Web Designer Nostalgia: Revisiting the Early 2K

For reasons unknown, I’ve stumbled upon age-old archives in my gasping 500GB drive. There was once upon a time I was so happy to have a smoking 1.5MB capacity on a 3.5 disk floppy. Or even 500MB on a zip disk. Once upon a time, we were all happy. But behind these plastic facades of promised storage, lay the gold. Remnants of web projects that once showed promise. Archived forums that were sustained by a common camaraderie of disdain for the unbelievers of massive online communities. Before Facebook, we actually knew how to elaborately hack the spaces we stalked our exes on.

This is a tribute to the fallen, the pioneers, and inspiration I’ve had in the Early 2K. You helped shaped my internets.

1. Stickernation.net and Tak!

Spray cans were cool, but stickers were better. With thousands of stickers in its database, it was a glimpse of a global underground sticker culture. Everything was archived based on artist (if known), location, and timestamp. The timestamp was essential, since stickers don’t live very long in the streets. At the time, this was a beautiful and very sophisticated system created by Tak!, who have also unfortunately disbanded recently. I loved em. Stickernation.net fell in 2005 when a malicious attack damaged their content forever. The best of the Stickernation.net archives lives on in Flickr. Visit it here →

2. Digikitten

Yes, I admit it. I was once a forumhead. In the early 2K, DK was different. Built on vBulletin, it catered to a wide classification of designers who wanted to share Photoshop techniques with each other. The forum was designed by the amazing David Lanham, who moved on to work with Iconfactory. The site design was one of the big draws. We had Photoshop tennis, before Adobe cracked down and had everyone name it Layer Tennis, as you can now see on Coudal. We had tournaments with Coudal too. This is where I started to really fall in love with drawing with vectors, courtesy of the encouraging words of Pixelgirl, who was one of the supermods of DK. Later we grew to accommodate other aspects of design, like Flash and animation – of which I was the mod. Don’t laugh, I learned AS+AS2 on the go while answering user questions. The artifact of Digikitten is still online, but just barely, and without the Lanham skin. View it here →

DK tried to stage a rebirth on sister site, Strangekiss, under Strangekiss Loft, but it looks like it didn’t really fly.

3. K10K

Kaliber 10000 (K10K) is still around and works decent enough, even with the obvious dated UI elements. It just goes to show that strong design lasts. Created as an online mag for the design community, the Cuban Council’s brilliant information design was my design textbook in its heyday. I spent hours deconstructing K10K rather than actually paying attention in university. I mean, look at it. It was years ahead of its time. When I was working at Slide years later, Cuban Council did our site. Small world, right? Visit K10K here →

Obviously I have more, but I think 3 is a magic number. I always like finding out about designers’ web histories, so share!