brief history of web design

A brief history of web design for designers

My interest in coding my designs was lost at the the moment I realized how much trickery had to be done to make it happen. Seemingly simple issues could be solved in so many ways. Yet it still might not have worked on some browsers.
One thing that always made me wonder is why there's a division between design and code. Why difficult things become more simpler, but simple things become more difficult?
So instead of debating whether designers should learn code or developers should learn design, let's set some common ground on how design for the web evolved and how we could bridge the gap between code and design.

The dark ages of web design (1989)

The very beginning of web design was pretty dark, as screens were literally black and only few monochrome pixels lived therein. Design was made by symbols and tabulation (Tab key). So let's fast forward to the time when Graphic User Interface was the main way of surfing the web – the Wild West era of tables.

Tables – The beginning (1995)

The birth of browsers that could display images was the first step into web design as we know it. The closest option available to structure information was the concept of tables already existing in HTML. So putting tables within tables, figuring out clever ways to mix static cells with fluid cells was the thing, started by David's Siegel's book Creating Killer Sites. Though it didn’t feel totally right since the main purpose of a table is to structure numbers, it was still the common method to design the web for quite some time. The other problem was the difficulty to maintain these fragile structures. This is also the time when the term slicing designs became popular. Designers would make a fancy layout, but it was up to developers to break it into small pieces and figure out the best way to make that design work. On the other hand, tables had some awesome features like the ability to align things vertically, be defined in pixels or in percentages. The main benefit was that it was the closest to a grid we could get back then. It was also the time when so many developers decided not to like front-end coding.