Getting together…

One of the most wonderful aspects of the web remains its people. The ones who get together to collaborate to try and solve problems. The ones who join a cause, a petition to help. And the ones who see the greater good and want to tell everyone about it ツ

This article is a little trip down memory lane ~ a look at some amazing projects, sites and collaborations. For those of us around in those days, we’ll fondly remember. Those who are too young will hopefully be inspired and find much to enjoy.

CSS Zen Garden

Around the pivotal point in my web journey – shortly after I’d seen the error of my ways and had begun to learn CSS, this amazing site surfaced on the web. Dave Shea, a graphic designer from Canada, came up with the idea to showcase the power of CSS. The aim was to show everyone how flexible and powerful CSS was in a time when layout was build, or should I say hacked together, with tables.

CSS Zen Garden came to be and inspired so, so many of us. In its day, the idea was simple: take the given HTML and implement your design with images and CSS. You could not edit the HTML, only add your design, implementing it with CSS only ~ putting it live online and sending the link to Dave who would review it and add it to the ever-growing collection.

It became like a badge of honour – a true test for us designers to have our designs featured in this amazing collection. I still remember working on mine, struggling with my newly learnt skills yet keen to be part of this project. I’m happy to say that my submission in 2004 (If I remember correctly) was accepted — I now cringe at the code, of course, but at the time I was proud to contribute.

Back in the day, there was a huge archive of the many, many of designs. The site is now a museum and features a collection of the star pieces, you should definitely have a look!

Lost world’s fairs

These days, we’re all just happy that Internet Explorer is no longer a browser we have to worry about (other than for exceptional projects which might have a user base of people on older tech, older OS and older browsers). In 2010 though, web designers were excited about IE9 supporting web fonts ~ and this little site was created in collaboration to show off what became possible.

These pages no longer all hold up as well as they did back then (some of the typesetting shows minor flaws) but they still deliver beautiful designs. Well worth a look ツ

24 ways

This website was created by Drew McLellan in 2005 and was active for 15 years, now an online archive of excellent articles. Drew had the idea of creating an advent calendar which would publish a new article per day in December leading up to Christmas. Initially, he planned to publish very short and succinct posts, hoping for his web design and developement friends to contribute. What had been a modest plan became a yearly highlight for us all ~ Drew’s contributors wrote brilliant articles with wonderful insights, shared code snippets and different approaches to various design and development issues. He had help with organising the authors and articles, with the development and publishing and much more. It became a collaboration which most of us looked forward to every year.

Do read his wonderful article called ‘The Accidental Side Project’ about the start and end of the project 15 years later. All articles remain online and it’ll be time well spent to dive in and have a read ツ

The same applies to another collection of articles, titled 52 weeks of UX, “Josh & Josh Production. All content and images © 2010. Designed by Joshua Brewer. Powered by Tumblr”.

This site is worth for the design as well as content – the article collection is now a classic, a piece of history of UX design. There are a few issues with some of the links but there’s also always a way to find the articles.

A word on side projects:

The article was triggered by collecting design inspirations and coming across old posts by people on sites which started as small ideas and grew into something much bigger to the joy of everyone. Looking back at these wonderful creations again reminded me how much fun side projects are. How much we can learn by enjoying ourselves with the work that goes into something so free and free of obligations, guidelines or requirements.