1993: Global Network Navigator and the first web designer

Global Network Navigator (GNN); via Ford & Mason Ltd.

If Adam Curry's MTV.com in 1993 was a text-based index of music reviews and industry gossip — basically the same format as a Gopher site or FTP server — then Global Network Navigator (GNN) aimed to be something a little more high-minded. It aspired to be an "online magazine" on the World Wide Web. Accordingly, it needed a designer to create that magazine experience.

Enter Jennifer Niederst Robbins (then Jennifer Niederst), who had started her career in 1988 as a book designer at Little, Brown and Company. In October 1992, she was hired for the same role at O'Reilly & Associates, the leading technical books publisher of the day. About six months later, she found herself roped into a new Internet project. She later told Rachel Andrew (herself a pioneering web designer) the story of how GNN started:

"In April of 1993, Dale Dougherty had the idea to start an online “magazine” funded by advertising on this new part of the Internet called “The World Wide Web.” And because the WWW could show images, he felt he needed a designer. The timing was such that my boss was on hiatus, so she assigned me to the team."

Jennifer Niederst Robbins in 2013; photo by Jeff Robbins on Flickr.

Although Robbins had only a basic knowledge of HTML and didn't get involved with the coding, she was the sole designer for GNN — she organized the site and created the brand identity and graphic files. Or as Dougherty put it in the foreword of Robbins' first book in 1996, she "gave GNN its 'look-and-feel'." This type of work would later be called web design, but in 1993 there wasn't a name for it.

Dougherty, who held the title of GNN publisher and who would later coin the term "Web 2.0" for O'Reilly, continued in the foreword:

"First, Jennifer came up with a delightful hot-air balloon as a logo image that captured the spirit of GNN and gave it a face people would recognize. Then she developed the basic navigational mechanisms for the site and mastheads or banners for each of the major areas. She worked hard to learn-and work around-the constraints of the medium. At times, it was frustrating for her because she could not control everything as she did when she designed for print."

Designing for the Web, one of the earliest web design books; published April 1996.

A Simple Task

Anyone who began their career on the web in the late-90s or early-2000s will likely be familiar with another book that Robbins authored, entitled "Web Design in a Nutshell." It was a reference book published by O'Reilly in January 1999 and was a kind of encyclopaedia of web design knowledge that Robbins had built up since GNN (it was one of O'Reilly's famous series of books with animal drawings on the cover — in this case a least weasel). Robbins referenced GNN in the preface:

"In the beginning, the Web was simple. When I first encountered it in early 1993 (working for O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator[...]), there was only one browser for viewing web pages and it ran exclusively on the Unix platform. There were about a dozen tags that made any difference. Designing a web page was a relatively simple task."

Robbins was probably referencing an early web browser called ViolaWWW, which had been developed for Unix. Its creator, Pei-Yuan Wei, was being funded by O'Reilly & Associates at this point and early versions of GNN were designed to run on ViolaWWW.

GNN screenshot from 1993. This design mirrors the copy on O'Reilly Media's current site, which states it was "the GNN home page when it launched in August 1993." O'Reilly's copy mentions issue 1 of the magazine and this screenshot links to issue 2, suggesting it's the first iteration of the design. Image via Steven Sinofsky.

Robbins could just as well have been talking about the early version of Mosaic, though, which only worked on the X Window System in early 1993. As noted in the previous post, it wouldn't be available on Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh computers until September.

In any case, Robbins was quite restricted in what she could do when building the user interface for GNN, both in terms of the HTML markup and what would display on early web browsers.

Computer History Museum screenshot of GNN, which looks to be from late-1993 or 1994.

The State of HTML in 1993

As Robbins had noted in the nutshell book, HTML only had "about a dozen tags" when she began designing GNN. That's because at that point in time, early-to-mid 1993, there wasn't a formal HTML specification. Tim Berners-Lee had been circulating a set of HTML tags over the past couple of years via mailing lists and the CERN website, but it was only in 1993 that a standards group — the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) — got involved.

By June that year, Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly had created an “Internet Draft” for the IETF, which included basic document structure such as paragraph (<p>), list (<li>), headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), emphasis (<b>, <i>, etc.) and hyperlinks (<a href>).

