I have always been really bad at design - to the point that some of my designs have been described as “a bunch of ants got together, had a big fight and exploded.” But last week, I decided to start learning about some of the fundamentals of design and as part of that, I have started looking into other designs (past and present) that I enjoy. At this point, if we could hook up a generator to how embarrassed I am with my old designs, I could power entire data centres. It’s renewable!
But I do get to read some great articles and Richard MacManus published an excellent one on cybercultural.com. He looked at three gurus of 90s web design (only one of whom I had ever heard of before), considered their contributions to the visual language of the web (Note from editor/writer - I just learned the phrase ‘visual language’ so I will overuse it for the next 14 months…sorry).
MacManus covered David Siegel who published a book in 1996 called Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design. In it, he advocated for hacks to HTML and since the final CSS spec hadn’t been published yet, he included a section called “PDF primer”. By 1997, the second edition of that book replaced the PDF primer with a CSS primer. MacManus noted (aptly) that that was how fast the web was changing at the time.
The information on Jeffrey Zeldman was especially interesting to me because while I don’t think I had heard the name before, I instantly recognized his designs and could see how they impacted the last thirty years of web design. Zeldman had had a very interesting career before he even got into the web, having spent time as a fiction writer, a journalist, a touring musician and then he spent ten years in advertising.
The design guru I was aware of was Jakob Nielsen. In the early days, Nielsen advocated for letting browsers decide how content should be styled - his chosen HTML was simple using hierarchies written by the HTML spec. He quickly got more into CSS but still advocated for an extremely usable, semantic based approach to web design.
So who won? You should read the article to find out. But personally, I see elements of all three throughout the web.