Prof. Dr. Style: The Web's First Design Language
Top Web Design Styles of 1993
Before star backgrounds and under-construction GIFs, the early web had a distinct look: plain, uniform pages created by academics. This article explores the 'Prof. Dr.' style—named after the search term that surfaces these pages—where professors' sites, often with a tilde in the URL, were primitive and identical, reflecting a time when browsers were also editors and users controlled the entire look of the web. It traces the transition from this user-defined aesthetic to the designer-driven web of 1995 and beyond.
There were not many options, this is why we got many pages.
- coldtea
Way more functional than anything in 2026.
- joegibbs
Don't forget that it's about as long since this blog post was written to today as from 1993.
The idea of making webpages in Photoshop and using a lot of gradients is something that today sounds very quaint - people say society's stagnated since then but that's something where it's definitely not true.
- stuaxo
Written in 2010 about websites of 1993 and viewed here, in 2026.