A Plea to the IndieWeb on the Topic of Expanding Oldweb Graphics Archival Efforts
So, I don't normally make pleas to most people out there on the internet. I also don't really expect to share something with the intent of like spreading it as far as it can, but I'm hoping the reach of this article will go somewhere. It's mainly based on conversations I've had with people here and there, but I've noticed it's come up quite a bit.
I want to talk about Oldschool Web Graphics Archival & Creation for a bit.
Now, I don't want you to think this is necessarily negative. It's not. For those of you who are already doing this, you can keep on doing it. But what I suppose I'm asking is that people kinda cast the net a bit wider. Like, actually, I'm just straight up begging you to please start including other types of graphics as well as what people tend to currently archive. Especially because I've noticed that quite a lot of rentry pages are suddenly going down, which means that we're going to start seeing the pools of webgraphics we currently have start shrinking as things get lost, and eventually most webgraphics pages might start looking the same.
But yeah, it's an observation. Right now, a lot of people tend to archive the following: Blinkies, Stamps, and 88x31 buttons. And then they kind of stop there. Sometimes, you get people archiving sozai as well (Pixel art, usually being characters, signs with text, background tiles, and dividers.) But like, I noticed a lot of old things are kind of getting skipped over as well. There's like 2 different types of userbars out there, and sometimes in a great while I see one type get archived--The ones that are like "This User loves Team Fortress 2" and stuff like that. And that's like great, because it's good to see that around. But what I really wanna talk about is these ones:
But sometimes I find myself sitting there like "oh, we really don't have any archive for those old glossy ones with the little tiny text anymore" minus like one site that barely works half the time. I think there's a few people out there still collecting them today. But I kinda found myself being like "Dang, I remember on RoosterTeeth's forums back in like 2006 and stuff, where we would have like WALLS of this stuff on our about section of our profile." And they were the norm in forums too. And I'm not totally trying to be like "Well, I'm nostalgic for it, so you should definitely bring it back" but at the same time like... I dunno, people don't seem to be aware sometimes.
I just remember talking to someone probably like a month or 2 back and them calling these "A lost art." And like, I dunno, but it's been gnawing at the back of my mind. Like. Surely it can't be that lost right?
...Right?
So I went digging. Searching around made me realize that like as far in as page 3, while I do get some results worthwhile, A lot of them just start diverging from what the type of graphic is and start being related to that specific community. We have a few generators that seem to work, and a few places archiving them (And one forum that like dies constantly). But I started to realize like... Nobody's making these kinds of things authentically anymore. Maybe it is turning into a lost art? Like I know some people are doing it still on Tumblr, but it's hard to figure out how active people are when you forgot your tumblr login and password and haven't really wanted to go onto social media enough to like, actually check it out. Because y'know, you need a tumblr account to browse past like 3 pages worth of information in a tag. But that's whatever.
I set it in the back of my mind for the time being, and moved on with my day.
Cue another incident. Actually, it's more than one, it's quite a few. For anyone who's browsed my site, you've probably noticed that I make oldschool 100x100 pixel Livejournal user icons. Now, these things really used to be everywhere. It's insane how much traction these things get. And yet, I see so many people not only never bringing them up, but then also they don't tend to get included in a lot of graphics arechives. I think I can think of less than 5 websites that I know of that has user icons of any sort that aren't my own. I find it a bit... I dunno, jarring? Like, what do you mean these are just up and disappearing? A decade ago, 100x100 pixels was still pretty standard on most forums for icons. Sure, the nicer ones with better software would let you have 200x200 or bigger as monitors grew in size, but 100 was far from uncommon. And roleplayers on Tumblr were using and creating them left and right as well.
So like, where did they all go? Why am I suddenly hearing people refering to them as "such a throwback" and "nearly a lost art?" These aren't too uncommon. Hell, I'd say it's the easiest sort of graphic to make. Sure you can tweak colors with filters or blending modes. Or you could toss on textures, brushes, text. Some peole wouldn't even do that. They'd just crop an image and call it a day. It doesn't even have to be fancy. But calling it a lost art is just surreal to me because of the ease of making these. You don't even need photoshop. Any old editor with layers will do. GIMP IS FREE!. Did you use to work with photoshop but you don't want to pay their shit ass licenses? Here, make GIMP into Photoshop! Or hell, just a reminder: CS2's activation servers are permanently offline. They gave out the keys for that shit and they're easily searchable. Go download that! I still use it out of habit! Just because they hid it on their site doesn't mean it's not still searchable and that there aren't good safe mirrors for downloads of the program. The key works. It's on the sites. And it's not illegal. Don't forget, they could have not told us that information once, but Adobe chose to do so at some point. So they legally gave out their program for free. It's old, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. Hell, I can tell you that when I was making oldweb graphics back in the days of the oldweb, it's exactly what I was using!
