ART AND DESIGN

THE UNRULY RETURN OF THE 90's STYLE WEBSITE

or the aesthetics of designing freedom

By Peggy Zhang

The 90's Style is Back!

The official website of Captain Marvel is a summary of 1990’s Internet aesthetics. You have the Smashing Pumpkins poster, the Nine Inch Nails (NIN) T-shirt, and the Windows 95 system. In conjunction with the official website of the film, each of the details of the Captain Marvel site is a revisionist re-working of early Internet styles and motifs. There’s no denying it – the 90’s are back in fashion, and especially in websites. Designers are using sign-in message boards, rainbow-colored gradient effects, Comic Sans fonts that have been taboo in proper design circles since at least the turn of the century, and stereoscopic image games that were popular in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

For most people, the whole meaning of the Internet was once a platform for self-expression, creativity, and self-marketing. Today, the spirit of that early Internet has been destroyed by the cookie-cutter aesthetics of Facebook and Twitter that demand that we follow the orders or else. It’s interesting that developers are using what we might call pre-modern Internet techniques to try to re-capture that spirit of innovation and communication. The movement has spread to include programmers and designers who are too young to remember the 1990’s, but have admiration for the chaotic, less commercial days that their elders keep on telling them was so fantastic. In doing so, we've seen the latest development in what people call "anti-design brutalism.”

For example, Paul Ford’s website Tilde.club is a deliberate attempt to go back to the 90’s. Tilde.club takes its name from the Unix tradition of preceding a user’s home directory with a ~ mark. In a post about the site, Ford writes, “A lot of the pages were purposefully retro and 90’s-looking; others were meditations on the meaning of Tilde.club.”

Join the club

When you first visit this website or should I say the club, the first thing you notice is the way the neo-orange text pops on the black background. Unlike what we are familiar with and use today, Tilde.Club places all the text into a grid system with no images. The homepage is divided into two parts, the left part lists all the users and the right part lists all the donors. The homepage continually updates you on the number of people, as of September 20th, 882, who have created their own homepages on the site.

If you are not familiar with 90's websites, you need to read all the information on the homepage carefully to find out how to use it. In the upper left corner is the most important sentence of this experiment: “$ WELCOME TO TILDE CLUB.” Below that is a service advisory that says, “New Server, New Owners, New lease on life for Tilde.club. Welcome back ~clubbers!!” The Service advisory truly reflects the values of Tilde.Club. You are not a user but a clubber, you own your home page, and you decide what your home page looks like.

You're even welcomed

Just like the introduction on the Captain Marvel website, Tilde.Club is not a social network, but a tiny standard Unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages. When you open the website, you don't need to worry about registration, no business model, no brand-related advertising, nothing to optimize. Ford writes: "The site does not compete with anything–for it is just a single computer like millions of others.”

On the other hand, what’s amazing about 90’s websites are how they came up with the idea of making illustrations and playing games when they only had limited resources, limited skills, and limited money. Nowadays, we have huge game production companies and complex computer games with beautiful graphics and realistic 3-D game modeling. The Abode Creative suite gives designers the ability to design by using the most effective software. Going back to the 90s, designers had to creates images and icons with pixel squares. Make Pixel Art, is a deliberately lo-fi app with an interface reminiscent of early versions of Microsoft Paint. And that sense of low-fi creativity is what people are clamoring for with this 90’s nostalgia.

The medium hearkens back to digital media’s pixellated look simply because of the limitations of computers and displays. The creator Ben Brown has said that the medium brings him back to a time when those Internet communities felt like their own places, separate from the physical world. Another example is the designer Michael Townsend who is known for his critically acclaimed “minimalist text adventure” A Dark Room. The design of the website is minimal, black and white, just texts, no images and no design as a design choice. There is no redundant information but only one section called “A Dark Room” with a button called “Stoke Fire”. Once you click the “Stoke Fire”, the game starts running.

Does it look like a dark room?

The progress of the game appears as text on the left side of the screen. For example, when you click the “Stoke Fire”, the text “the fire is flickering” appears, and “the room is mild”. Click “the fire is burning” and the text “the room is warm” appears. At this stage, the section called “A Dark Room" changes to “A Firelit Room”, which triggers a section called “A Silent Forest”. When you go to the “A Silent Forest” section, there is a button called “Gather Wood”. When you click it, the button becomes a process bar to value how much time it takes to gather wood. And a chart shows your storage will show on the right side of the screen. After you collect enough wood, it will have the "Build" options in the “A Firelit Room” section to trap, cart, or hut.

From any point of view, this game is completely different from our definition of online games. For those born after the 1990s, this game is a brand new experience. Surprisingly, the game is actually interesting and easy to get into the storyline. Because every click and selection triggers the site to display more options and guide the game in different directions. The important thing for a text game like “A Dark Room” is how it is inherently critical of contemporary online culture or games. Without the sophisticated and wild graphics, the game framework and story content become more important to the player and make it easier for them to pay attention to what is happening.

At the same time, each action of click becomes more pure and meaningful, and the player needs to carefully monitor his or her action. Nowadays, video games are pursuing more eye-catching scene design and character design, which is fine. Nonetheless, when game resources are limited, how do we still produce a good game? The answer is not better graphics, but something like, A Dark Room. It proves that the real brilliant is in the framework and storyline and it shows people how to think about possibilities.

It's not just for superheroes

The modern Internet style has abducted our thinking patterns and browsing habits. When older people gradually forget the Internet style of the 90s, young people don’t even understand the history of the Internet. For people like us who  are born after the 1990's, the world should have high-speed Internet access and smart technologies. It's hard to go back in time. Maybe we can watch old movies and listen to songs of the last century, but we cannot experience the past in the daily life. What's amazing about 90’s web style coming back is these group of sites make us try to browsing and using websites like people used to in the past. By doing so, we can break the stereotype of the modern Internet and start thinking about another way of life.

©Peggy Zhang and the CCA Arts Review