Design practices emerge and fade away. Knowing the past can inform inventing the future. Below are some of my self-taught web and interface design experimentation from the early 2000s. This was the period called “Generation Flash” by Lev Manovich. Website interfaces themselves became a canvas for visual and audio expression and style. This resulted in blurring the boundaries between content and the interface to access that content. In many such interfaces, each click and interaction was designed to feel consequential and have "weight" and a sense of aliveness.

Countless hours of handcrafting experimentation led me to view gen flash as when the medium and tools afforded exploration with aspects like playfulness, comedic or irreverent effect, futuristic outlook, minimalism, immersiveness, creating an atmosphere similar to that of ambient music, or simply originality.

Some of that aesthetic lives on in video games and interactive media (where "gen flash" took inspiration from), creative coding, VFX, application personalization skins and themes, mobile apps, and OS GUIs.

Creativity on the web now extends beyond design language and basic interactivity (which have largely standardized from the use of templates and themes) and into data infrastructure, APIs, scalability, emerging platform support, services, and AI.

While the current web (as of 2023) is emphasizing clickbait content, "best" practices, usability and “efficiency” (the ubiquitous search feature), aesthetic experimentation for the web is now in the form of creative coding communities, chrome experiments, and 3D web graphics technologies. For instance, here are my web experiments.

More examples of previous design practices can be found at the Web Design Museum. Gen Flash done poorly led to "those annoying flash banner ads and loading screens" or cool but utimately meaningless visuals but when well executed, marked the beginnings of a new craft or even art form.

"The main goal of the Web Design Museum project is to map out past trends in web design that were dominant on the Internet between 1991 and 2006. We would like to preserve the creative legacy of web designers from the turn of the millennium for future generations, since Internet users in 2030 would hardly guess how unique the websites in 2003 were in terms of their design."

-Web Design Museum Mission (read the comments to their videos for insights!)

"There's usability... but there's also joy ... there's that simple fun of being able to .."

-Interview with flash web designer Yugo Nakamura in 2000 (1:46)