The decade of cluttered type, clunky websites, and dirty design. Oh, how I was not looking forward to this era of design. Let’s dive right on in, shall we?

As someone who was young in the nineties, I suppose I owe a lot to this era. It brought us the internet and the beginning of a lot of technologies that, as a millennial, I take for granted on a regular basis. Typography was huge in the nineties and one iconic typographer was David Carson – as an art director for Ray Gun magazine, he introduced the innovative typographies and distinct layouts. He revolutionised the graphic design world with his unconventional typographic styles and has been claimed to be the godfather of ‘grunge typography’.

90s Graphic Design and the Internet

Today we enjoy websites that are created to be visually pleasing, clean and most importantly, user-friendly. In the nineties websites where tables were the building blocks of almost every site. Creativity was limited by the technology of the time and this made the design rather boring. Websites were essentially long lines of text, colourful backgrounds, and chaotic gif placement.

If you don’t remember or weren’t old enough to have accessed the internet in the 90s you can still take a trip back in time to what is known within the industry as “brutalist websites” so named because of the ‘brutalism’ of its aesthetic. Using basic HTML the brutalist web design movement is all about creating rough and ready design, this approach is neither visually appealing nor user-friendly. Curious? Take a look at some of the pages on this archived website – https://brutalistwebsites.com/

Rave culture and design.

Just adding to the visual PAIN that is 90s design is Rave Culture.
Typography was bold and legible. Colours were bright or contrasting. Backgrounds dark and often inspired by science fiction and surrealism.

Fuelled by nostalgia some of these trends are coming back but with any luck, this will be a complete and total fad that will leave as fast as it came back.

The 1990s Typhograhic design styles weren’t all bad though, with some absolutely iconic movie posters coming out in 1994.
Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump are very well known no matter how old you were when the films came out, most people would be able to recognise the film poster with only a fraction of them displayed. Both posters rely heavily on the 90s style of big type and simple imagery and both pull it off so well!

Dirty Design

With the advance of computer technology and access to “knowledge” due to the internet you have a recipe for disaster. Combine publisher or photoshop with the ability for anyone to print anything with an inkjet or as a website, and you have design anarchy. In the 90s the role of the graphic designer was reshaped to take on the duties of typesetting and pre-press production, which were formerly separate roles. Designers were now at the mercy of their industry.

“The tools of the designer are confused with the skills of the designer … The accessibility of production tools has undercut the design profession since anyone could make a flyer or a brochure.”

– Johanna Drucker

For a period of time there it did seem as though digital technologies were going to spell the end for graphic artist and graphic design professions. Graphic Designers managed to ride that wave out by adapting to survive, taking on more skills and more roles and learning expensive and elaborate software – this, however, paved the way to dirty design.

“…Because we designers, as a profession, decided to take over other people’s jobs (color seps, typesetters, retouchers) instead of concentrating on ours. In general, I think we should think more. Thinking, however, is difficult. Typesetting is easy.”

-Steven Sagmeister

Designers who used the computer as a creative tool created work that looked chaotic, anarchic, and expressive – but not logical. The irony is that this is what made 90s digital design so interesting.