Like, I dunno. It's just crazy to me to hear all this stuff is just forgotten about, especially when so many people wanna talk about old web archival. Go out there and find these things. Got any sitting around from when you roleplayed on tumblr? Upload them. Did you used to make them back in the day on LJ or other oldweb graphic sites like Aethereality & Celestial Star? Post them! Are you a new person who's generally interested in learning how to make these things? Attempt it! Or speak up! I used to make tons of this stuff. I'll put out tutorials on how to do it. I have a ton of resources sitting around! But like, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg of things that I feel are just lost to time these days that I think should get attention. Let's talk about a few others real quick.
Naturally with the decline of forums, signatures also took a dive in relevancy. These things used to be everywhere as well. These days, they kind of get outnumbered by stamps. Not that I blame them, they're smaller and easier to put a bunch of in a small space without taking up too much room. But oldschool forum signatures usesd to be an art form in their own right. Here, just take a look at ones I've made:
This is admittedly kind of long
Like yes, these are a lot more complicated to make and what not. But like, it's not impossible. This doesn't have to go away. Even if you make the most basic of signature, it's still better to sit there and do it. If you find some of the oldest in your face anime sigs, might as well share. That was part of the fun of all this. You got to see what people were putting their names attatched to and all the different styles they'd come up with. And hopefully, the rise of more indie cultures will indeed bring this stuff back. Interested in learning how to make them? Fun fact, I made a tutorial over at Treefort on how to make them. And look that's a forum you can come post them and use them on and show me and many other people whatever else you create. But like, stop calling it "a lost art." Let's not let it become a lost art. You can revive it. We can revive all of this. Just do it. There's 3 little tutorials right then and there.
There are legitimately so many types of webgraphics that I'm still not covering. If I sat here and like covered them all in details with examples, I would probably be here all night. But I do want to touch on a few other things that I've noticed still:
C4Ds and Fractals are another thing I keep people hearing refer to as a lost art. I know at least of 2 people (Gojo & Slaid) who I've seen C4D renders on their site and honestly, seeing them again made me quite happy. It's insane to think that they're pretty forgotten. Fractals are even more forgotten at times, it feels. But they don't have to be. I'm pretty sure somewhere in my stuff, I have a giant archive of a bunch of them that I grabbed off Deviantart way in the past. I've lost all the credits by now which is why I don't give all that stuff out (that and the files are huge and sometimes unsupported formats for the web, like .TIFF files.) But I'm sure there's others out there who might have this stuff as well.
Wanna talk about things like textures? How about brushes? Stamps? Patterns? Coloring files? A lot of those used to come from deviantart and other websites that used to specialize in user graphics but are now long gone. They're really only survived by people sharing their resources with others. I remember websites like Aethereality & Celestial Star & FEEL used to all be super popular for these things. Now, Celestial Star is online, but nothing functions any longer. Aethereality? I think it's a web archive these days. FEEL is so forgotten due to the vagueness of it's name. I only remembered because I found an old back up of my older graphics website and saw them listed in the credits. Boy did that take me back. Anyways, if you're interested or you can contribute, I really want to point you to SALVAGED. It's just like the name implies. It's a bunch of things that have been salvaged from the net for you to use. You should REALLY check them out. Have fun experimenting with the tools they have there. You can make neat things I'm sure of it. They could also be useful for art aside from your webgraphics (Honestly as long as you're not using it in commercial art then I'm sure nobody's going to care if you toy around with ancient textures on your art but just a reminder that you probably shouldn't use it in anything yo plan to sell.)
