Glories of the Old Web
During the 90s and early 2000s, the internet had a unique and memorable aesthetic. You know it when you see it: crude HTML sites with simple layouts, bright backgrounds, plain text, and a choice selection of clip art, animated gifs, and textures that look noticeably dated. Those graphics are emblematic of an era when personal computers were new, and being online was an exciting frontier. It was a time of optimism and innocence: the 1950s phase of the internet.
Long before Web 2.0, blog templates, memes, and the glut of content on social media, the "look" of the internet had its own style. I remember it well, having created multiple Geocities pages in the 90s and spent years "surfing the web", joining webrings, and signing guestbooks.
Everyone drew from and shared the same pool of animated gifs, clip art, backgrounds, and bars. There was a canon of imagery we all recognized: the flame bars, dancing baby, "under construction" signs, email buttons, etc. Yet we used the same images to express ourselves in different ways. We varied their placement, combined them with others, recontextualized them.
Loss of Angelfire & Tripod
Early web design produced a treasure trove of interesting and culturally significant graphics that should be preserved and studied like any other artifact representing an era of art, illustration, or design. Yet we're letting these artifacts disappear. First Geocities shut down, and recently Angelfire and Tripod vanished forever, taking with them the last vestiges of the earliest websites. The Internet Archive is all that remains as a historical record of the early internet.
What we've lost when Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod shut down could be viewed in a similar vein as the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the destruction of 75% of all silent films. I don't see the online community rallying or even noticing. Apart from a few reddit threads and social media posts, the response has been apathetic. But the early internet mattered. It was arguably better. And it deserves appreciation and preservation.
Purpose
From what I can tell, very little effort has gone into curating and collocating early internet graphics. There are no wikis or databases out there; no attempt to rescue, document, or organize them. GifCities, a subsidiary project of the Internet Archive, is the greatest resource we have as a dicovery tool for unearthing animated gifs. But what about clip art? What about backgrounds, bars, custom graphics?
In the early days, many personal sites had subpages with "cool clip art" they collected. What I have done with this Museum project is to emulate that very thing on the grandest scale possible. Where these old Geocities sites might gather 20 graphics, mine curates thousands.
Scope
I hope to maintain an active hub encompassing animated gifs, clip art, bars, and backgrounds. There are roughly 9,000 such images contained here, organized by subject, arranged on the page by hand and with a degree of order and organization, including cross-references to similar graphics. Had I started on this project sooner, I could have recovered even more before Angelfire and Tripod shut down. For now, this museum features what I've found in the wild from websites focused on gaming, fantasy, and 90s culture.
The original guiding impetus for finding and saving these images was to support my Dungeon Project, a series of interactive HTML pages inspired by dungeon crawlers and Encarta 95's Mind Maze. In my quest to create different rooms and scenes reusing old internet graphics, I was inspired to find as many "assets" as possible, which is how my collection of saved graphics began. Once I had trawled thousands of websites and saved 12,000 images, it occurred to me that I should organize and share these.
Future Plans
I had so much more I wanted to discover and retrieve from Angelfire & Tripod. Now my only avenue is archaeological digs on the Internet Archive. I'll keep adding to the museum. I have thousands of more images to sort through. Perhaps one day I'll expand the scope to all topics and produce a collection that has everything, the full taxonomy of human interests represented by graphics of the old web.
Mission statement
