here & now

While reading about Web visuals I came across this article from designer and critic Max Bruinsma, for Eye magazine, about The 1st International Browserday, a design student competition which took place in 1998, in Amsterdam, based on the concept of reinventing Netscape’s browser, from its roots to visuals.

The article features some of the 38 designs and concepts presented at the competition.

At a time when mostly software engineers were involved in the process of designing interfaces for Web and designers and artists were only figuring out the new possibilities within the medium, Netscape released the code for their browser, allowing others to work and develop it in new directions.

The projects range from metaphorical and even comic proposals, to more serious ones, which address the highly visual oppressive nature of standard browser interfaces, and ultimately, radical proposals based on ideas of customization, invisibility of the interface and browsers that actually learn to think like you!

Interesting to see here is how the future looked like 12 years ago, and compare it to the present.

Putting aside the 90’s mostly outdated web designs, the technical impossibilities existing at the time and the usability problems some projects faced, a large number of proposals raised interesting and still very actual questions about how should browsers and search engines work, which kind of information should be privileged, and what kind of improved (and sometimes futuristic) visual experience were we expecting from the future. Anyway, we seem to have walked towards a different direction…

The proposals remain now like an abandoned project, archaeological relics from the past. Yet, they also belong to the future.

By reading this, one gets the feeling the future hasn’t come yet.