In response to today’s clean and crisp web design, and with a hint of nineties nostalgia, a growing niche of young people are celebrating the look and feel of the early Web. Animated GIFs, clunky web
On the whole, today’s internet is aesthetically pleasing. Website layouts are generally clean and clear. Video content is often professionally shot. And platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr have spurred on a web culture of sharing beautiful visuals. It seems we’ve come a long way from the early days of the internet, with all its clunky graphics and ugly layouts. Or have we?
Partly inspired by early internet nostalgia – and partly in response to the modern online aesthetic – a growing niche of people are celebrating the quirks, themes and imperfections of Web 1.0. They’re harking back to the nineties’ web, and reminiscing about an internet before the days of social media, mobile apps and live streaming.
"It's all about 1.0 aesthetics"
For many of these early-web revivalists, the movement is about exploring the old internet aesthetic. Blogs such as Gold Card, Vanilla Shapes and Wet Dik have curated streams of early internet relics, with overly-colourful graphics, nineties style fonts and images of primitive virtual worlds.
Contemporary graphic design has been inspired too. Daniel Swan, a London-based designer who produces visual communication for London art collective Lucky PDF, is pioneering a jarring, colourful aesthetic that draws heavily on early internet styles – but exaggerating it further, making it look like it was born from eighties post-modernism. He recently used the style in an identity for Lucky PDF TV, a live television project at the last Frieze Art Fair.
Other designers are incorporating the iconic glitches of primitive computer interfaces, despite having advanced internet tools and software solutions such as HTML5. It can be seen in the work of Jon Satrom, a pioneer of the movement, whose glitch experiments can be found on his equally abrasive looking blog. Kim Asendorf, another artist from Germany, has an equally deliberately unappealing website that looks like it was made in the mid-nineties. Glitch artist Nick Briz recently took the movement to mobile phones with an iPhone video game called Duck Feedom, inspired by the old 8-bit Nintendo NES. There’s now even an annual festival in Chicago called GLI.TC/H that celebrates the movement.
