In 1997, the web got weird.
That was the year designer Ben Benjamin created Superbad.com, a website that was as much performance art back then as it is a functional museum of evergreen web design today. In 2019, the most engaging and vital interactive features on the internet wouldn’t be possible without Benjamin’s work, or that of the other “weird” web designers who came to prominence in the late ‘90s.
Legacy media has dragged its feet and stayed traditional to the point of skeuomorphing, but nowadays, it’s starting to look like that weird aesthetic—capitalizing on the web itself, and how technology has changed our visual and navigational vocabulary—is slowly clawing its way back into the mainstream. Today, weird withstands. Here’s why.
In 1992, Benjamin began his senior year at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana with barely 1,000 students. He earned a degree in psychology, and in his senior year, the college finally got access to the text-based form of civilian internet.
“We had been on ARPANET,” Benjamin says. “Then a friend of mine who was a computer guy was like, ‘We’re getting internet. It’s a big deal. We’re gonna be connected to a lot more computers.’” Like the rollout of Facebook, colleges and universities picked up internet access before the general public.
This first internet had limitations. “It was a big deal, but it was still before the web,” Benjamin says. “It wasn’t visual yet. You could go on newsgroups, and I was looking at chess matches. This was before Mosaic.”
Mosaic, the first graphical internet browser, was released later in 1993. To add pictures and sound to websites, experts found ways to shave off large fractions of data to form new file formats that could be sent over 14.4k modems.
There was still a sizable gap between the release of Mosaic and when regular, non-university-affiliated people got internet access. During this time, Benjamin moved to California, where he attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco. “I was learning to be a graphic designer,” Benjamin says. And something else was on his mind: “My last year of college, the first issue of Wired came out,” he says. “I was really excited about the web.”
With the release of Mosaic for PCs, Benjamin understood that a gigantic new audience was about to get online. “It was a new way for humans to communicate that we’ve never had before,” Benjamin says. “I'm in a position to really explore new possibilities within this new type of human communication. This is amazing."
Benjamin dropped out of art school and got a job at CNET, which launched in 1994. There, he rapidly learned data-conscious, browser-friendly web design. “There’s this mindmeld, where when people [were] trying to figure out how to do something, and there would be somebody in the room who would know how to do it,” he says. “So I learned to make web pages really quickly. And at CNET, we’re pushing to be efficient [and] very consumer friendly: 20K limit per page, keeping files really small, keeping pages really cross-browser compliant for the 90s.”
At CNET, Benjamin learned many of the tricks that he used to make Superbad so visually rich and interactive, but still fast-loading. A 1996 CNET feature on cable modems breaks information into pages by topic, and the intro page weighs in at 40K with the code and images combined. And these thoughtful tweaks worked: By 1999, CNET was one of the most visited websites on the internet.
At CNET, Ben Benjamin learned many of the tricks that he used to make Superbad so visually rich and interactive, but still fast-loading.
During his time at CNET, Benjamin learned the limitations and best practices of ‘90s internet, and when he left after a year, he began a freelance career. He read Dr. Lev Manovich’s influential essay “On Totalitarian Interactivity” and wondered if the idea that hypertext—the jump-around interactivity of Wikipedia—only created the illusion of democracy. In Manovich’s essay, he laments the disconnect between traditional visual art and the weak Xerox copy we’ve recreated online. “All classical art was already ‘interactive,’” Manovich writes. “[W]e are asked to mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own.”
Superbad began as a simple, related thought. Benjamin worked all day making websites for corporations and other clients.