It would take more than two years after that Internet Draft to formalize an HTML specification (called HTML 2.0), so HTML was a fluid beast in the first several years of the Web. Also, during 1993 the early web browsers implemented their own tags from time to time. Most notably, of course, the IMG tag for inline images that the Mosaic team invented. That tag was quickly adopted and was in the Internet Draft document of mid-1993.

GNN screenshot by Ford & Mason Ltd; this was taken in 1994, but the grey background suggests it's still a relatively early iteration of the design (perhaps the second?).

It's worth noting that there were no presentation tags at this stage — not even a "color" attribute! Aside from inline images, the only color you would likely see on early web pages were the blue hyperlinks. The blue color was a default browser setting popularized by Mosaic; it was not something a designer could control. Blue stood out on the default grey backgrounds of the operating systems of that era, and also clearly distinguished links from the black body text of the page. Mosaic also decided to underline all links and add a purple color for visited hyperlinks.

So this is the context for the design of GNN — Robbins could not control background or foreground color, or even the layout. Her main job was to organize the information on each page, and create the site's navigation and images.

The Inspiration for GNN

Let's step back a bit and look at how O'Reilly & Associates came to be interested in the World Wide Web. It had been briefly discussed in a book the company published in September 1992, called "The Whole Internet." Written by Ed Krol, it mostly focused on the first wave of internet systems — like electronic mail, FTP, Archie and Gopher. But it also contained the first mention in a book of the World Wide Web.

GNN screenshot circa 1994 by Ford & Mason Ltd.

In Chapter 13, Krol describes the WWW as “one of the most flexible tools — probably the most flexible tool — for prowling around the Internet.” He compared it to Gopher and WAIS, two other client-server information systems running over the internet. But he cautioned that the Web was “very much under development” in 1992 and “don’t be surprised if it doesn’t occasionally work the way you’d like.”

According to a later interview with O'Reilly & Associates founder Tim O'Reilly, Krol's book was the impetus for the company to create its own website. He noted that the chapter about the web was only added "at the last minute" and there "were only about 200 websites at the time."

"But we thought, 'This is really what we've all been looking for,'" O'Reilly said. "We've been working on electronic publishing and the notion that there should be a standard format to read electronic content and it really excited us."

GNN Launch and Legacy

Promotions for GNN began in August 1993, when it was said to consist of "a regular news service, an online magazine, The Whole Internet Interactive Catalog, and a global marketplace containing information about products and services."

The site launched in early October, at which point it had "600 (not around, not approximately, but 600 on the nose) outside links." Since GNN partly functioned as a directory of the early web, those 600 links probably represented almost all of the World Wide Web at this time.

GNN promotional flyer; image by Liz Lawley on Flickr.

From a design perspective, it's commendable that Robbins was able to achieve any form of visual control over the presentation of GNN in 1993, given the limitations of HTML and early browsers. But she did indeed achieve a unique 'look-and-feel' for the site, particularly through her graphics. The hot air balloon motif — denoting an early form of exploring — was inspired and the well-drawn navigation icons added complementary color to the site.

GNN screenshot circa 1994 by Ford & Mason Ltd.

In a 2001 interview, Robbins was asked what was the most significant change in web design since she started in 1993?

"I guess the biggest difference is that you can do so much more with Web design now, both visually and functionally," she replied. "Back then we had a couple dozen HTML 1.0 tags, and if you wanted to get really fancy, you could use a CGI script. Now Web sites are much more beautiful and robust. HTML itself has evolved quite a bit and now style sheets are coming of age, giving visual designers much more fine-tuned control over the page than we ever dreamed of."

She added that the web in 1993 was "largely a text-and-pictures kind of medium" and so her focus back then had been on "designing a 'page,' similar to a book or a magazine, according to the principles of solid graphic design."

That Robbins was able to rise above the "grey page" aesthetic of the day, like a hot air balloon rising above the earth, is testament to her talent as a designer. With GNN, she can lay claim to being the world's first web designer.

GNN screenshot circa 1994 by Ford & Mason Ltd.