Batman Forever website, launched May 1995. If 1994 was when the Web became a publishing medium, then 1995 was when the Web truly marked itself as a unique expressive medium. The Web became a place — a destination — rather than a mere repository for documents. In previous posts, we've seen how web design elements...

Cool Site of the Day; screenshot via ​Megan Sapnar Ankerson. On August 10, 1994, a 33-year old web enthusiast named Glenn Davis posted the following announcement to a UseNet mailing list: "Need a daily web fix of something new? Try The Cool Site of the Day. Every night at midnite the Cool Site of the Day gets set to...

Netscape's browser project was codenamed Mozilla during 1994; via Macintosh Garden. If web design is not yet a profession in 1993 because of the technical limitations of HTML and early browsers, then 1994 is the year web authors start asking the question: why can't we control formatting and presentation? At this...

Global Network Navigator (GNN); via Ford & Mason Ltd. If Adam Curry's MTV.com in 1993 was a text-based index of music reviews and industry gossip — basically the same format as a Gopher site or FTP server — then Global Network Navigator (GNN) aimed to be something a little more high-minded. It aspired to be an...

MTV VJ Adam Curry in 1993, the year he took to the Web with MTV.com. Photo via WikiMedia. Any history of web design has to begin with the first graphical web browser to go mainstream: Mosaic, later to be renamed Netscape Navigator. At the beginning of 1993, college student Marc Andreessen wrote a message to the...

Web design books; by Phillip Chee on Flickr, February 2010. Welcome to season 5 of Cybercultural, which will be a history of web design from 1993 till 2012. That's twenty years of web design, going from the grey HTML webpages of 1993 through to the colourful, mobile-centric (yet responsive) designs of 2012. This...

DavidBowie.com, January 8, 2013. After 2004, the rise of the social web — and especially platforms like MySpace and Facebook — made niche social networks like BowieNet less relevant in the culture. This shift coincided with the slow decline of BowieNet itself. The portal and ISP had launched in 1998 and had two...

Pitchfork's 2003 review of MP3 blogger favorite, The Rapture. Season 4 of Cybercultural has been focused on the rise of digital culture from 1994 through to 2003, a period that encompasses the beginning of the web, moves through the dot-com boom and bust, and ends the year before Web 2.0 emerges. During this season,...

Flash at full volume: Jamiroquai’s website in 2003. By 2003, the internet had weathered the worst of the dot-com crash and developers and entrepreneurs were beginning to come out of hibernation. While it would take another year for Silicon Valley to start inflating another bubble — this one would be named "Web 2.0"...

Browsing the indie web is like browsing a record store; you'll be surprised at the treasures you find. Photo by Josué Sánchez. I've always liked doing annual wrapup posts, from the Best Web 2.0 Companies posts on ReadWriteWeb in Web 2.0 through to the "What the Internet Was Like in {Year}" posts on Cybercultural...

The release of NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, one of the first popular RSS Readers. So far in my history of blogging and RSS, we've seen how weblogs emerged in 1999 as a new form of personal journal, began to link to each other in 2000 via blogrolls, turned serious in 2001 with "warblogs," and then became an...

BowieNet version 3. Screenshot circa September 2003, via Web Design Museum. At the end of July 2003, in the lead-up to the release of David Bowie's latest album, Reality, BowieNet teased members with a promotional splash page and a new feature called the “Reality Jukebox.” The latter turned out to be a Flash page...