Showing all posts about design
Classic Web, a Mastodon page that explores the web of old
16 July 2025
Specifically, the time frame encompassing the dot-com boom (late 1990’s), Web 2.0 (early twenty-first century), and the 2010’s. The 2010’s don’t seem that long ago, but then again it’s been nearly six years since. Six years is close to thirty internet years (LinkedIn page), if you subscribe to the idea.
Classic Web features screenshots of websites from this period, and is curated by Richard MacManus, creator of Cybercultural, which documents the history and cultural impact of the internet, and founder of defunct tech blog, ReadWriteWeb.
I feels a certain ambivalence looking back at some of these old websites, particularly those of the dot-com and Web 2.0 eras. The web had a bit more character back then — certainly from a visual perspective — but there were downsides. Lack of accessibility, and even a sense of aesthetics, among them. But while we might have more accessibility today, visually the web appears more generic.
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Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS
8 July 2025
United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:
HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.
It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.
The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.
See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.
Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.
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design, history, technology, web design
IndieWeb is Punk, you have the blog, now here is the t-shirt
25 June 2025
Jamie Thingelstad recently suggested IndieWeb is to the web of today, what punk rock was to music of the 1970’s. IndieWeb is Punk, he said.
In a comment on Thingelstad’s post, Robert Birming said the slogan would look good on a t-shirt.
Not long after, Jim Mitchell unveiled a line — one black, one white — of t-shirts emblazoned with the words IndieWeb is Punk, which are available for purchase.
Never mind the bollocks, here’s the bloggers…
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blogs, design, IndieWeb, SmallWeb
Canva catches the AI coding assistant vibe
13 June 2025
Simon Newton writing on the Canva Engineering Blog:
Yet until recently, our interview process asked candidates to solve coding problems without the very tools they’d use on the job. Our interview approach included a Computer Science Fundamentals interview which focused on algorithms and data structures. This interview format pre-dated the rise of AI tools, and candidates were asked to write the code themselves. This dismissal of AI tools during the interview process meant we weren’t truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role.
The Australian founded online graphic design platform is now mandating candidates for coding roles be proficient with AI tools, and will be expected to demonstrate as much during coding interviews. Given many Canva employees (to say nothing of the industry as a whole) are using AI assistants in their coding work, the move is hardly surprising.
Canva is an app I’ve to tried to pickup, but to date with little success. Several years ago I went along to the Canva offices in Sydney — I’m pretty sure they were located in the suburb of Surry Hills at that point — to give the then iteration of the app a try.
With again, er, limited success. I was kindly told long-term users of Photoshop tend to struggle more than others with Canva, so that was some consolation.
Proficiency with Canva is still on my to-do list, but at the moment getting my head around GIMP is the priority. I’ve not been able to sandbox Photoshop on Linux Mint, so when it comes to image creation and manipulation, GIMP it is.
Still talking of Canva, I learned in quickly looking up the company, that Cameron Adams is a co-founder. Yes: have I been living under a rock or what?
Adams might be better known to some earlier (I’m talking prior to 2010) web creative people as the Man in Blue, being his website/blog, which is still online. In 2011, Adams created a data visualisation of the music of Daft Punk, which is likewise still online, and something I linked to back in the day.
There’s some oldies, but goodies, in the mix, including Da Funk, Television Rules the Nation, Alive, Face to Face, and One More Time. And how good is the pre-loading popup, this using Firefox 139:
If you are going to view this site in Firefox, it is recommended that you use the latest version (Firefox 4).
That’s quite the trip back in time. Firefox 4 came out in March 2011. A good year before Canva was founded, and what seems like a lifetime before AI as we know it emerged in spectacular fashion.
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artificial intelligence, design, history, technology, trends
The Jony Ive/OpenAI device, a limited function, screenless, smartphone?
29 May 2025
Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at Hong Kong based TF International Securities, spills the tea, perhaps, about the upcoming “futuristic AI device” being designed collaboratively by former Apple CDO Jony Ive, and OpenAI.
