I didn't expect to find that...

I recently discovered gifcities.org, while building the new neocities website for vulpinoid studios (if you're interested, look here). I've been interested in the concept of the underground resurgence of the free web as a backlash against Web3.0 which is awesomely punk in its aesthetic. Neocities feels like the way the web used to be before the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, a bit of a wild west where people can lay claim to an address and just do whatever cool stuff they want. 

As a part of this, there has been a reclaiming of the 88x31 gif button, which is how I got led to GifCities. There's argument about how this standardised size was developed, with folks pointing to an early Netscape Navigator button as the prototype. 

 


But it moved beyond there to other programs, and other links between sites back in GeoCities and MySpace days.

 

It's not hard to make something like this, and the file format is pretty small, so I figured I'd make my own for the website I'm building. I just think it's cool that old technologies like this are making a pushback, giving this part of the web a really lo-fi and handmade aesthetic. Here's what I've come up with so far...


I'm trying to work out some of these gif buttons for the other games I've developed over the years too.

The things that struck me about this rabbit hole was thinking about some of the old gifs I made back in the 90s. I was really wondering if the old "cybergoth" gif had been archived, because I lost it off my physical hard drives years ago... 

...and there it was.


Gothic, dark, edgy, peak 90s. I'm glad I found it again... naturally, it will be thrown into the new site somewhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7)

Image
A working computer and scanner...that means it is time to get back to work on the geomorph sequence. A lot of the discussion in this set of tutorials has been focused around square geomorphs. They're the easiest for most people to wrap their heads around.  But my preferred form of geomorph is based around the hexagon, these tend to produce more organic and interesting shapes. This is true for natural environments, but it's no less true for urban environments. The example set of geomorphs above as a simple two-phase system. One edge type is plain, the other edge type has a road piercing the centre. There could be dozens of combinations and permutations for each of the two phases around the hexagonal edges, but a quick look at the variety of buildings and road shapes shows that there could literally be hundreds of possible options when drawing these map fragments. But you certainly don't need to create hundreds of designs for the system to be effective. Usin...
Read more

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 1)

Image
After numerous requests to get back to map tutorials, it's time to start our new series. This time focusing on the concept of geomorphs, modular map fragments that can be mixed and matched. We'll start with a couple of theoretical tutorials before sinking into a few more practical posts. I'm predicting a dozen or so posts in this sequence, but let's see how long it lasts.
Read more