Retro web design

The parts list is unusually literal, because the style is an impersonation rather than an abstraction. Grey window chrome with a coloured title bar. Buttons cut from a raised bevel with a light edge on top and a dark one underneath. A tiled background image repeating behind everything. System type, or a bitmap face, or the one script face everybody had. Saturated primaries used with no restraint at all. A hit counter, an under construction sign, a guestbook link, a webring at the foot of the page, and something animated for no reason, which is why the marquee has never quite died.

Two separate periods get collapsed into it, and the difference is worth keeping. The personal web of the mid nineties, built on free hosting services, is what researchers call the vernacular web: pages made by people with no training, where the aesthetic came from using whatever the tools gave away for free. The desktop it ran on is the other half, because the beveled grey window is an operating system’s design language, not a website’s, and it got copied onto pages simply because it was what a screen looked like. A modern revival usually mixes both, which is historically sloppy and looks exactly right.

The revival is not really about the nineties. It works now as a reaction against platform sameness: every product looks like the same rounded card in the same neutral palette, so a page that looks handmade, cluttered, and slightly wrong reads as a person rather than a brand system. That is the same argument neubrutalism makes, but the two arrive at it differently. Neubrutalism is a contemporary style breaking contemporary rules; retro web design is period costume, and its charm depends on the reader recognising the period. If they do not, the page is just badly designed.

Wear it where it can be enjoyed and take it off where it cannot. Marketing sites, event pages, game pages, personal sites, and the odd product easter egg can carry it. The pieces that must not be costume are contrast, focus states, motion, and hit targets: the original web was inaccessible by accident, and reproducing that faithfully is the one part of the homage nobody wants. Blinking text and endless marquees are also a genuine hazard, not just a taste question. Draw the nostalgia in colour, chrome, and type, and leave the behaviour in this decade.