Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

Summary

The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability. By Richard MacManus | May 28, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, 1997 My well-thumbed copies of three classic web design books: 'Creating Killer Web Sites' by David Siegel (1996-97), 'Taking your Talent to the Web' by Jeffrey Zeldman (2001), and 'Designing Web Usability' by Jakob Nielsen (1999). Like many of the first wave of web designers, Jeffrey Zeldman — who turned 42 in early 1997 — had begun his career in a completely different profession. He’d started out as an aspiring fiction author, briefly worked as a journalist, tried his hand as a touring musician, and then spent ten years in the advertising business. “Writing billboards and coming up with quick visuals was good training for the web because you have to communicate something instantly,” he later said in an interview. It was the rise of multimedia that attracted creatives like Zeldman, who made his first website in 1995. “Hyperlinked text made the web, graphics made it a consumer playground,” he wrote on his personal website at the end of 1996. Jeffrey Zeldman's homepage, March 1997. Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions. Via Wayback Machine. But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).” To create his webpages, Zeldman used a plain text editor on a Macintosh computer to compose the HTML, along with Photoshop to create his graphics. He encouraged people to keep to HTML fundamentals, but he was also pragmatic — copy other designe...