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› November 8, 2001

Browsing back through time

  • Reported by francois

I've always been interested in redesigns (on the web and other media) as they happen, especially the big guys. I figure that considering the amount of money and expertise (and corporate ego) that obviously went into something like that, it makes sense to try and learn from it what one can. A before-after picture gives an excellent idea of the decisions that were made.

Some other high-profile redesigns this year were bbc, hotmail, slate, ibm, webmd, latimes, and of course google. Offline, some other notable redesigns have been the Economist and the NRC Handelsblad.

For my own research purposes, I've made many before/after snapshots that I've been planning to put on my own site. Seeing Nathan Lineback's fascinating GUI archive also served as inspiration.

The amazing Internet Archive Wayback Machine, when it sorts out its growing pains, may well have made this idea obsolete, while providing web designers with an invaluable view over the evolving face of web design.

Comments

1. November 8, 2001 04:11 PM

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Nate Posted…

Here are a handfull of old designs: http://www.icehousedesigns.com/webarchive/

2. November 9, 2001 03:31 AM

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francois Posted…

I think I will still go ahead and do my before-after gallery when I get time. I think a few side-by-side comparisons with some commentary will still be useful. The aim is not so much nostalgia as analysing the thinking behind design upgrades.

3. November 9, 2001 12:01 PM

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Nate Posted…

It's a great idea francois, I think quite a bit could be learned from it. On a simillar note, I've been thinking of putting together a collection of approaches to various recuring visual themes in websites. For instance, hundreds if not thousands of site designs have found some method of iconifying navigation and many of these navigation icons represent the same thing (news, about us, case studies, etc). Wouldn't it be interesting to see many of these approaches collected for compairison's sake? Perhaps that would be a good subject for the next webgraphics feature article.

4. November 9, 2001 12:27 PM

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francois Posted…

Aha, that brings you onto the subject of "Patterns" in web design, so named in deference to Christopher Alexander's work on architectural pattern languages. Many people have seized on the applicability to interaction design and websites in particular. In fact, the last meeting of the AIGA Experience Design London group was on "Pattern languages in interaction design" (more related links on this page.) The Interaction Design Patterns Page is like the usableweb.com of I.D. patterns. One site that is already on its way to becoming a good resource of this type is Martijn van Welie's Web Design Patterns, which collects patterns under the categories of Navigation, Page elements, Searching and Ecommerce. His method of describing patterns under the headings of Problem--Principle--Context--Forces--Solution is derived from Alexander's method. More of his work is to be found here. I've done something similar, cataloguing navigation schemes which I've illustrated schematically. Note to self to put this online. I think there is definitely a strong case for a web-graphics.com feature on patterns, covering both examples and the application of this knowledge. It is also a political issue, treading that balance between good standardisation and stultification.

5. November 9, 2001 12:33 PM

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francois Posted…

According to Christopher Alexander's original definition, "A Pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use that solution a million of times over..." This from the Hypermedia Design Patterns Repository

6. November 9, 2001 12:38 PM

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francois Posted…

Damn, I left a tag open again. Keyboard shortcuts for common tag pairs will help combat it, but clever scripting (way beyond anything I could do) can also prevent it.

7. November 15, 2001 07:45 AM

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ollie Posted…

http://www.archive.org Just stumbled upon this, an internet archive... type in the url and see it's previous incarnations

8. November 15, 2001 08:16 AM

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francois Posted…

Hi Ollie! Yes, that's the site I was writing about in the first place. The service and the web.archive.org URL are currently off-line; they underestimated demand and were overloaded by requests. By the way, someone has already written some bookmarklets for the Wayback Machine (via kottke.org.) 'Once you have installed the Bookmarklets, just click "Most Recent..." to see the latest archived version of the page or "Index..." to see the list of all archived copies. This works great for pages that are 404.' Great idea, once WM resumes service that is.