It's cool to see the website[1] of the startup/dotCom I worked at in the early 2000s captured there!
The website won the navigation award at Macromedia's fashforward event, and I still think holds up quite well even over 20 years later. The zoom navigation was quite interesting and worked well on mobile devices like the HP iPAQ PDAs we tested it on.
The book is an interesting read. The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. Granted, this may be less due to the death of Flash and more due to marketers and UX professionals trying to simplify the journey from visit to purchase.
The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now.
People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it.
Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser, but the entire machine. Sure, the operating system and the browser were complicit, but I'm not going to blame a broken window for not being bulletproof. Plus, it seemed like there was forever update after update after update every time you tried to view a fancy web site. Updating plugins isn't a big deal today. It was a big deal when it happened over a 56k dialup connection.
Can you imagine someone today thinking, "Oh, this looks like an interesting web site. I'd better close every other window and program on my computer, so it doesn't crash." It's unthinkable.
I hate that today's web sites are all boring and desaturated and flat. But I love that I can browse the web and keep a dozen other programs open and doing work at the same time.
Watching all of the new things people are doing with canvas and WebGPU and whatnot makes me think we're heading back to the bad old days of Flash. It seems like an arms race between people who want to turn a browser into an operating system, and browser makers trying to keep everything tidy.
I miss the creative explosions of Flash games. Even with Canvas and WASM today there is nothing which comes close.
My favourite casual puzzler was made in Flash and published in 2010, the same year, Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash".
Thankfully then the developers developed a sequel as an iOS app which took advantage of the iPhones sensor. In 2010 in looked for a short time that creative iPhone games could take the crown of Flash. The sequel died in the 32bitocalpse of iOS 9.
I never developed with Flash, but I grew up on Flash media, in particular old Newgrounds Flash games / movies. I remember some of the pains of the day. The fact that Flash media usually came with a loading bar is seems quaint compared to now when websites are expected to load in mere seconds.
To some extent I'm glad we live in a time where websites are lean and efficient for the reasons you mentioned, but man, I miss the days when the internet was actually worth exploring.
Yes, I loved Flash and ActionScript as a designer, but later viewed it as indistinguishable from malware as an IT support tech. It was frankly the worst, in terms of security whack-a-mole, and because it required patching so frequently, opened up a ton of genuinely malicious actors who could trick even competent people into clicking and installing malware.
Flash may have been a resource hog in the single-core CPU age, but we have computers today that are much faster, yet Google Chrome is the botleneck, using up gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to render a few tabs worth of text and images.
The modern "replacement" for Flash, things like WebGL and three.js are also pretty slow on modern machines. Speed isn't hamstrung by the tool, it's hamstrung by the people that made something with said tool.
I was an "ActionScript 3" developer around 2010s targeting browser, but also offline "Rich Internet Applications". Together with our designers, whom worked in Adobe Flash, we had a tremendous throughput of production ready applications.
Today I program React.js/TypeScript applications. What a slow turtled pace of getting things done. :( And of course very very expensive to develop. And a lot of things aren't even possible anymore.
Of course, the Flash platform had it's downsides too, but in terms of throughput and productivity, this was very very great.
As a developer I really miss the Flash books; they were a beautiful, glossy, coffee-table quality. I think it was the designer-bent audience. There were some good programming books but nothing like the Flash ones!
Is there a reason why designers moved away from that - I'm not sure what to call it - magazine look?
A lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do. And realted, the widespread use of common frameworks instead of people actually understanding how web sites work and doing their own programming.
I build a web site for a hospital that was fast and responsive and accessible. A manager complained that it didn't look like a "real" web site because the pages loaded instantly. She wanted me to put in a mechanism so that every time someone clicked on a link a loading spinner would appear for a few seconds before the next page loaded. Because that's what "real" web sites do.
Wow, I’ve never had someone ask me to purposefully build in latency. That’s nuts.
Maybe she was responding to how jarring page transitions can be. I’ve gotten some good use out of the View Transitions API in a product I’m building. (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transiti...) It’s a server-side rendered multi-page app, and throwing in just a bit of view transition CSS to get a nice fade effect when you go to a different page does feel nice.
> I build a web site for a hospital that was fast and responsive and accessible. A manager complained that it didn't look like a "real" web site because the pages loaded instantly. She wanted me to put in a mechanism so that every time someone clicked on a link a loading spinner would appear for a few seconds before the next page loaded. Because that's what "real" web sites do.
That's atrocious. I think a big part of it is the merging of websites (purely informational) and web applications (programs with IO). The lines have blurred over the years.
I think a lot of it comes down to the much larger variation in screen sizes... back then, you pretty much had to work in 640x480 or 800x600 and were usually good... 1024 got a little harder, then it was all over when 1440p and larger became very normal.
A lot of the designs were also somewhat flexible via Flash/Flex and not HTML alone.
Do people maximize the browser window on a 1440p monitor? I don't. Mine is usually around half the width of the screen because most sites don't stretch beyond that in a sensible way.
Three of the main reasons were wide screens, mobile devices, and HiDPI. When a layout only needs to work at 640x480 on a 96dpi monitor where you're guaranteed to have a cursor and keyboard a "magazine" layout can work fine.
