I haven't heard nearly as many people wanting a return to maximalist 90s web design. People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on.

Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for, which was (if you like) 90s web design minimalism. That's the motivation all this gopher revival/gemini protocol stuff is about, at least from a design perspective.

I'm just trying to say there were different strains of "90s web design" which are not compatible with each other.

Yeah, I recently made a portfolio site for a friend. Very minimalist: https://christinelopez.ca

It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site)

Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react

Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint

I actually really that that site design!

One note: can you tag that NSFW or somesuch? Even artistic nudity can be unwelcome and get people in trouble.

Surprisingly, his site seemed to load faster for me.

That's the thing. Computers have become so fast & bandwidth so wide that the bottleneck is primarily latency

Interesting point!

That's just rationality intertwined with nostalgia.

I mean, I do acknowledge how messy 90s websites were. Overly bloated with GIFs and annoying MIDIs playing on the background. But they were full of personality. And it was also a time where getting into "the internet" was an exciting thing by itself.

Only us, people who are "computer literate", complain about a 3mb download or 10mb javascript blob. Most people don't care as long as their phone or computer are able to do the job.

People care about things being slow, but our industry has done a fantastic job of covering up the fact that it constantly makes everything slower by convincing people they just need newer devices. It is sickening.

> People miss the time when a website wasn't a 3 megabyte download, and didn't pop up a newsletter signup form. They don't (as often) miss the web pages with 100 animated gifs on them, an over the top tiled background, blinking text, and so on.

This is really colored by who you're paying attention to.

https://yesterweb.org/webring/members.html <-- this is a lot of Gen Z, especially with the more active people. Literally animated gifts, tiled bgs, etc.

> Many more people want the minimalism of a page that gets out of the way and shows you the content you came for

This is an assumption, not data.

are you really saying that website you linked is a gen z design? looks like something out of 2004, looks horrible... or maybe it's not loading well on my phone. but that's not....

The website I linked is a list of members of a webring, because such a survey presents more examples than a single page can. The creators of the pages in the webring are predominantly gen z. The argument it is supporting is about which people want which strains of 90s web design to come back. If you look at a few pages in the webring you will see which strains these young people, at least, want. That's what I'm saying. Whether you consider it horrible is immaterial.

So that site is interesting to me because it comes across as retro more than anything else.

It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design.

To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life.

It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.

It's certainly self-aware pastiche, not the 90s original, for sure. But I guess what I'm saying is that the idea that "the majority of users" want XYZ or are even looking for design styles actively isn't actually something substantiated by data in any of these claims, and there's enough interesting counterpoints that none of us should be confident our preferences are shared by the masses. Design sampling bias and mindless imitation certainly brought us a lot of the cookie cutter whitespace affairs we see also.

I started out a little curmudgeonly about the style, but was won over by Persona 5: https://www.atlus.com/persona5/home.html

It's messy, chaotic, and feels like something from the late 90's/early 00's, where you'd often see custom web pages using formatted images as elements of the page. But I love it. I can't quite make sense of it, as I adhere pretty strongly to brutalism/minimalism when designing my own content.

Persona 5 did really well with balancing their line work and colors. The colors are very bold and in your face, but so is some of the strategically placed line work, so you can still visually differentiate everything.

And there’s still a design language underpinning the site. It’s chaotic and loud and whatever, but the elements are consistent.

It’s not random. Still has a theme and a palette. I like it as well.

It looks like a well-designed comic book.

https://heckscaper.com/plugins/ and https://heckscaper.com/aminals/deuteronomy/ (warning: semi-NSFW) is a powerful aesthetic of loud colorful idiosyncratic individuality, which makes any of the websites or software I've tried building pale in comparison.

yeah and get myspace back as well.