The 90ies were an embarassing time for web design. Those of us old enough to remember what the web looked back in the 90ies cringe at the sight of blinking text, fractals, and yellow letters on black backgrounds. Basically, being a web designer meant knowing what the hell HTML is, so the best looking pages from that age were simply black text on white background.

Now, the thing is, I actually started to write a completely serious article about old, but great website designs, but I’m telling you, it was hard work. Not only did my eyes bleed from most of the pages I’ve visited, I’ve also had a few good laughs, looking at pages of huge, multinational corporations that look like they were created by a bunch of (poorly) trained monkeys. So, I’ve decided to shelve the initial article until next week, and have a few festive laughs at this jolly time of year at the big corps and their 10-year-old website designs.

The copies of old webs are brought to you courtesy of Wayback Machine. It’s a bit slow, but it works! So, let’s start!

Adidas - OK, this can be characterized as an ‘honest attempt’. It’s obvious what the guys at Adidas wanted: a really sleek, cool, techy black website. But they also wanted their logo, which was based on human foot, all over it. This is the result. On the second page of the site, the designer decided to slap the same background in tile mode, which may have been forgivable on 14” screens, but looks pretty damn hideous now. One more detail: the horribly placed German flag on the front page was thought in the 90ies to be the best way to give the visitors a way to browse the site in a different language; such flags were featured on many, many ugly websites.

BBC - It’s hard to decipher what BBC’s website really looked in 1996. because Wayback Machine is having problems chewing it, but I’ve tried most of the links and it seems that this archived page from 1997. is closest to the real look of the website. Never mind: even if half of it’s missing, I still can’t imagine any graphical detail that could make the site actually look good. I guess this was the time when web designers still thought the best way to make an image fit into the background is to make it ‘blend’ into it. Newsflash: it never looked good, and it still doesn’t. Note: if you try to click the link you’ll get the whole page every 30th time on average, so I don’t recommend hammering Wayback Machine’s poor servers.

BMG - OK, I’m cheating here, because this is from early 1997. But I just couldn’t skip it: I clicked the page, and only the text loaded at first, so I thought, ok, this isn’t that bad. But then came the background, and…well, you know the phrase ‘cheap photoshop effects’? They’re all here - the bevel, the emboss, the invert, the cheesy shadow - and it’s all put together in the worst possible way. This is the irony of the early days of the web: just keeping the background white would make your site look cool in 10 years, but I guess that white backgrounds were frowned upon by BMG execs back in the day.

Budweiser - Animated GIFs? Check. Badly cut out images? Check. Cheesy rock and roll motifs? Check. Put all that, together with a huge red font, on a black background, and you’ve got yourself one embarrassingly ugly page.

Kawasaki - remember what I’ve told you about yellow text on black backgrounds? This is the proof. For some weird reason, this was the ‘in’ thing back in 1995., and all the cool websites had to have it. Luckily, guys at Kawasaki skipped the fractals, but the page is still pretty ugly.

Lego - OK, Lego is a cool company, so don’t laugh. Seriously, stop laughing. I mean, the website isn’t that bad at all; it’s got a pirate, and a wizard on a bicycle, and… some bricks (!?), which were obviously too hard to draw so they just included them in text format. It’s interesting how the lowest brick isn’t actually a link; is it a sign or a puzzle of some sort? Also, they didn’t include an image for the ‘learn’ link, which totally destroyed the otherwise perfect symmetry and harmony of the design. To Lego’s credit, at least the background is not black!

McDonalds - If it weren’t for the eye-burning red background, this website wouldn’t be all that bad, but what sets it apart is the content. Let’s be honest here, kids in preschool give more relevant info on their MySpace pages than this. And, what exactly does ‘Dalmatian Location’ mean? Btw, this is the older version of the page; the earliest version doesn’t have the Dalmatian Location part, which makes it a little less funny but not at all less useless. Also, this page is a fine example of another common web design blunder from the nineties: making an image the main link to the rest of the site, and then having to explain it in text so people would know where the hell to click. Anyway, I’d seriously like to know how much money did McDonalds spend on this website. If it’s more than 10 bucks, I consider it to be one of the bigger financial mistakes in the company’s history.

Panasonic - Forget everything you know about Panasonic and imagine you saw this website today. What would you think this company is selling? My estimate would be either ’sex toys’ or ‘dubious quality healthcare products’. In any case, this page is very educational because it exhibits some details so characteristic of web ‘design’ in the nineties:

- horrible curvy background

- menu background image too small for the text

- animated pink letters on black background

- shadow of the animated gif doesn’t really work on the pink background

- jaggy separator lines probably drawn in MS Paint

- 10 different font faces on the page

Penguin - this page is not that horrible (hey, I’m not saying it’s good, just that it’s not outrageously hideous), but what’s funny is that this is the “full graphics” version of the site. See those those little 1338 bytes heavy penguin gifs? Those comprise the aforementioned full graphics. It actually speaks more of the state of the internet connections in 1996. than the site itself; when less than 10 kilobytes of images are too heavy for some people’s connection, you know the times have been rough. I guess we’ll talk about this stuff to our grandchildren: You’re having it easy, boy! When we were young, we had to get up at 3 in the morning, and walk 30 miles through the snow to reach a web cafe which only had a 2400 bps modem, and the connection was split between 6 computers!

Pepsi - Hello, LSD! What the hell were they thinking with that background? And those animations…in 1996., your best bet was not to try and have a flashy GUI because the technology to build it simply wasn’t there, but Pepsi didn’t care - they wanted bling, baby!. There’s also a cool warning at the bottom: If travelling at speeds less than 28.8 bps (yes, that’s bits per second, kids), then jump on the low road. I don’t know about the low road, but that background makes me wanna take the high road.

With these ten jewels of the past, I leave you until next year and wish you all happy holidays!