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How Contemporary Digital Content is Borrowing Inspiration from 90s Web Design Trends

May 16, 2024

Words by Jeff Cardello

Purple, Violet, Pink, Paint

Step inside our time machine — we’re taking a trip back to the 90s!

We are all accustomed to websites featuring sharp graphics, seamless animations, and user experiences driven by the latest design trends and techniques. However, with so many websites sharing the same flawless polish of modern design, standing out from the crowd means many are now borrowing cultural elements from previous decades.

We’re going to take a look at 90s web design and explore how contemporary content is borrowing from the decade that gave us girl power in the form of Spice Girls, Ross and Rachel’s “will they, won’t they” relationship, and a love for mood rings. When it comes to web design, today’s designers have fixed the flaws and glitchiness of the early internet, spinning 90s design into engaging and unique user experiences.

90s web design was a huge step forward

Let’s begin with a science lesson. In evolutionary biology there’s a theory called “punctuated equilibrium”. This describes the phenomenon of a species carrying on for a long time with everything fine and dandy and then BAM! something happens that shakes things up forcing it to undergo a rapid change.

We can look at 90s web design in much the same way. Early websites were primitive, made of plain arrangements of text and images, and limited styling. And much like a species being transformed by outside forces, design clawed out of the primordial muck of simple HTML into a more dynamic and advanced form brought about by the introduction of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash.

The elements of 90s web design

Maximalism

Empowered by these new technical advancements, who wouldn’t go a bit wild? 90s websites were overfilled with busy visuals, and vibrant multi-colored layouts, with almost every space occupied with something to get visitors’ attention. 

Today, designers who want their work to have a 90s vibe shouldn’t be afraid to shake off the restrictions of minimalism and push things into the weird and wonderful chaos that maximalism entails.

Offbeat patterns and shapes

If you were around in the 90s, you likely enjoyed a cup of soda or other beverage out of a waxy disposable paper cup emblazoned with a peculiar graphic. With a scratch of purple laid over a thick blotch of teal, this design has attained meme status as the “Jazz cup.”

Art paint, Font, Aqua

Drawing inspiration from patterns like the Jazz cup, 90s web design often includes background shapes and patterns that add touches of nostalgia and campiness.

Science fiction inspired visuals

In the words of the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, “Space is the place” and 90s web design is the place for starry backgrounds, laser beam glowing colors, starcraft control screens, and cyberpunk visuals that evoke a sense of the interstellar.

Computer, Photograph, Black, Rectangle, Font, Line, Screenshot

Random images

If it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a Roman statue to give it a Vaporwave vibe, a piece of obsolete tech like a Walkman, or a gif of someone busting out the running man, incongruence is key.

Retro futuristic/vintage typefaces

Typefaces that evoke an rough sense of modernism are a hallmark of 90s web design. If you’re using Vev, you have access to both Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts, and here are a few typefaces you can use for your own 90s web design projects.

Press Start 2P

Get it from Google Fonts here.

Orbitron

Get it from Google Fonts here.

Courier Prime

Get it from Google Fonts here.

Outdated technology

90s web design embraces the obsolete. Taking inspiration from extinct operating systems, ancient GUIs, antiquated home electronics, and inferior screen resolutions, retro web design revives forgotten technology.

Low-fidelity

In an age of HD displays we’re used to pixel perfection. The 1990s were a time of less computing power, and clunkier resolutions. 90s web design isn’t afraid to find the beauty in imperfection. If your website looks like it would be best viewed on NetScape 3.0, you're doing 90s web design right.

Skeuomorphism

By combining shadows, textures, and color to emulate three-dimensionality, Skeuomorphism was a hallmark of 90s web design. Buttons, icons, and other elements mimicked real-world objects to add a sense of familiarity to the user experience.

90s video games

Filling a design with characters or visuals that look like they’re straight from the Nintendo Entertainment System, is a great way to give your web designs a throwback feel.

Construction set toy, Building sets, Interlocking block, Creative arts, Lego

Unconventional color schemes

90s web design doesn’t care where on the color wheel it lands. The clash of colliding colors, bright neons, and heavy contrasts in 90s web design breaks the rules of color theory, leading to a wild sense of eclecticism.

If you’d like to create 90s-inspired web designs we put together this color sheet to help you out.

Hot pink
#FF69B4

Sunset orange
#FF7F50

Mint green
#98FF98

Electric blue
#7DF9FF

Deep purple
#5B29A7

Pastel yellow
#FFFF66

Hot pink
#FF69B4

Sunset orange
#FF7F50

Electric blue
#7DF9FF

Deep purple
#5B29A7

Pastel yellow
#FFFF66#FF7F50

Mint green
#98FF98

The current rise of 90s web design trends

Gen-Z is rocking Nirvana t-shirts, in 2021 a sequel to Space Jam came out, and even Tomagotchi relaunched its handheld digital pets. No one can deny that the 90s are back. Whether you weren’t even alive then, or are old enough to remember when MTV actually played music videos, 90s web design has a timeless sense of nostalgia and a wistfulness for simpler times that any generation can appreciate.

