The Past Reclamation Project, Part IV

Designer Profile Featuring Robert Schmitt

Designer Profile home page
The portfolio landing page, accessed by
clicking on the Designer Profile masthead.
A portfolio sample detail page. It was 1994 (the year Katie Couric asked the now infamous question, "Can you explain what Internet is?"), and I was working for a small design firm in San Diego, California where one of our more savvy clients had just asked me to create some graphics for his Web site — something not a lot of people at the time were doing, at least on a commercial level — and I thought, "I need to know more about this."

For the previous couple of years, I had been surfing around the Web, mostly looking for software updates and the occasional distraction like how to make strawberry Pop-Tart blow torches (still online after all these years!). But I didn't really have much of an idea about how to go about making websites, so I set out to learn more and figured the best way to do that was to create a website for myself.

After having used bulletin boards systems (BBS) and forums for years (through CompuServe as well as via direct connection to local groups and vendors), I had eventually signed up with a small Internet service provider in San Diego called Electriciti (now defunct like so many small early providers), who, besides offering access to the Web, also included hosting services by offering free personal websites branched off of their own domain. Consequently, my first Web address was: www.electriciti.com/ ~rschmitt, not the easiest to remember but nevertheless, it was my own small space in the wider cyber-world and it would do for my purposes at the time. Electriciti also offered some basic information on HTML and how to create websites, so armed with my brand-new Macintosh 6100/60AV, my Mosaic browser, and a 2400-baud modem, I set to work on creating Designer Profile Featuring Robert Schmitt.

For reasons I can't recall, I decided to make my website look as if it was a third-party profile of graphic designers called "Designer Profile" and that this "issue" would feature Robert Schmitt. I suppose I wanted to make it look like it was instigated by someone else and not by me, thinking that blowing my own horn might seem a bit narcissistic which made me feel a bit uncomfortable and might have, worse of all, turned off potential employers. Of course, nowadays it's perfectly normal, in fact expected, for designers to have their own websites (not to mention everybody else — can you say, "Facebook?"), but back then it was unusual and I had no idea how people would react to it.

20th Century Web Design

Very little of the Web in 1994 resembles the Web of today. Things were much simpler back then. There weren't even tables at the time which, in the following years (before CSS became the layout method of choice), would offer designers a bit of control over the look of their Web pages. Prior to tables, the most advanced layout feature of choice was the align parameter which causes text to flow around an image — and that parameter was only supported by the most modern of Web browsers. Fortunately, because the Web was so new at that time and populated only by the more tech-savvy elements of society, most people updated their browsers regularly. It wasn't until big providers brought lots of users onto the Web, through their own proprietary portals, that things started getting more muddled. (Yes, I'm looking at you America Online.... AOL — which was to become the largest Web provider of the time — did not support the table tag in their browser for years, which was to become a pain in my ass in the following years, but that's a story for another time.)

So, during the spring of 1994, I set about reading, learning, writing and designing my first website, and in the summer of that year it launched. The site is no great shakes by today's standards (it's so last century), but 17 years ago it was good enough to be included on the KPT Power Tools "Cool Graphic Sites" page and on Specular's Web site (the makers of Infini-D, TextureScape and Collage — if anybody remembers what those were).

Print Magazine
The November/December
1995 issue of Print. It also drew the attention of a writer for one of the leading graphic design journals of the day: Print magazine. In the fall of 1995, Print was creating a special issue about what was next for graphic designers, and they asked if they could include Designer Profile. I eagerly agreed, knowing that the only reason they were asking was, not because Designer Profile was any sort of amazing design, but because there were only a handful of graphic designers with their own websites. Well, I figured, if the only way I could get in Print magazine was by way of my technical savvy, and not for my design work, I was OK with that. And so, later that year, Designer Profile was pictured on page 140 of the November/December 1995 issue of Print.

More importantly, Designer Profile also caught the attention of an employer in Northern California who I started freelancing for in the summer of 1995, and went to work for full-time later that fall — hired as Art Director for a new online magazine called Web Review. If you're interested, you can read more about Web Review here.

Back to the Future

Even though I had stopped updating it sometime back in 1996, Designer Profile stayed online for years at the request of an instructor at San Diego State University who used it as an example of Web design. (What he taught in that class ... I have no idea!) The information on it is so outdated, and the mark-up so ancient now — by today's standards — that it's a bit pointless to keep up, so I decided it was about time to take it down. It's still an important part of my history though, so I've replaced it with this narrative and a few screen shots to give you the gist of what it looked like back then. I hope you can enjoy it for what it was, and also as an interesting glimpse back to the year 1994.

Bob Schmitt
March, 2011