unstrungstudio

Sadly, a large number of web sites are going offline these days. Lounge 72 is the most recent victim. After six years, the web site is leaving the fertile ground of design to other portal sites, like News Today, which now operates solely under the QBN moniker. Pixel Surgeon also left a gap in the world wide web recently. Things, inevitably, come to an end. As I am fond of saying, the only thing that you can truly count on in life is change. Yet, I still wonder where good sites go when they die.

Well, for those of us who are familiar with the web, we know that an almost endless archive continues to live in the annals of the server network that comprises the Internet. For example, to see comical examples of this web site's design, you can visit the Internet Archive. Fortunately, the archive is not complete, many of the images are missing. You can also visit web site's that should have a place in history, like the bright and shiny Enron web site from 2002.

For many, designers included, the web might seem like a fleeting medium, here today and gone tomorrow. However, the web offers us more options for maintaining examples of design in perpetuity than one might think. From the existence of dense, although incomplete, archives to screen captures and aggregation portals. In many cases, the web has a deeper memory than most humans. What is the shelf life of a print piece, really?

I love that the web is a constantly evolving entity, and although its history might not be as rich as the history of print, an issue that Armin touched on in Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou?. There is a rich design history driving the web, and although it often seems to be a tale of technological advancement; in truth, the tale of print is also a story of technological advancement.

At the very least, we might all benefit from a look at the first Amazon homepage, a classic moment in design.

posted by J.  # 11:45 AM