In 1995, a new industry was born, and design became a true practice.
The WWW Wizards Conference was organized by O’Reilly Media employee Dale Dougherty. Years later, at the dawn of a new age of the web from the ashes of the dot-com bubble burst, Dougherty was the one that coined the phrase Web 2.0. In 1993, he was simply a web fan. At time, and short of its founder, perhaps its biggest. He understood the value proposition, and potential commercial value, of the web far before anyone could see the forest for the trees. He was willing to make a huge bet on the web and its future.
Just before the conference, Dougherty had been tasked with exploring the possibilities of the web for O’Reilly. His focus was on spreading the word, teaching people what the web was and how to use it even as they were rapidly discovering it. His first move was to hire one of the web’s earliest pioneers, programmer Pei-Yuan Wei. Wei was responsible for ViolaWWW which, as some of you may remember, was the first browser created outside of CERN. Dougherty’s idea was to take O’Reilly’s bestselling book The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, a dense exploration of the technologies that underpinned the Information Age that was already becoming a handbook of the geek generation, and put it on the web. Wei was going to help him do that. In a few months, he had a version of it running inside of Viola.
Dougherty took his proof of concept and used it to get buy-in to spin off a small team inside of O’Reilly. The team was tasked with making the world’s first commercially viable website. In the summer of 1993, Dougherty and his team did just that when they launched the first version of Global Network Navigator, GNN.com.
GNN’s website was a starting point for web newbies. It packaged news and business listings with a meticioulslcy organized directory of unique and interesting links from around the web. That section of the site was known as The Online Whole Internet Catalog (derived from the aforementioned Internet User’s Guide title), and each day it was updated with fresh new hyperlinks as websites blinked into existence. Over the years, GNN would be responsible for a number of web firsts. The first commercial website. The first website with sponsored ads. The first mainstream web portal. The team at GNN was writing the rules even as they were running at a breakneck speed.
Dougherty recruited book designer Jennifer Robbins to help with the site’s overall aesthetic. When Robbins came on board, the web had little in the way of actual design, a sea of white backgrounds and plain black text. Berners-Lee didn’t plan much for the web to be designed. He was, after all, a scientist. Robbins immediately set about shaking up the status quo. She worked alongside the developers on the project to understand the limitations and promise of HTML in the browser. Then she experimented a bit. She added a logo, a hot air balloon that would soon be iconic. She created bold graphics to run before blocks of text. She organized simple table of contents and layouts. She was, in essence, paving the cowpaths. The web was still just full of possibility and promise. It would be up to the first web designers and developers, like Robbins, to deliver on it.
A new language for the web
By the time 1995 rolled around, Netscape had helped to transform the web into a product ready for the mainstream. Once Microsoft entered the browser arena, they only pushed harder. The Netscape Navigator 2.0 release would be their most advanced browser yet, but they needed something more. So they recruited former Silicon Graphics employee Brandon Eich to create a new programming language designed forthe web for use on the web. In just 10 days, Eich had a working prototype.
And just like that, Javascript was born (it’s name, the result of a marketing play as a way of capitalizing on the popularity of the Java programming language is a different story altogether). After working with a team for a few months, he had the first version of Netscape’s new language ready to go. It was officially released in the fall of 1995 and it’s hard to understate the influence it had on the web. Crucially, it added a new dynamic layer to the web which eventually gave rise to complex applications that run right inside of the browser. Today, it’s the most popular programming language in the world.
Learning to Design
Netscape, for their part, were working on their end of the bargain by packing their browser full of new functionality and features. The web platform shifted even as more and more sites were coming on line, and the pace of browser development was moving at an exceptional rate thanks to the push code first, ask questions later attitude at Netscape. They even began pushing non-standard HTML tags like the font and layertags, which gave developers new tools for layout and design years before CSS made its way into the platform. That would have some pretty important repercussions later on. For now, they just kept on moving.