When a non-trivial number of users have widescreen displays a layout designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio ends up either crowded on one side of the screen or floating in the center with large margins on either side. A layout filling a 16:9 aspect screen will end up being different than the 4:3 layout. This feeds into mobile as well, your 4:3 or 16:9 landscape layout for desktops either looks terrible or is broken on a mobile device in a portrait layout. The graphics that look good at 96dpi start to look shitty on HiDPI screens.
It's entirely possible to make responsive layouts that handle all those cases. CSS and HTML have lots of options for responsive layouts. The main limitation is time/money. It's a lot of work to build a "magazine" layout that is responsive and displays properly on all devices. It's possible just difficult. It's much easier to make a layout that looks equally bland and lifeless across all devices.
What is the essence of the beauty I see in 90s websites?
To me, they are easier to reason about. Maybe because of a higher information density, that’s static and aligned such that it’s easier to track groups of components and their relationships; cohesiveness is probably the word.
The evolution of the McDonalds website is a great example of playful and whimsical 90s design aesthetic gradually replaced to become the blandness that it is today.
In that particular example, and probably many others, I think the progression corresponded to changes in the business itself. McDonald's rebranded, expanding their target demographic beyond kids specifically, and I feel like they lost all their character in the process.
I still to date prefer the older, full-of-character designs than the modern soulless minimalist designs. We also didn't have to worry about annoying cookie consent popups, "subscribe now!" splash screen popups and the general fear of clicking any link that opens a new window randomly to some walled garden.
Readit News
[1] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/relevare-2002
The book is an interesting read. The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now. Granted, this may be less due to the death of Flash and more due to marketers and UX professionals trying to simplify the journey from visit to purchase.
People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it.
Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser, but the entire machine. Sure, the operating system and the browser were complicit, but I'm not going to blame a broken window for not being bulletproof. Plus, it seemed like there was forever update after update after update every time you tried to view a fancy web site. Updating plugins isn't a big deal today. It was a big deal when it happened over a 56k dialup connection.
Can you imagine someone today thinking, "Oh, this looks like an interesting web site. I'd better close every other window and program on my computer, so it doesn't crash." It's unthinkable.
I hate that today's web sites are all boring and desaturated and flat. But I love that I can browse the web and keep a dozen other programs open and doing work at the same time.
Watching all of the new things people are doing with canvas and WebGPU and whatnot makes me think we're heading back to the bad old days of Flash. It seems like an arms race between people who want to turn a browser into an operating system, and browser makers trying to keep everything tidy.
My favourite casual puzzler was made in Flash and published in 2010, the same year, Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash".
Thankfully then the developers developed a sequel as an iOS app which took advantage of the iPhones sensor. In 2010 in looked for a short time that creative iPhone games could take the crown of Flash. The sequel died in the 32bitocalpse of iOS 9.
To some extent I'm glad we live in a time where websites are lean and efficient for the reasons you mentioned, but man, I miss the days when the internet was actually worth exploring.
The modern "replacement" for Flash, things like WebGL and three.js are also pretty slow on modern machines. Speed isn't hamstrung by the tool, it's hamstrung by the people that made something with said tool.
Dead Comment
Remember when tech was optimistic?
Is there a reason why designers moved away from that - I'm not sure what to call it - magazine look?
A lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do. And realted, the widespread use of common frameworks instead of people actually understanding how web sites work and doing their own programming.
I build a web site for a hospital that was fast and responsive and accessible. A manager complained that it didn't look like a "real" web site because the pages loaded instantly. She wanted me to put in a mechanism so that every time someone clicked on a link a loading spinner would appear for a few seconds before the next page loaded. Because that's what "real" web sites do.
Maybe she was responding to how jarring page transitions can be. I’ve gotten some good use out of the View Transitions API in a product I’m building. (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transiti...) It’s a server-side rendered multi-page app, and throwing in just a bit of view transition CSS to get a nice fade effect when you go to a different page does feel nice.
Oh my god, that is awful and ridiculous.
A lot of the designs were also somewhat flexible via Flash/Flex and not HTML alone.
When a non-trivial number of users have widescreen displays a layout designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio ends up either crowded on one side of the screen or floating in the center with large margins on either side. A layout filling a 16:9 aspect screen will end up being different than the 4:3 layout. This feeds into mobile as well, your 4:3 or 16:9 landscape layout for desktops either looks terrible or is broken on a mobile device in a portrait layout. The graphics that look good at 96dpi start to look shitty on HiDPI screens.
It's entirely possible to make responsive layouts that handle all those cases. CSS and HTML have lots of options for responsive layouts. The main limitation is time/money. It's a lot of work to build a "magazine" layout that is responsive and displays properly on all devices. It's possible just difficult. It's much easier to make a layout that looks equally bland and lifeless across all devices.
To me, they are easier to reason about. Maybe because of a higher information density, that’s static and aligned such that it’s easier to track groups of components and their relationships; cohesiveness is probably the word.
Maybe it’s just nostalgia. But I don’t think so.
Serving 3 is in there, too bad serving phour doesnt seem to be.