Cath Virginia

In a special issue on the year 2004, The Verge looks twenty years back to examine how 2004 was “the year of the future,” setting in motion the internet as we know and use it today. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, and a slew of other giants launched, but the internet still had a Wild West quality that’s since been shaken loose. For the design of the issue, we wanted to capture the chaotic nature of the internet two decades ago, how novices of any age could hunker down on their desktops and create corners of the web that were entirely their own. 

The issue’s landing page is composed of a hub with three “skins,” mimicking that customizable nature of the internet (and computers) of the time—a toggle bar allows users to scroll through the options—along with other era-specific elements like a buddy list and pop-up text window.

The individual stories (sixteen in total) pay homage to the deliciously disheveled microsites of the early aughts: in “Crappy Cameras Are *So* Back,” a bedazzled page is an homage to a teenager’s blog, complete with sophisticated UX and clickable elements in the lede image. “The Year of The Music Licensing Legal Wars” pays tribute to the glossy green corridors of music downloads, the status bar tracking the percentage read recalls the agony of slow broadband speeds. Other stories, like “Facebook Put Us Out There” and “What Gmail Did to Email,” cheekily replicate the platforms’ interfaces of the era.

The Verge art department is a small but mighty team of four, and this package is both a love letter to a time we all saw ourselves for the first time online, and a capsule of what we hope it can become again: a place for play, creativity, and connection.