there. Turns out a lot of people were looking for that free form design space we left behind in 1995. There are 350,000 sites on Neocities already, all from word of mouth. To Drake, it's not about nostalgia, it's about recovery. We're looking for the things about the '90s web that were fundamentally better in design and outcome than the web of today, which isn't things like technological limitations, and dancing baby GIFs. It's about creative expression and about being able to sort of retake control from the algorithms, and actually go out and explore the way that you want to explore. Whether it's on Neocities or platforms that haven't been invented yet, the spirit of 1995, when you were in charge of designing your own little corner of the web, is always waiting to be rekindled. Making the web more predictable was a necessary part of making it work for everyone. But as a result, preserving our weirdness is something we have to constantly work at. If we're not careful, our online lives can be entirely designed for us. As the web evolves, I guess it's inevitable that some amount of best practices, and templates, and standardization show up. But it's worth remembering that every best practice, every template, was once a brand new idea. And if we want to know what the best web of tomorrow looks like, we should keep building online spaces where weirdness can thrive. For more details on the web design revolution of the 1990s and our whole season's worth of bonus material about 1995, visit redhat.com/commandlineheroes. Next time, we'll be diving into another major area of change from that fateful year, e-commerce. We're exploring how perfect timing and some crucial new technologies turned some tiny startups into the biggest stores in history. Until then, I'm Saron Yitbarek. And this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Keep on coding.

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About the show

Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.