Brands, commercial products, and the first attempts at e-commerce all began to find a home online. These new technologies soon led to innovations in design. Working through an ad agency, Alec Pollak and Jeffrey Zeldman designed and developed a unique, interactive, animated design to mark the release of the movie Batman Forever. Design moved from an afterthought to a critical cornerstone of building websites. The early work by folks at GNN and elsewhere was becoming a full industry.
This flurry of activity in 1995 also, incidentally, included a new feature no one thought much about that allowed data to be streamed from the server to the browser. It could, in theory, be used to create animations. A day after the feature was released, two sites would feature animations of this type. The first was the Netscape homepage. The other was a bouncing blue dot.
Experimentation
Craig Kanarick was responsible for that particular blue dot. He had been up late the night before trying to get it to bounce just right. He even patched the code of the browser itself to fix a bug that had stopped. When he launched his site on the day of the feature’s release he called it, appropriately enough, The Blue Dot. With a few weeks of experimentation, The Blue Dot would evolve from a simple animation to a digital art gallery plastered with the work of Kanarick’s friends and collaborators. The site featured a collage of poetry, photography, and illustrations weaved together with a design that was rudimentary, but clearly designed with some sort of purpose, vibrant backgrounds and bold text that put its collection of art on display.
The site became the calling card of Kanarick and his partner, Jeff Dachs. The two would go on to launch the web agency Razorfish, a larger continent of techies in New York, which was sometimes referred to as Silicon Alley, who were taking their chances on the web platform rather than through traditional design career paths.
That experimental and fast-paced kind of design became the hallmark of 1995 websites. It drove the medium forward by throwing out the rule book of design on a platform that allowed for very little freedom without some truly creative thinking.
Among Silicon Alley’s single most important driving forced was Jamie Levy, by all accounts the rock star of the early web. She hosted underground parties for the cyber elite in her East Village loft, and well before the web was a blip on anyone’s radar, experimented with digital art on floppy disks for magazines and Billy Idol. She was exactly the kind of the designer the web needed. Someone who understood the limitations of the digital medium, but wasn’t scared to try a bunch of cool stuff anyway.
When Levy was recruited to build the web’s first true online magazine, she hired Marisa Bowe as the site’s editor and Yoshi Sodeoka as its art director. By June of 1995, they launched WORD, a site that completely redefined the nascent web which, as you may recall, was just a year ago being used to distribute research papers among academics and was not being masterfully utilized by Levy and her team to create a website that offered real content for real people with the driving aesthetic of a punk rock zine.
Bowe brought on an impressive roster of counterculture writers which collided spectacularly with Levy’s vivid and subversive designs and Sodeoka’s energetic graphics. There were no books on web design, no best practices. The site was limited only by its creators imagination. No two pages were alike. They created quizzes and games and once even a chatbot, carefully crafted layouts for each new article, all of which supported writing that offered an alternative take to the latest cultural milieu. Brilliantly executed and meticulously managed, WORD lit a spark and inspired the tinkerers of the world to unite on the web.
Other members of the Silicon Alley scene included Stephanie Syman and Steven Johnson of Feed Magazine (a more regularly updated, and often ironically tinged, riff on the digital magazine), Nicholas Butterworth of SonicNet (a gathering place for music lovers), Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field of Nerve.com (one of the earliest dating websites), and Heather Macdonald and Esther Drill of gURL.com, who were still in college at the time. Of course, this wasn’t just on the East Coast. They were part of a much larger movement that gathered steam in 1995 and believed deeply in the open promise of the web to redefine our everyday experiences and buck the mainstream.
When a couple of employees at Hotwired wanted to start their own snarky digital magazine, they siphoned off some server space from their employers and for months went under the radar while getting Suck.com off the ground. Addicted to Noise, the web’s first rock magazine, began when its own founder was fed up with the bland, repetitive articles he was editing at Rolling Stone. An avid film fan in Britain found that the web was a perfect space to host his exhaustive list of movie etymology and moved his Internet Movie Database in early 1993. A VJ at MTV started his own unofficial site for the network, which was little more than a collection of inside jokes and clips. People found a home themselves on the web. And crucially, there was no one to stop them from making a website of their own.
By 1995, that would become a trademark of the web.
