We Are Losing the History of Web Design

We need a web design museum.

We need to start collecting and gathering artifacts (physical and digital), stories, documents, whatever we can get our hands on, to preserve the history of web design. From the launch of the World Wide Web to Netscape 1.1 to the adoption of web standards which enabled Web 2.0, Responsive Web Design and the multi-device world that we live in today.

For too long we have relied upon a service that “archives” other websites but it’s not enough. The archives are tragically incomplete and lack the means to provide the full experience of what used to be. Archive.org does not adequately preserve enough information to serve as a lasting account of the our work. We can not rely on large, multi-billion dollar companies to do this for us. Nor can we depend upon individuals to properly archive PSDs, HTML, their work, which helped to change the world.

We have already lost too much. There are so many wonderful sites from 1994-2004 that have disappeared. All that is left are domains that have been turned into Go-Daddy-SEO-Landing-Page-clutter because the old site had a Google Page Rank higher than the pulse of a nursing home. I hate to think about how many amazing pre-Web 2.0 sites that are gone for good because a service shut down, ad revenue dwindled, or there was a lack of time or interest or both.

Somewhere in Christopher Schmitt’s home is a Zip disk with a complete backup of High Five, one of the first sites dedicated to the review and critique of web design. I know he’s looked up and down for that disk but it might be gone forever and with it, an important piece of our professions’ history and heritage.

We need a museum! An institution that can help preserve first-hand accounts of how things were done, what went down in the past. The working files, important emails, formative essays, and forgotten blog posts. We need to preserve the story of how web design began and how it has evolved to today.

In 1996 I purchased my first web design book, Designing Web Graphics by Lynda Weinman. Since then, I have amassed a small library of web design books. Looking through the collection you can see how web design changed with larger screen resolutions, new versions of HTML, and eventually different devices.

While I love to look through that collection, it only provides glimpses of the design, not a complete representation of the experience. We shouldn’t settle for this and certainly not for anything less.

“We Need a Web Design Museum” was originally published as “Vogel” in Airbag International on April 8, 2014.