Now, let’s take a journey through eight contemporary websites that tap into 90s web design, offering captivating retro-inspired user experiences. 

  1. Pool suite FM

Poolsuite FM, is an online radio station with an eclectic mix of dance music to get your head bouncing. Its website honors 90s operating systems, with draggable dialog boxes, pixelated icons, and skeuomorphic drop shadows. It feels very much like you’re sitting in front of a Macintosh Powerbook in 1995, with the only thing missing being the whirs and clicks of a 3.5” floppy drive.

Sometimes committing to a retro aesthetic can get in the way of a user’s experience, but this is not the case for Poolsuite FM. Its 90s web design is the perfect combination of vintage computing combined with the ease of modern usability.

2. New Era

Vaporwave emerged in the mid-2000s as both a musical genre and a visual aesthetic. Vaporwave music is like an auditory hallucination mashing up low-bit-rate samples of 90s jams, over-the-top filter effects, reverb-drenched vocals, warbling synth lines, and glitched-out beats. As an art style, it also borrows and remixes, taking the excesses of 90s graphic design by utilizing gaudy color schemes and typefaces that look like they’re from the opening screens of straight-to-video movies at Blockbuster.


With its vector lines, pastels, and glowing neons, New Era goes all in with an agency website that perfectly encapsulates the low-fidelity beauty of vaporwave.

3. Krispy Kreme Arcade

To bring millennials to come back to their brand of delightfully sugary donuts, Krispy Kreme Australia launched a retro arcade through their Instagram, tapping into the nostalgia of old-school video games.

This case study echoes the 16-bit feel of the games that were part of this campaign, and along with videos and screenshots of gameplay it has a design filled with blues, yellows, and purples along with whimsical background shapes. There are also animated gifs of feisty donuts (which you can use on Giphy) that further lend to its atmosphere of 90s web design.

4. Sita Abellan

Sita Abellan is a techno DJ, model, and stylist. She very well could have gone with a website design that reflected the refined classiness and sheen of the fashion world. Instead she took a chance with an experimental retro aesthetic, which makes this website stand out.

There’s navigation that feels like flipping through the game menu of a Sega Genesis, the blocky video-game inspired typeface Start 2P, and a clash of colors. We also love the About page that looks like it's from the GUI of a long-discontinued Dell Computer. Sita Abellan’s design is filled with vintage-inspired text and graphics, perfectly encapsulating 90s web design.

5. Captain Marvel

Marvel’s Captain Marvel website is like stepping into a time machine and turning the dial to Geocities. Are there annoying gifs? Check. Is the text in Comic Sans? Another check. And is there a visitor counter? Checkmate. Marvel is such a gigantic brand that could have dug into its deep budget with a fancy website, instead, they went with a website celebrating all of the cheesier aspects of 90s web design.

6. Nokia 3310

Okay, for those who are sticklers about technology, the Nokia 3310 came out in the year 2000. But the Nokia 3310, with its Gameboy like LCD graphics, is well worth mentioning in any discussion about vintage electronics.

This website with its slithering opening animation of the Snake game which was one of its most famous features, chunky squares of green and block, and low-resolution visuals, is a fitting tribute to the sturdy and compact blocks of plastic and electronics that so many of us had before Android and iPhones took over. Along with its vintage visuals, you’ll also find scroll-triggered animations and horizontally scrolled sections, that give this design a modern touch.

7. Castor et Pollux

With its touches of bubble gum pink and baby blue, and the Japanese street sign inspired font GT-Maru, this interactive web quiz from the agency Castor et Pollux, brings to mind video games like the Nintendo Gameboy Color and the 1990s Hello Kitty cartoon. It’s a fun and upbeat user experience showing how artificial intelligence isn’t necessarily a threat to creativity but can be used as a catalyst to spark new ideas.

8. Kallistero

Through a design filled with terminal line green text, sparkling celestial objects, and a minimalist GUI , Kallistero is a fantastic display of retrofuturism.  What’s also great, is that you can create your own throwback visuals through its effects maker which lets you drag and drop vectors, glowing particles, and other science fiction inspired graphics, and generates code you can embed in your web designs. If you’d like to bring a touch of cyber noir to your websites, there are some great tools here to help you out.

Experience what’s possible with no-code through the power of Vev

Whether you want to create websites with the grittiness of 90s web design or want something more sleek and modern, Vev offers you the freedom to explore any design style. Follow your creative whims, and build digital content through our drag-and-drop platform, with access to all of the elements, typefaces, and colors that will make what’s in your imagination come to life.

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