Preliminary designs, 1994

glasshaus

May 29, 2002

In 1994, most typeface sales happened in the 'real world' through a printed catalog. People who did sell typefaces online usually sold them as shareware through services such as AOL or CompuServe. That's how I got into it. My understanding of the Internet at that point in time was limited to my personal use of AOL and my professional use of Lynx, Gopher and other emerging technologies that were being explored in the college where I worked as a designer. Nothing about the Web back then made it easy to use.

Most of my sales at that time were happening because of releases of an AOL based 'zine I was publishing called @Type.New. It covered type design topics and offered it all in a cool and easy-to-use interface that was assembled using the Mac-only Docmaker format, which worked pretty close to the way that the Internet would work later on. (It was just a little ahead of its time).

From a user's perspective this magazine was a complete pain. People would log on to AOL and spend a half hour or more downloading it before they could read even a single word. But the people who were reading it were people who wanted to explore the possibilities of online information at a time when the web didn't exist as it does today. Because the magazine was something they could access through an online method, I got a lot of praise and sold enough type to spur me on with further development.

The first real online type web site that I created was designed in 1994 and was never released. Back in 1994 I was even more concerned about expenses for SynFonts than I am today. Back then, I was making an educational salary and every dollar was very carefully spent. For a number of reasons, it remained so much easier for me to use AOL instead of moving to the Web (AOL back then was pretty much an entity unto itself, rather than a window onto the Web).

1994 homepage

I was fairly new at using computers to create digital media and most of my experience until this time was limited to PowerPoint presentations and experimenting with mostly linear applications. Because of this, little or no thought went into the usability of the site when I designed it. Back then, most of my thoughts entertained the idea of making things look cool. I was much more interested in the idea of building the look and feel of SynFonts than I was in creating a usable web site. And since the Web was so very young, there were no books like this one to clue me in to what my concerns should really be.

The site was very simplistic in nature and consisted of only two pages: one that served as the "main menu" and one that previewed a few images of my typeface designs. Both pages linked to downloads of the typeface packages as well as to an order form that they could send in with any shareware payments.

As far as usability on the site goes, there are some obvious issues here that make the site pretty hard to use.

The link names are hard to read

The icons are completely unrelated to what they are supposed to represent

The interface doesn't even exist in the FTP (file transfer protocol) section.

Not bad for a first try, but I was wise not to release this to the public.