Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

Nostalgia and Early Learning Culture

• Many commenters began their careers with these books and sites, learning by “View Source” and experimenting on Geocities, personal sites, and early blogs.
• Other contemporaneous influences mentioned: “Web Pages That Suck,” Flash books, CSS design galleries, and early design blogs/communities.
• There’s strong nostalgia for a time when the web felt experimental, personal, and fun, even when sites were ugly or hard to use.

Print Aesthetics vs Native Web Design

• Some argue early “gurus” largely transplanted print and DTP thinking onto the web, overloading pages with dense layouts, colors, and information.
• Others counter that these designers were pushing the limits of a very constrained medium and toolset, and that experimentation was necessary before standards and better tools existed.
• Game UI and demoscene design are cited as better models for simple, screen-native interaction.

Usability, Minimalism, and the Usability Expert’s Legacy

• The usability advocate in the trio is widely credited with popularizing empirical user testing, discount usability, and concepts like Fitts’ Law, personas, and small-sample testing.
• Supporters say this focus on speed, clarity, and minimalism helped kill Flash intro pages and mystery-meat navigation.
• Critics describe his work as rigid, aesthetically indifferent, and sometimes ironically unusable (book/page layouts), but still useful as ammunition against bad client demands.
• Several note that many of his “best practices” clash with today’s conversion-driven dark patterns and ad-heavy layouts.

Flash, Creativity, and Lost Possibilities

• Flash is remembered fondly as a uniquely approachable, powerful environment for animation and interaction; many careers started there.
• Its strengths (consistent cross-platform visuals, vector graphics, simple scripting) are seen as still unmatched in ease of authoring, even though it was overused for ads and killed by mobile constraints and platform decisions.

Evolution of the Web: From Tables to CSS to Homogenization

• Commenters recall invisible tables, spacer GIFs, browser-specific CSS hacks, and “web-safe” color palettes as everyday survival techniques.
• Google’s radically simple homepage is seen as a pivotal moment showing the power of minimalism.
• Some feel modern CSS/HTML are vastly better yet underused creatively; the visual web is now standardized and “sterile,” with far fewer surprising designs.

Climate-Change Detour

• One of the 90s authors’ current climate-skeptic website is briefly discussed; commenters deride the content while noting the irony of its poor design.