Over at the Atlantic – probably my favorite website – Alexis Madrigal blogs about what he calls "the Gold-Plated Age of Web Design" (namely, the mid 1990's). He does this under the guise of a rant about April Fool's day, which I am mostly too earnest to enjoy.
I, myself, was guilty of making websites of the sort he describes – most notably, the website I made for the AP Spanish class I was teaching in the fall 1997, which I wish I still had the materials for, as it was awesomely bad from a design standpoint, although I remain marginally proud of the content (it was, thematically, meant to be a sort of "internet of fictional places from Latin American literature" – I had called it Macondonet).
Madrigal's blog entry includes the following quote, which I simply must reproduce.
This was also back when designers still mostly made fancy chairs and clothes, so web page design was a little like a bunch of nerds getting together to critique each other's tucked-in t-shirts and faded black jeans. It wasn't, "Maybe you should wear a suit;" it was, "You need more robots on your t-shirt."
For some reason the nerd-critique, such as he describes it, made me very very LOL.