2003: BowieNet 3 Launch and the Peak of Flash Web Design
Cybercultural: Internet History 2025-12-09
BowieNet version 3. Screenshot circa September 2003, via Web Design Museum.
At the end of July 2003, in the lead-up to the release of David Bowie's latest album, Reality, BowieNet teased members with a promotional splash page and a new feature called the “Reality Jukebox.” The latter turned out to be a Flash page featuring multimedia promotions for the new album:
“Firstly there are 90-second snippets of The Loneliest Guy and Looking for Water from Reality in the AUDIO section, (60-second snippets for non-members) and then there is a great new EPK (Electronic Press Kit) for Reality (Members Only) in the VIDEO section...”
There was a prominent “click to order now” link on this page, which had a pink theme and used some of the imagery from the album. In addition, users were invited to become a part of the BowieNet “e_team” — a volunteer army that would “help get a buzz going” by calling up radio stations, voting on websites, posting links and banners on message boards, “distributing IM icons and wallpapers,” and more.
The Flash-based Reality Jukebox, first released in July 2003.
New tracks were added to the Reality Jukebox, two at a time, over the coming weeks. Then came the main event: the release of BowieNet “version 3” in September.
Bowie's New Flash Design
The last time the site had been redesigned was over three years ago, with the spacious Hours-inspired pastel and white design of version 2. Flash had been used extensively in v2, especially for navigation elements, but the layout remained HTML-based. For v3, Flash became the primary interface and brand expression of BowieNet.
The new Reality-themed design also took up much less space on the screen. But this wasn’t unusual for the time — many Flash websites from the 2002-03 era look small and compact to our modern eyes. This is because designers intentionally constrained Flash content to a fixed size to ensure consistent layout and performance across different computers and internet connections; all part of the UX web design movement, which aimed to avoid the excesses of previous Flash design patterns.
Here's a brief video walkthrough of BowieNet v3, via Web Design Museum. Unfortunately, this is all that's accessible of the site now — there's a lot the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine wasn't able to capture and preserve, due to the vagaries of Flash code. For example, you might notice the top menu bar (which you can see in the feature image of this post) didn't make it to the Wayback Machine.
The Reality design was similar to the Jukebox. It had a few circular pink splotches in the background of an otherwise white page, around 800 pixels wide. A relatively small promotional photo of the upcoming tour was the main graphic, with a few tiny square images floating around it representing parts of the site (“Bowie Blogs” read one). If you clicked one of the square images, it moved into the main photo area and assumed the same dimensions. The main menu was a series of white-on-pink rectangular buttons on the top-left of the site, just above a new BowieNet logo that used the same font as the Reality album cover.
Screenshot of BowieNet v3, February 2004; via PC Pro - October 2024 UK.
The new design was serviceable, but — ironically, given the reputation of Flash — it lacked the creative punch of the previous two iterations, the Outside-era design of v1 and the Hours design of v2. Also, because v3 was built entirely in Flash, it did not get archived for future generations. From after the launch in 2003 right up until April 2005, the Internet Archive saved only an incomplete version of the BowieNet homepageand two help pages (built with PHP, not Flash).
Bowie's welcome message for the redesigned site was oddly half-hearted, too. “My routine means I do still check out this place [BowieNet] every morning,” he wrote, “and though I may not have been around as much as I’d like to have been, we have got some great stuff coming up for you.” He promised to come in “for another chat before the madness starts again.”
The Flash Website Movement
The v3 design didn’t seem to capture the imagination of Bowie fandom. Some even groused that BowieNet was no longer worth the subscription fee. On alt.fan.davidbowie, long-time fan Baal — who ran a Bowie bootleg site at helden.co.uk — complained that most of the information on BowieNet “is available via UseNet” and that the site “is difficult to navigate.”
“It is designed for the Broadband brigade and DialUp Networkers fall asleep waiting for pages to load,” he added.
