Improving Web Design

The World Wide Web was conceived as a way for researchers and scientists to share documents, not as a medium for visual expression.

The aesthetics of web pages, such as there were, derived from computer screens and typewritten documents.

Early web users no more felt the graphical limitations of the hypertext markup language (HTML) than they had resented having only one golf-ball font on their old IBM Selectrics.

They were also delighted with the Net that the look was irrelevant. First functionality, then bandwidth, and finally search were the key characteristics of good web sites.

Because people are used a variety of browsers and operating systems to explore the Web, pages had to be flexible. The width of the window, the type size, the font themselves – all could vary and often did. The Web was so new and interesting, no one cared if it was ugly.

For many publishers and designers, New Media was born when John Gage, the Sun Microsystems evangelist, showed off the Mosaic Browser (Which later become Netscape) at the Seybold Seminar in Boston in April 1995.

But some of the designers in the room stared at the big screen with little enthusiasm. To them, the browser was software, and that reminded them to work, but not of their work.

Their control of the details, the high resolution of the printed page, the saturated colour of photographs, the great library of typefaces – all this was threatened by New Media.