Revisiting Image Maps

Summary

I mentioned last time that I’ve been working on a new website for Emmy-award-winning game composer Mike Worth. He hired me to create a highly graphical design that showcases his work. Mike loves ’90s animation, particularly Disney’s Duck Tales and other animated series. He challenged me to find a way to incorporate their retro ’90s style into his design without making it a pastiche. But that wasn’t my only challenge. I also needed to achieve that ’90s feel by using up-to-the-minute code to maintain accessibility, performance, responsiveness, and semantics. Designing for Mike was like a trip back to when mainstream website design seemed more spontaneous and less governed by conventions and best practices. Some people describe these designs as “whimsical”: adjective spontaneously fanciful or playful given to whims; capricious quaint, unusual, or fantastic — Collins English Dictionary But I’m not so sure that’s entirely accurate. “Playful?” Definitely. “Fanciful?” Possibly. But “fantastic?” That depends. “Whimsy” sounds superfluous, so I call it “expressive” instead. Studying design from way back, I remembered how websites often included graphics that combined branding, content, and navigation. Pretty much every reference to web design in the ’90s — when I designed my first website — talks about Warner Brothers’ Space Jam from 1996. Warner Brothers’ Space Jam (1996) So, I’m not going to do that. Brands like Nintendo used their home pages to direct people to their content while making branded visual statements. Cheestrings combined graphics with navigation, making me wonder why we don’t see designs like this today. Goosebumps typified this approach, combining cartoon illustrations with brightly colored shapes into a functional and visually rich banner, proving that being useful doesn’t mean being boring. Left to right: Nintendo, Cheestrings, Goosebumps. In the ’90s, when I developed graphics for websites like these, I either sliced them up and put their parts in tables ...