Certainly, fans who didn’t yet have broadband — which had only begun ramping up in 2002 — would’ve struggled to load and browse the new BowieNet. But Flash websites weren’t unusual in this era of the web; in fact, they were almost the default for anyone wanting to be creative on the internet.
Time Warner’s Road Runner website in 2003, built in Flash. It was apparently the first to incorporate Google search in a Flash website; screenshot via 'Web Design' by Rob Ford.
As game designer and net artist Nathalie Lawhead wrote in a later retrospective, Flash “started as a tool for bringing animations to the web,” but it “eventually grew to being used for building rich, immersive, and very animated websites.” 2003 was smack in the prime years of what Lawhead termed the “Flash website movement (when websites were ‘the new emerging artform’).”
A case in point was the website MTV2.com, the network’s channel for showing music videos (the main channel, MTV, was now given over to reality TV shows). Also Flash-based, MTV2.com used a 3D blocks metaphor as its visual theme, and — like BowieNet v3 — it featured a pink colour palette.
MTV2 Flash website; via 'Deep Sites' by Max Bruinsma.
The site was live from 2000-02, but could still be viewed in 2003 at the designer Digit London's website. Now, more than two decades later, only the intro screens are accessible in the Wayback Machine. But even with just that, you get a sense of the animation and sound effects that Flash brought to the web:
In a 2003 book, design critic Max Bruinsma complimented the design of MTV2.com:
“The 3-D design (in Flash) with its nuts-and-bolts appearance may at first sight look quite over the top — who needs flying panels that zoom in and out of the screen just to say ‘click here’ — but the look and feel of the site is a serious component in appealing to MTV’s target group of web-savvy youngsters with attitude. For all its overstatement, the design works well and is unquestionably aesthetic, a good example of the restrained typography and exuberant visuals so characteristic of today’s hip visual culture.”
This was the effect the designers of BowieNet v3 were going for as well: compact but colourful, creative yet constrained, and with eye-catching details like movable navigation items.
BowieNet v3 wasn’t at the cutting edge of web design like MTV2.com, but it was at least adjacent to the “hip visual culture” of the time. Pretty similar to what Bowie was going for in his albums of the early 21st century — Reality was no Hail to the Thief (at least according to the ‘hipper than thou’ Pitchfork), but it kept him in the game.
The Peak Years of Flash
In retrospect, the peak years of Flash as a web design technology were 2002 to 2003. When Macromedia released Flash MX (Flash 6) in March 2002, its goal was to enable "a new generation of rich Internet content and applications." Unlike many tech prognostications, this actually became a reality over the next year or two.
A showcase for Flash websites during this time was the Favourite Web Awards (FWA), run by Rob Ford. In his review of 2003, Ford highlighted tokyoplastic v1, an experimental Flash site designed by Sam Lanyon Jones and Drew Cope from the UK. "One of those rare sites that gave you an adrenaline rush (or was that a fright?) when you clicked on the loaded graphic and the site swallowed you up," Ford wrote.
Jones and Cope later said that the site "served no purpose just kooky animation, sound design and a bit of interaction." While that's underselling their clever use of vector graphics and 3D animation in tokyoplastic v1, it does sum up what Flash brought to the web: a sense of creativity and fun, albeit sometimes it "served no purpose."
But unfortunately, Flash wasn't designed to last because it was incompatible with web standards. That we can no longer access BowieNet v3 on the Wayback Machine is sad proof of that.
This is part of a series about the history of BowieNet and David Bowie's website:
- 1995-1997: David Bowie’s Early Websites: Outside to Earthling
- 1996: Telling Lies; Bowie and Online Music Distribution
- 1996-1998: BowieNet, The Inside Story of Its Creation
- 1998: Launch of BowieNet and the First Inklings of Social Networks
- 2000: BowieNet Version 2 and its Karma System
- 2003: BowieNet Version 3, a Flash Reality