field note

Y2K Neozine Vibes

Throwback to the golden age.

I’ve been designing for digital since the early 2000s, when, without frameworks, libraries, or even even reliable css positioning, the design community managed to do some amazingly original design work. Some might say the Golden age of Web Design. In hindsight, the lack of those tools actually drove the collective creativity and web design was less comoditized and reflected more hand-crafted tastes and workmanship. More personal experimentation, more community links, more design for the love of design.

Somewhere along the way we shifted to more framework-oriented, cookie-cutter design templates and everything started looking the same. We all watched as design was efficiently filtered from a thousand wild, heirloom varieties to a handful of domesticated cash crops.

Social media and algorithms further refined community sharing to follower metrics, hot takes on job titles, and general engagement farming. Now AI is here to automate all the shitty parts of what is wrong with design and the internet.

If you were around the design community back-in-the-day, maybe you feel a bit of nostalgia toward those vibes. In a very small way, I made this site as a sort of throwback to that era and wanted to try to rediscover some of the things I liked about web design. While a lot of us are busy “transforming” our day roles with AI, I’m trying, (with AI), to have a little fun, take a break from the race-to-the-bottom, and use AI to make cool things for myself.

I hope you like it, or at the very least find something interesting.

Check out the Homage to K10k