Any article on 90s Web Design gurus would not be complete without at least a mention of Jeffery Veen. HotWired completely defined the aesthetic of the 90s web, breaking all sorts of conventions to create something totally new.
Some point along the way I lost my copy of HotWired Style: Principles of Web Design – so I picked up a new one. It's an amazing time capsule of what that time was like, and even if the technology has changed it's still so interesting to me from a standpoint of working within constraints, and understanding a new medium for itself rather than just as a thing to host the previous medium.
I thumbed through the HotWired style guide so much I ended up having to buy a second. If it was possible I also would have worn out the WebMonkey and Jeff Zeldman sites in the same way. I poured over them all for style cues.
I loved the bright look of the "HotWired" style designs. I found them to be really functional on top of just enjoying the aesthetic. You could get a lot of visual mileage out of a little bit of markup even without images. This was a great feature when most people were on shitty dial-up.