According to Kuo (X/Twitter link), the device is intended to be worn around the neck. A bit like a lanyard maybe. It will be a little bigger than the erstwhile Humane AI Pin, will have cameras and microphones, but no display screen.
The device however will connect to smartphones and computers, and use their screens, and, by the sounds of things, tap into their computing capabilities also.
This detail intrigues me. Given the Ive/OpenAI device is intended to be “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone”, doesn’t deriving much, or some, functionality from an iPhone (or other smartphone), defeat the purpose?
Otherwise the device sounds like a lite version of a smartphone, that you could keep on your side table overnight. It can still make and pickup phone calls, act as an alarm clock, and offer information in response to voice prompts.
Things like: “what’s the weather forecast?” or: “what’s making news headlines this morning?” It may be possibly be a device that keeps us connected to the outside world, but prevents social media doomscrolling in the middle of the night.
That might be something people will find useful. We’ll have to wait and see what is actually shipped.
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artificial intelligence, design, Jony Ive, Sam Altman, technology
Jony Ive and Sam Altman announce collaboration in video lovefest
24 May 2025
Jony Ive, former Chief Design Officer at Apple, founded LoveFrom in 2019, when he left Apple, with Australian designer Marc Newson. In 2024, Ive established io, as a vehicle to move into the AI space.
A few days ago we learned Ive is joining forces with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and io will merge with OpenAI. You take the last letter of OpenAI, pair it with the first, and you get io, right? The merger however sounds like the tech/design collaboration made in heaven.
No clues have been offered as to what can be expected of this coming together, other than an AI device of some sort. According to a Wired article published last September, it will be “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone“.
If you haven’t see the video announcing Ive and Altman’s partnership, and have a spare nine minutes, take a look. What a beautiful tech bro bromance we have going on here.
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artificial intelligence, design, Jony Ive, Sam Altman, technology
The motherf***ing website, the way all websites used to be
13 May 2025
A long time ago, that is. But the motherf***ing website (hopefully them asterisks slip this post through them filters wherever they may be) is lightweight, responsive, and works.
Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them.
Designed by someone called Barry Smith, the motherf***ing website has been around for over ten years — the Digiday article I linked just then, is dated December 2013. I don’t know how I missed seeing this before.
Needless to say, NSFW on account of strong language.
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Ye Olde Blogroll is sporting a swish new design
18 April 2025
Check it out. In addition, Ray, creator of the algorithm-free web directory of personal websites and blogs, which lists this website (thanks again), has transferred ownership to Manuel Moreale, he of People and Blogs fame, among other things.
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blogs, design, IndieWeb, technology
After 25 years we still don’t know what the web is, what it could be
18 April 2025
Here’s some web history trivia for you: it’s been twenty-five years since A Dao of Web Design was published at A List Apart (ALA). Written by Australian product developer, and Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp, the article explored how the web, still seen then as an online variation of print, could find its own path, and evolve into something entirely different.
Reflecting on his ALA article earlier this week, John made the following comment:
The Web is its own thing — but we’ve still yet to really discover what that is. Don’t ask me, I don’t know what that is either. But a quarter of a century on I’m still just as interested in discovering what that is.
I think what we can say now though, is the web is no longer a child of print.
For additional historical trivia, see this article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, about John and Westciv, a company he established with Maxine Sherrin. Westciv developed tools to assist web designers create compliant CSS, and web pages.
That was twenty-years ago — yes, mind blown — and was one of several articles I wrote for print publications, before becoming more focused on writing online. And while talking of ALA, it sadly appears only to be publishing sporadically nowadays.
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content production, design, history, technology
The Australian Book Design Awards 2025 longlist
13 March 2025
This is where we get the once-a-year chance to judge a book by its cover… the longlist for the 2025 Australian Book Design Awards (ABDA) was published last week (PDF).
Among numerous inclusions (this is the longlist after all) are covers for Tim Winton’s latest novel, Juice, designed by Adam Laszczuk, and Lucinda Froomes Price’s book All I Ever Wanted Was To Be Hot, designed by Katherine Zhang, of Sydney based Australian design house Evi-O.Studio.
The winners will be announced on Friday 23 May 2025.
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