Exactly. Here's Gamespot's homepage in 2007:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070228162159/http://www.gamesp...

Very similar. So much more personality than Gamespot today:

https://www.gamespot.com

But back then everyone viewed websites on desktop. Mobile if supported was special-cased. It's the opposite now.

You call it personality, I call it gradient overload. Check out the difference in content density, though.

Humor me for a moment. What decade did you go to high school in?

I'm in my late 30s! Can't wait to see what condescension comes next.

I didn't mean to sound condescending, I was genuinely curious. I was wondering if there's a correlation between age and aesthetics, but we're about the same age.

Modern designers would think it’s terrible because it gives you too much information, and suggest putting in way more white space, hiding things under menu bars. I wish I was being facetious but sadly it’s a sincere statement.

Completely agree though. Information-heavy pages for desktop consumption were wonderful. It truly feels like we’ve regressed. Just loading that gamespot link honestly filled me with an immense nostalgia for the web of 10-15 years ago

They implemented it using float and etc. My nostalgia tears are dropping

Back in the day it was just a table based layout though. It was used for quite some time. I'd say the design first emerged about 1998 and lasted until the smartphones came in 2010 or so.

It's surprisingly easy to make that sort of design if you use the right tools. You just drew it in photoshop and sliced it up and exported it as an HTML table, then you poked out the bits where the content was supposed to go.

Doing it with CSS is a right pain in the ass though. I guess that's why there are so many mono-colored rectangles in modern web design.

These days it's actually pretty easy with CSS flexbox or grid.

You can get the boxes in the right places, but you can't style them in nearly the same way.