Something that people also don't seem to really talk about: Premade templates. Yes, there's a lot of them that exist on the modern indieweb already. But there's a distinct like, artistry to the way some of the oldweb anime and fansite layouts used to be. If you want a good example of those kinds of design, Salvaged not only offers some, but I dare say that looking on any fanlisting might give you an idea. Here, out of all the ones I've joined, I'll list a few great examples of oldweb design showcase. I will warn you though: It's not exactly user friendly. Most times, due to the age of some of these sites, and the general clinging to old ways, it doesn't tend to be mobile friendly. But layouts back then used to focus more on the graphics than the function. I bring this up nowso because Pomelo.lol was the only site that I could think of that had layouts like these but then it went down. I honestly only remembered them because I went to go check Pastel.hello, and it was also down.
Still, have the following examples as I said:
Hell, if you want an oldweb adjacent layout you can download, I have a few that probably fit that. You can go see them over on my premades page for any live previews. I'd specifically like to highlight "Weed Smoking Girlfriends" because of the fact that I legitimately used one of my old layouts from my 2012 graphics website named "Pandaemonium" for the HTML and decided to replace the graphics. Maybe one day I'll put that up just to show it off. Another one I would like to point out is Mizumiya's Version 1. This thing was made the way all old websites were made in photoshop: Making some graphic and then heavily editing the page with the slice tool and then turn around and save for web so that photoshop would just generate the HTML for you (Obviously since this was a program from like 2002 it's not like modern day GenAI bullshit). I'm pretty sure if you look in the files, there's a spacer in there, instead of just coding shit normally. The borders are also made of repeating tiles rather than just border styles. It really is a mess, but unfortunately that's how things used to be done. Not that I'm saying we need to bring the sloppy HTML back necessarily. In fact, uhhh, we probably shouldn't. But it was a method. Hell, if it gets people to learn, I'd rather take that then people legitimately just typing their website shit into chatgpt and crap like that... Messy is messy, but it's something.
One last thing: Distributing and extracting pngs of characters and objects was pretty big. Like yeah, we have that now too, but like, these were hand cleaned images usually. Or alternatively, people would go into illustrator and make vectors where they redrew the image touched up. You don't really hear the term "vectors" brought up with anime art anymore. Hell, I remember the website Animepaper had a ton of wallpapers they'd make and distribute in all kinds of sizes. It was pretty neat. They also had a ton of resources that are now probably all lost to time, and were in pretty high definition too. Like we're talking 4k pixel scans in 2006 of any anime under the sun usually. Like, every once in a while, you still see people scanning resources and what not, but it's usually on piracy sites more than anything. Assuming the downloads still work. And you don't really see oldschool anime wallpapers either. God, that's just another thing to add to the pile of resources that we're out there losing.
So uh, yeah. I hope this communicated my point when it came to webgraphics. There's so much more out there. There's probably still things I missed or was unaware of. And there's obviously the more common things which I didn't cover. And like sure, I don't really have an issue with the common things at all. But I do really wish that the Indieweb would expand its scope with graphics more. Hopefully anyone who takes the time to read this article will find something that maybe inspires them to either create or look into. And maybe it'll inspire more people to want to talk about this old stuff rather than acting like we can't have it all again. Whether it be through sharing or creating things yourself, continuing to cycle this stuff is important. It's like, internet history. And it feels like we're losing way too much of that these days, just due to the natural decay of the internet. I hope someone will read this and maybe feel a bit inspired to share the things they've made or they've found. But I'm begging you all to stop saying "It's like a lost art." Don't let it be lost. Don't just say "We need to revive the old ways" and then not really do anything about it. Like, go through your old imgur accounts. Dig up your old facebooks. Check if your favorite old forum was archived. See if you can download a copy of your old photobucket's archive (They let you do that btw. You don't have to pay. You just have to tell them you want to delete and then request the archive before hitting delete.) Go dig through your old harddrives. I dunno. I'm not trying to like nag or bitch at anyone. I just want to maybe inspire people to like, actually talk about this stuff. It just gets drowned out in favor of the more popular things.
Basically, go forth little archaeologists of the web, dreaming of the distant past they didn't experience. Make it the web's future, rather than all this corpo algo-friendly bullshit and AI slop that people wanna praise. Go find something. Or hell, go make it yourself.
And then come show everyone. The more we circulate these methods and ideas, the more we keep them alive.