Constructing a Geocities website may have required only basic knowledge of HTML, but the actual page designs were far from simple. That’s something underscored by the website Cameron’s World, a loving tribute to both the hosting platform’s heyday and primitive ’90s web design. Cameron Askin, a digital designer from Berlin, scoured the Geocities archives and scraped together a scroll-worthy page which highlights the days when browsing the web had all the subtlety of a Lisa Frank sticker book. “In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet,” says the page’s manifesto. “This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.”
In other words, Cameron’s World is an explosion of homemade animated GIFs, clashing color schemes, pop culture tributes, and Comic Sans and Times New Roman. For good measure, the page is soundtracked by a vintage-sounding, MIDI-like song—which, in a nod to modernity, is available in many forms on Soundcloud—which sounds perfectly calibrated for an unstable modem connection.