Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen".
Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
8pt Tahoma, lowercase, and using colons for decoration, like this:
Yep! I'm guilty of continuing to use the double-colon separators to this very day. Just shipped an internal app for my company a few months ago that utilizes them in page titles.
> 8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
So good it is bug when it 8pt Tahoma looks off: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/10
> IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
Search for Artwiz under Unix. Same feelings.
Well, the screen resolutions and pixel densities of that time also made those micro bitmap fonts to be not so micro.
I miss it too.
Serious lack of anti aliasing contributed too.
I miss my 90s / 00s active desktop with random gifs of battlemechs walking around.
It seems the next battle we'll have to fight is for fonts that actually present enough information to the user to disambiguate "Weird Al" from "Weird AI". Seems like we used to have these things called "serifs" but modern design knows nothing of such heresies.
Actually, Weird Al could see so far into the future that he called himself that on purpose.
Most splash screens had a "skip" button though. If you were visiting the website frequently, you as the user could always bookmark the internal page that the intro screen pointed to.
That 2Advanced flash intro tho...
I can still hear the music