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A Time-Travelling Journey Through the Many Faces of Web Design

It can be very easy to berate a hideous website design, especially when its an abomination unfit for the eyes of web surfers. However, do you know how things were a long time ago when web design technology isn’t as advanced as it is today? If you are a child of the 90s, you know exactly of how web design progressed all throughout the years. From strikingly revolting colours to cluttered information, frustrating typography, and awkward image sizing, web design has been through a lot before it evolved into the eye candy we see today. If you think some of the websites online this year are a joke to real web design, think again. Ride a time machine through web design history and witness how the tacky turned into the tasteful through the development of web design. Brace yourself, though, for the ride is sure to be a hilarious one!

1991: Web Design? What Web Design?

The web was devised during the 1950s by American scientists who wanted a venue to send and transmit information over very far distances. The concept of the Internet was developed in 1969, and without this concept, todays Internet would never exist. 1989 marked the creation of the first ever website, and if you’ve ever seen what it looks like, you might have the laugh of your life, or maybe not, because you wont even believe its a website by the way it looks. The first website was made purely of text and studded all throughout with a few links here and there.

1996: A Remarkable Year for Web Design, But Not One To Repeat

1996 is surely not the golden year of web design, for it is in this year that one will be able to find the most ridiculously created web sites that today is a laughing stock of all web designers. 1996 marked the use of shocking bright colours that would pop a neuron in someone’s brain if stared at for too long. 1996 was also the year where Times New Roman, Courier New, and Comic Sans were everyones idea of an exciting font, and innumerable GIF images were thought of to be vibrant and interesting. The McDonalds website in 1996 featured a background of striking ketchup red with an almost illegible yellow font that would give you a headache in thirty seconds. Some websites thought the idea of a shocking electric pink background was dainty and playful, while others opted to use contrasting colours for an eye-aching experience.

1999: A More Serious Take on Web Design Albeit a Bit Too Glossy

1999 marked the year where web designers began to take a more serious approach to their designs. Web designers took advantage of a vast plethora of programs to help them arrive with web pages that exhibit attractive visual characteristics. Colour was taken more seriously, proportions were taken into consideration, and designers finally considered the importance of website design rather than just scattering a mumbo jumbo of colourful things across the website. Interface elements were used, but there were still a number of websites that utilized the head-splitting blue over black background format.

During 1999, a couple of recurring elements were witnessed on most web pages. First off, web designers turned keen into using the white background in order to play things safe. During this year, website designers are more keen on measuring using pixels and in turn, improving the design of the website by making it look more proportional. Web designers wanted their websites to look clean, organized, and easier to navigate. Links were placed in positions were they will be discovered more easily, and the placement of text was more orderly as well.

2002: The Entrance of Web 2.0

2002 was were Flash animation was used copiously. Web designers jumped in the bandwagon and created their own flash introduction pages that, depending on the speed of your Internet, can take a while to load and to watch, preventing you from accessing the main page until you’ve gone through the entire length of the video. This year, however, colour was raised on a pedestal. Web designers now truly realized the important of colour in web design. The right choice of colour could make or break a website, so web designers chose their colours carefully.

2005: The Trendy Single Page Website

By 2005, web design has been constantly developing for ten years, and there are already a wide variety of tools, trends, and trendy designers who wanted to make their own statement about what’s right for web design. As retort to the past years multiple web pages, 2005 web pages developed the trend of putting everything in one single page that can be scrolled down. These single pages had table of contents at the top page, allowing people to click a particular topic and end up with that particular section in the page. Single web pages were thought of to be make navigation a lot easier, and it actually has, however, without a main page, viewers can be distracted from the main reading, and in effect, misleading them.

Web designers started to take interest in typography and have began playing with font types, colour, sizes, and even direction, as some websites displayed their text vertically or horizontally.

2011: Simple, Straight Forward, Direct to the Point Design

And the end of web design journey has finally come to an end. 2011 is where the Internet is nothing new, therefore, websites need to capture the attention of their readers at once, lest they be forgotten forever. The web design trend in 2011 is to use large photographs with very little text. Large photographs are meant to capture the attention of the reader at once, coercing them to stay and read more. The minimalist design is finding a lot of supporters, though there are still flash menus here and there. The concept is to create a portfolio-esque website that readers can easily skim through, without losing their attention.

 

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