Ghosts on the machine
These are web sites and designs that are no longer extant, but which we choose to commemorate for reasons of our own.
It is common to all web firms that, for reasons quite outside their control, sites they have worked on - frequently their pride and joy - will disappear from the web or will be reworked by others in a form that makes them unsuitable entries in a corporate portfolio. This is 'portfolio rot' and the only positive thing to say about it is that it does keep us on our toes. In remediation, however, we have been able to rescue a few fragments of websites that we were pleased with - at least at the time - or that present some points of interest.
- Election 97
Election 97 - which was at www.election.co.uk - has since disappeared for reasons that are unclear, but we cannot let it go unsung and unmourned (it was a mighty resource).
Here are some selected pages that were part of our contribution to this huge collaborative site. - Insynch
The Insynch project was a fixed-term initiative to provide skills and access learning for work in the creative, cultural and humanities industries in West London. The project is now over, having achieved its goals, but we kind of liked the design, so we have archived it. - The Web Review
The Web Review was an ITV weekly magazine series that, well, reviewed websites and ran to three seasons. We provided this design and engineered a content management system using PHP and mysql running on a Linux server. This allowed the site managers to categorise and publish the full text of reviews on a weekly basis and enabled a complex search to be made on the archive.
The site, sadly, was removed when the series came to an end. We can only consider this a misunderstanding of what the web is all about, as the site had, by this time, an extensive archive of reviews and a very popular forum.
But we cannot, sadly, publish the original review archive or revive the forum, but here is the front page, just to give an idea of the design. - The Internet Factory
Fin Fahey comments: 'Brings a tear to my eye. This is the design for an early 1990s Internet firm that I briefly worked for. In them days, the commercial Internet hadn't really found its feet and even if you were a programmer you had to hack out the odd design too. So don't judge me too harshly. After all, pictorial icons and little globular blobs were totally à la mode at the time. The text that floods all the way across the page is a bit dodgy though - probably looked just fine on a 640 X 480 screen...
As far as I can remember, the only tools used here were TextPad and Photoshop 3 - dead posh. Most people back then were using version -1.0 of Paint Shop Pro.'
The design is reproduced here - in all its Rothkoesque glory - with Albedo Systems content, though the code has been slightly updated (the complete lack of navigation rollovers reflects the original - you just couldn't script these in 1995). - The Museum of Lost Icons
Like any other medium, the web has its phases, fads and fancies. One of those was - in the early 90s - a great love of representational icons for navigation. Here are some that we saved from the cutting bin.
