Tag Archives: nostalgia

Web Badges from the 1990s and 2000s

One of the aesthetics of old web pages that I love the most are those teeny tiny badges (sometimes animated) that appear towards the bottom of the pages. Back in the days of 640×480 or 800×600 resolution CRT monitors these badges weren’t instantly visible until you reached the end of the badge. However these days, if you manage to stumble onto a relic of a webpage, the badges usually show up in full view thanks to 1080p monitor resolutions.

These little badges managed to perform a variety of simple tasks from advertising products you personally endorsed (like web browsers or chat applications), to forced sponsorship badges from your hosting provider, to badges indicating that your website (or webpage) used only the latest of web technology.

This post is a celebration of these tiny heroes, forgotten to time and dreadfully out of fashion.

Enjoy!

If you prefer web banners, then check out this post.

Warning!
This page probably will make whatever browser you are using run slow – to the point it might even stop responding.

Gallery

Web Banners from the 1990s and 2000s

In similar vein to the Web Badges post, this post will feature a gallery of those pesky ad banners, which in hindsight were probably less infuriating than some of the modern multimedia type adverts we have to endure today!

Bask in the glory of 4 frame gifs with plenty of dither!

Disclaimer

This page is a true assault on the eyes – so if you become hypnotised from watching all of these banners blink away simply close your browser window!

In all seriousness this page may take a while to load depending on how it grows, although most of these banners came from an era of dial up moden and slow DSL broadband and weigh in a measly ~20KB you may find they take a while to load in.

Also if you are using a browser based ad-blocker such as AdBlockPlus or uBlock Origin then you may find that some of the banners do not load / display. Simply temporarily disable the plug in and everything should show in all its glory (its ok you can turn the blocker back on after!).

All the dates given in parentheses “()” are from the date modified string on the original file – they may not be strictly accurate to the age of the banner.

Gallery

Terrible 90s Web Graphics (Art Explosion!)

While sorting through a cupboard of old unused software at work we came across a nearly complete collection of clip-art, fonts, photos and graphics simply titled Art Explosion.

The discs contain your normal fare of odd clip-art (which appear to mostly be scans of drawings from 1900-1950), low-resolution amateur photographs of various subjects (a post on these to come), fonts that I don’t think anyone would ever consider using and a small amount of totally radical gnarly web graphics – just what you need to make your GeoCities website really POP. Anyway, enough rambling…

Warning!
This page probably will make whatever browser you are using run slow – to the point it might even stop responding.

Animations

Let’s not mess around here – the best items on these CD-ROM’s are the animated GIF’s.

Buttons

Yeah these aren’t that interesting. There are hundreds of variants on the CD-ROM, so I will only share my er… favourites.

Offset Oval on White

Oval Chrome Red Dark Background

Oval Gel Blue Light Background

Paint Splat Bubble Gum Light Background

Panic Button Bubbled Purple

Santa Fe Plaque Green

Scribble Lava Light Background