By Emerson Dameron In the late ‘90s, tiny magazines were having a moment. The popularity of underground punk and indie rock, together with the wide circulation of the review zine Factsheet Five, gave rise to zines, a subculture of shameless self-expression that was thriving around the same time millions of living rooms got their first […]

By 2000, Salon had made quite the name for itself with their quick, pithy headlines and stories that posted all hours of the day, around the clock. Their coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment trial was particularly exhaustive, with up to the minute updates multiple times a day. It was the closest you could get to watching the […]

The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don’t often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place.

Accessibility is one of the foundational principles of the World Wide Web. Fighting to preserve that principle are the creators behind the most powerful tools, some of which still exist today.

The web has been… unpredictable. We usually think it will go one way, only to see it go another. Case in point. There were plenty that believed major media organizations would find their place on the web medium. What we didn’t expect so much was this totally unpredictable outgrowth of personal and boundless creativity, a […]

Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the web as passionate early adopters. Wasow had just recently made a shift from running a pre-web Internet provider called New York Online to developing and designing websites for magazines like Vibe and Essence. Sun, on […]

The Internet does not begin and end with the World Wide Web. Sometimes, if we want to truly understand how the web developed, we need to step back to a world where it never existed at all. The Internet invigorated us with a new kind of spirit; it created a new way of seeing, feeling […]

It might seem strange to talk about books on the web, but when designers first turned to books for a way to learn about the web, Lynda Weinman and Jennifer Robbins showed them the way.

On August 7, 2010 Wired declared that the World Wide Web was dead. The cover that graced the newstands that month featured a bold orange background splash with large black text words that simply read “The Web is Dead” (pictured above). The release was provocative and timely, just a few months before the 20th anniversary of the […]