“The ‘World Wide Web’ has an omnipresent ring to it, but when it first began, it didn’t carry with it the weighty significance, the reigning long-term quality of royal blood, that it now holds in all its ubiquitous glory. We don’t question its appearance and critique it with the quick-to-judge enthusiasm we once did. These days, in a somewhat arrogant fashion, we feel enough distance from the primitive web world that first embarked in the early 1990s when it underwent its awkward years, reflected in its uncertain design and organization, and limited navigation.

It was a time when the web design profession hadn’t quite taken shape. Creation was a free-for-all of experimentation and trial and error by amateur experimenters. But through all of this unsupervised exploration emerged patterns and forces of habit. Standards slowly took shape and grew, transforming into what we now understand as web vernacular, or language, and professional designers emerged from this early breed of web creators. Filled with nostalgia for an earlier era of web identity and exploration, Olia Lialina brings light to these very first elements of discovery in Vernacular Web 2, a project that serves as an archive and ode to a time when one wasn’t able to fully grasp the potential of the medium but experimented with the freedom that only infancy can provide, and our current state of separation between ‘professional’ web design and ‘amateur’.” Continue reading Review of Vernacular Web 2 by Natasha Chuk, Furtherfield.