Steven Garrity's Web Design Hall of Shame
Here lies the strange and amusing history of web writing and design of me, Steven Garrity. Much of it is embarrassing, but I hope you will find it as entertaining as I have (this is not likely). How I came to be the brilliantly subtle writer and web designer I am today, I will never know.
The Life & Times of MetaMedia
MetaMedia was a company started by my childhood friend, Dan James (now CEO of silverorange) while we were still in high school. Each of the following served as our live website at some point.
1997 - 1998
This was first site we put up and it served us for over a year. Check out the portfolio to see how well it served us. We were just learning how to run a business, how to create web graphic, write HTML. Not the animation on the sub-pages - that took me hours to create - and I think I might have been proud of it.
1998 - 1999
We are still occasionally ridiculed for the writing on the home page by our co-workers. I remember thinking it was extremely clever (perhaps it was X-treme-ly clever). Brokenrecord.gif - wow.
1999 -
I can't really explain this design. I'll never forget the day our company met with a government official to discuss a proposal. He had our site printed off from his ink-jet printer on a sopping wet ink soaked page. At that point, it made sense.
Some of the sites were dug up from old backups while others were retrieved from the Wayback Machine. Many have broken links and are incomplete. Some were used on live websites, other were trial designs that never saw the light of day. I post them here that you may find joy in my folly and hope in my progress.
The MetaMedia Experiments
If you can believe it, there were designs we thought we too wacky to actually use as live websites. These are particularly interesting - and note that 'interesting' does not indicate a value judgement.
I suspect the background animation sprung from the 'do it because you can - not because you should' design methodology. The transparent-grid GIFs are kinda cool though. At least I didn't use too many photoshop filters. This design was never used.
You may have to increase the contrast on your monitor to enjoy this. I suppose it was a splash screen of some kind. Never used.
I'm not sure where I stole this idea. We considered it for the live site, but it never got beyond this mockup.
You'll definitely want to read this one closely as we make some earth shattering claims. Keep in mind, this site was never used.
I'm not sure what this one is all about. Perhaps I should have titled it Nuclear Winter. Never used.
The Unclassifiable Other Stuff
The following sites defy classification.
Other have since claimed to invent it and call it 'Extreme Walking'. $#@! them. We invented it and we call it Leaping. You should really check out the pictures section.
Horton's Choice was my high school band. This is one of the old sites I found. As you'll see announced on the front page, it coincided with the release of our self recorded cassette. Explore closely. This is funny.
I think I must have seen k10k by the time I did this one. Sorry for the popup window. This site was never used.
This site ran for a long time for our band and had loads of updates. The News section was a blog before blogs were blogs. Look for our friend Ffoeg's essays.