Welcome to the Whomobile

This reminds me that I need to get back into web design...

Geocities is definitely an inspiration, but the biggest influence has to be old CD-ROMs. Check out the YouTube channel JSmon for a great archive of them.

You have to take everything I say with a grain of salt because I could be poisoned by nostalgia, but I consider Eyewitness Children's Encyclopedia to be the epitome of interactive design. The design philosophy behind these CD-ROMs seems to be solid info organisation, but in a way that feels both accessible and vast. It's skeuomorphic design, but it feels almost hyperreal, because in real life buttons don't really make these sounds and things aren't really this tactile. Yet it all becomes part of the language of the interface. You felt like you were exploring a kind of cyberspace.

I really love how there's this CGI-rendered environment that you can travel through, whether it's a house, a garden, a jungle, outer space etc. Everything in those scenes can be clicked, taking you to its DK learning page. So there's two spaces to explore, the Virtual reality space, and the operating system like space. It's a great example of "interface metaphor" design.

Another thing I liked about the DK Interactive CD-ROMs was the ability to create a profile, and the basic tracking. You could make a fun custom profile picture and fill in personal details.

These programs were never connected online and weren't multiplayer, yet the profiles were still fun because it made it feel personable. For example, every new page you visited in Eyewitness Children's Encyclopedia awarded you with a star that marked that you'd been there, almost like stamping a map in a museum. I feel like this sort of thing would be really fun on a website, even a simple portfolio site.

Other examples include Packard Bell Navigator and of course Microsoft Bob. Another example I really like is the settings menu in Fin Fin, a 1990s virtual pet game, as seen in this LRG video. The settings interface looks incredibly tactile. Imagine polished semi-precious stones embedded into rough sandstone. I also think simple CGI rendering adds to the appeal because it isn't hyper-detailed, it feels more internal, dreamlike.

I know none of these are actually web design examples, but I think most of them could probably be recreated today with CSS3 and HTML5, with little to no JavaScript. Basically, I'm interested in personable, interface-metaphor-driven design.

I'm not trying to be stuck in the past, lol, but contemporary web design often feels like something out of the TV show The Chair Company. Everything seems flattened into the same set of corporate design principles and aesthetics.

If the web design industry is anything like graphic design, it's plagued by people captured by tech corporations, which just means you have to dig a bit deeper to find the good stuff. I'm sure there's plenty of contemporary work that would appeal to my tastes, but I haven't really gone looking for it.