In the 1990s, I began my career in new media, including working on ITV (interactive television) and CD-ROM production. The “multimedia” industry, as it was called at the time, was transformed as the Internet gained in popularity and, by the late ’90s, the dot-com bubble was just getting going. The agency I worked for, Ikonic Interactive, was on the bleeding edge, as it were, and we were wooing every client with money to burn, and there were plenty.
One such company was called “Attingo,” a Web start-up with its eye on the greeting card industry–physical greeting cards you could order online and have mailed to you or directly to the recipient with a hand-written note (as I recall). Embedded above is the entire “sitelet” we created to pitch our services to the prospective client.
Highlights
- The resolution of the presentation is about 620 x 460 pixels. At that time, most people had monitors with 640 x 480 and used Netscape browsers so screen space was limited.
- The home page features an early flash animation. Scrolling text was our “specialty.” I particularly like the copy once the animation finishes: “Brothers, Sisters, Cousins”–huh?
- The code includes no style sheets, has “Navigator” javacript that no longer works and includes over 200 separate HTML pages. I only had to fix a couple of bugs to make it work again.
- There’s a portfolio embedded in the presentation showing Ikonic’s showcase work. The screen shots are 300 x 200 pixels and show the level of sophistication of Web design at the time.
- We didn’t get the account. Attingo did not survive the bust–their time had not come.
