Timeless web design: Online portfolios today — and in the year 2000
A nostalgic trip through homepages of brand agencies and type foundries on the cusp of the new millennium.
Philippe Starck, a renowned industrial designer, once said:
“A designer has a duty to create timeless design. To be timeless you have to think really far into the future, not next year, not in two years but in 20 years minimum.”
Born in 1990, I witnessed the internet evolve from text to immersive audio-visual experiences. And throughout, I wondered—can design be timeless on such a fast-changing medium as the web?
Starck’s own website unfortunately wasn’t up in 2000, but archive.org has preserved landing pages of many other agencies of the day.
Are you ready to jump into the time machine, shed a tear of nostalgia, and see if their designs would speak to the audiences of today?
Design studios
Many of the top design agencies today were founded long before personal computers and the web. As such, they had to consciously transition from print, to the Internet.
Pentagram
London
Pentagram, founded in 1972, is the world’s largest independently-owned design studio. Its list of past and present partners includes such stars as Alan Fletcher, Bob Gill, Paula Scher, and Michael Bierut.
Pentagram’s 2000 website was written in Adobe ColdFusion Markup, and like many websites of the day, tried to replicate print design elements on the web.
The menu, drop cap, titles, and image captions are pixel-perfect low-resolution GIFs. The columns — hand-crafted with <td> tags.
In 2020, the Pentagram logo remains unchanged, but the website went from all text, to all image, letting the studio’s work speak for itself.
MetaDesign
Berlin
MetaDesign, founded in 1979, is behind such iconic projects as the Berlin Transit System (BVG).
True to their name, MetaDesign also worked on several meta projects, such as Apple’s macOS design system, and the Adobe brand.
MetaDesign’s 2000 website went all-in on cutting-edge features of the day, including a Gaussian-blurred logo, and a rotating 3D cube (a GIF, of course).
Not displayed below, the site ends with a veritable signature of the era:
Copyright ©1995–98 MetaDesign. All rights reserved.
webmaster@metadesign.com Last modified — Nov. 11, 1998
MetaDesign’s 2020 website pays tribute to the original swathe of red, but also gives attention to usability — large fonts, and WCAG 2.1-compliant contrast.
Of course, it’s also covered by a cookie warning — the signature of this age!
Landor
San Francisco
Landor is a brand consulting firm started in 1941, one of the first to apply consumer research to design.
Walter Landor used to say that “the package itself must do the talking.” It is therefore surprising to see how wordy their website was in year 2000.
The pre-Google SEARCH Our Portfolio dropdown is in fact a list of all the sections of the website.
The background image and silhouette in the footer reference the ferry boat Klamath, which Landor used as headquarters from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Landor’s 2020 website maintains the yellow colour scheme, but streamlines both the logotype, and the ferry boat icon.
Like Pentagram, Landor puts the visual of their work front (back?) and center.
Happy Cog
New York
Happy Cog is one of the first digital-native agencies, started in 1999 by Jeffrey Zeldman, the founder of A List Apart.
The original website of Happy Cog might not win any design awards, but unlike others on this list, it was written in W3C-standard HTML (Zeldman was an early proponent of web standards).
It is also the only website on the list to make use of JavaScript, updating windows.status, and animating menu items on hover:
onmouseover=”window.status=’Our work, and welcome to it.’; changeImages(‘projects’, ‘botdex/projects_over.gif’); return true;”
Happy Cog’s 2020 website continues a familiar pattern — visuals of their work in the background, overlaid with oversized type, and a minimalist logo.
Frog
San Francisco
Frog is a design consultancy founded in Germany, in 1969.
They soon moved to Palo Alto, and are best known for their work on Apple IIc, and the Snow White design language used by Apple from 1984 to 1990.
Remember Flash? Good.
Remember Shockwave?
Frog’s website was built using this multimedia platform, which was already then giving up market share to Flash (both owned by Macromedia).
This also meant a static welcome page asking visitors to download a browser plug-in, before they could access even just the studio’s contact details.
Frog’s 2020 website follows the crowd with a visual background, but chooses to forgo the slogan, and overlay the video with navigation instead.
Art. Lebedev
Moscow
Art. Lebedev, founded in 1995, is by far the best known Russian studio.
Today, they specialize in urban navigation and industrial design, such as their award-winning Moscow Metro map and signage.
Back in the day, however, the studio was still focused on branding and interface design, with what can only be described as hit-and-miss results.
Not displayed below is a footer with the most 1990’s feature yet: A counter bragging about six million visitors to the website!
Счетчик посетителей: 6224079
Art. Lebedev’s 2020 website is a real breath of fresh air in portfolio design.
Out: Full-page images, videos, and pretentious taglines.
In: Intuitive navigation, and a cookie permissions box that wins the day:
We are using cookies on all our websites including this one because without cookies the entire Internet would go to shit.
Type foundries
With the advent of web fonts, great web design became inseparable from type. Which brings up the question — What web presence did foundries have before cloud typography became the norm?
Emigre
Berkeley
Emigre, founded in 1984, is the first foundry to design typefaces for and on a computer, as well as the first to sell their fonts online.
Emigre’s 2000 homepage was surprisingly barebones, more like a web directory than a portfolio site.
It compensated with hi-tech features such as Typetease, which let customers preview characters from their fonts.
By 2020, Emigre did a one-eighty on the millennial design, replacing the wall of text with a much more inviting wall of specimens of their fonts.
House Industries
Delaware
Founded in 1993, House Industries is one of the best known digital type foundries.
They went for a fun, minimalist style in 2000, embedding various typefaces as GIFs throughout the site.
My favourite part? The contact page which wouldn’t feel out of place on a hipster startup website of today.
In 2020, House Industries website still puts the typefaces front and centre. The cute factory logo and signature humour are unfortunately long gone.
Hoefler&Co.
New York
The Hoefler Type Foundry, started in 1989, designed such iconic typefaces as Archer, Gotham, and Whitney.
They’re also the lucky owners of the typography.com domain, which in 2000 hosted a surprisingly modern site, with full-text search, and a Flash app for customers to try their fonts.
H&Co.’s 2020 site features a stunning masonry of specimens of their fonts.
Bonus: Toolmakers
While great artists can mesmerize the world with nothing but a piece of charcoal and a wall, design is inseparable from the medium, and the tools.
Adobe
San Jose
Although new alternatives have appeared in recent years, such as InVision, Sketch and Figma, most design professionals continue to use Adobe software on a daily basis.
Adobe’s 2000 website shows that already then, the company had offerings across all aspects of print, audio-visual, and web design.
For another kick of millennial nostalgia, notice the colourful Made with badges, and the Y2K Information link in the footer.
The 2020 website goes for a clean style focused on new features, and the amazing works created using Adobe software.
Apple
Cupertino
Apple was a pioneer of print-quality type & graphics on personal computers, and most design professional continue to rely on their trusty Macs.
Apple’s 2000 website clearly shows their focus on creatives, featuring a prosumer camera connected to a PowerBook.
The 2020 website maintains the overall aesthetic, but gives up on fake glass, and serif fonts. Apple’s focus on the creative industry is also less obvious, now the iPhone is behind most of the company’s growth.
Although it’s nice to see how far we have progressed in usability, accessibility, and interaction design, there’s something sad about the lack of creativity that came along with these improvements.
All agencies on the list, with the notable exception of Art.Lebedev, use such predictable templates that one would struggle to tell the five apart.
As for my original question: Is timeless design really possible on the web?
I’ll let you share your verdict in the comments!
