1.2 Tribute: Please set your screen resolution to 800x600 for optimal viewing

Concept

To get around, just single-click on any blue or purple word or phrase (here's an example). You need to think about written content and page design before you start putting pages on the Web. For some reasons, most computer software is still ignorant about handling italic text. Speaking of GIFs, be careful with background GIFs!

Those and many others early web design guidance found on 90s websites (yes, some of them are still alive! take a look at this amazing web-fossil) sound ridiculous to us, much less for modern UX/UI hipsters. And at the same time, it is an object of nostalgia. Good old world wide web times. Those rainbow gifs and flowery sheets (it’s a euphemism) backgrounds!

In my first project, I gave a tribute to the early web design. It was an amazing journey to the roots of HTML and CSS. Some projects are trying to collect and archive old web pages (Web Design Museum, 404 Page Found), and there is even a scientific conference «Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials» (RESAW). The first search engines, personal blogs (look at this ‘Internet Explorer is Evil’ page! I think it could be still relevant), shops, news websites… the wast majority of old web pages sank into oblivion. Is it an inescapable fate of the web? How could we use the past of the web? Is there something inspiring or it is completely outdated material? Will our state-of-the-art web turn into something new irrevocably? These questions inspired my project.

Form

I choose the form of a poster to give a tribute to the old web (would it be more satirical to make a web page?). The form of a poster allows you to look at the message for a long time, consider and (ideally) get some inspiration. I have made a simple funny (I believe) poster framed in the classic 90s border, which consists of two parts: a message and a picture. The message written in Courier font relates to the limitations of early web design and (ideally) makes us think about the rapid development of web technologies. The image below the text is a gopher. I found this creature on one of the buttons and could not resist recreating this icon of the old web. Why gopher? I think it’s still one of the big research questions for web archeologists.

The poster for printing can be downloaded from here.