Day 1 — The Small Web

Today was less about “how” and more about “why.” We dug into what it feels like to be a creative person making things for the web in an age when AI can generate code, designers are told to “stay in their lane,” and all the web’s starting to look eerily the same.

We talked about:

• The classic assembly-line model of web design (designer → dev → launch) and how it causes silo-ing of creativity. Instead, there’s power in becoming a bit T-shaped: knowing your core craft well, but being able to play in the broad, messy, interconnected parts around it.
• We talked about how the web, as a space, isn’t fixed. It’s a city or a garden; sometimes a pile of books. It can be a highly personal, living material, not just an industrial machine.
• When the web opened up in the 90s, it wasn’t corporations that we see now but personal, weird, handmade sites on platforms like GeoCities. It was a new vernacular that emerged when everyone is allowed to play, not just the professional designers and makers.
• The corporate web thrives on telling you “it’s too hard” so you’ll settle for being a perpetual renter on someone else’s platform. We’re here to push against that, and make things on our own terms.

Towards the end of the day, we learnt how to explore both the bygone web and the small web that seems to exist only on the fringes. We explored tools like the Internet Archive, The Geocities (Restored) Gallery, Marginalia, and some ‘webrings’. By scrap-booking from these sources and seeing the more hand-crafted and personal web, maybe we can develop our own sensibilities of how our view of the web will look.

For more details on the assignment, head over the assignments page and look for the assignments under this day.

The Plan

In the beginning of the class, we talked about our approach to learning during this module. You’re building just enough technical fluency to talk directly to the materials (code, structure, layout) of the web, prototype ideas on your own, and most importantly seeing coding not as a rite of passage but as another creative tool. This will be done through deciding on a personal project which will be discussed and introduced in a later class.

Today’s Links

• Website design and development stages
• We Don’t Need More Designers Who Can Code
• When Figma Starts Designing Us
• A digital artifact museum
• The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back
• Welcome to Geocities
• Living and Dying on Geocities
• Into the Personal-Website-Verse
• Millions of Facebook users…
• Rediscovering the Small Web
• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine
• GeoCities neighborhoods archive
• One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
• Web Design Museum
• Archive.org
• Marginalia Search
• XXIIVV Webring