Happy (late) birthday to dark design!

26 Aug 2022


It's been about a year since the first appearance of my black, white, green and yellow design that dons this website today. The first archive of it appears on August 5th, 2021.

To celebrate the anniversary of me switching to arguably my best design yet, I'm gonna go through the history of colean.cc and zayne.logandark.net, my websites.

In the beginning, there was light (2017)

The earliest archive of Z.LD is from September 9th 2017 back when I was a lot stupider and was using the online moniker Rawlan (it was a whole thing, squids), as you can gather, it was a plain Bootstrap site that is eye-blindingly white. I also had a very different opinion of Node.js. I didn't know what the heck a blackbox was (it was a series of directories, you really weren't missing much).

Then was blue (2018)

Later on, I kept with bootstrap but made it have a blue header and black navbar, better but still blinding. The content is much the same but I added a hit counter at the bottom (it was 50 at the time of archival on February 18th 2018) and I had switched to being called light. I could never really decide on a username, could I? I also decided SemVer would be a great idea for a static website that wasn't in a git repository. The hit counter might've been borked though as it was still 50 in March but was higher in May.

Eventually, the boot was unstrapped (2019)

For some reason, I decided to revert to black-on-white, this time, however, was completely unstyled with April 6th 2019 showing the death of the blue Bootstrap header. Farewell, Bootstrap, we loved ye. I called myself a "software company", yet had no legal basis for this, funny. Later on in September, I decided to replace my personal site with a game before...

I was a design thief (2019)

I stole someone's CSS in October, not a proud move and a stunt I repeated again to the same result, this caused some shit between me and the guy who actually made the theme (we ended up talking to each other and admitting we were both dumb kids and moved on) and the next time I did this, it repeated. Although, to the original creator's credit, the theme is an absolutely beautiful one.

I rectified the stolen design (2020)

The year of the plague was among us and in January of 2020, I took a new direction. Boxes, and 5 at that. I remember the shop subdirectory also using stolen CSS however I might've just been inspired by birdiesoft.dk's website because they made a game I played as a child that I still absolutely adore; alas no archive.

However... (2020)

You know how I said I repeated a stunt in 2019? The beta site of January was also using stolen CSS., this was the Zayne64 age. A couple days later, It became the main site. I didn't improve shit around here. I stole shit around here. Shame, it would soon be super seded though.

90s Geocities design (2020)

In June 2020 after watching a nice video by Whang! on YouTube about geocities.ws, I decided to have a crack at making a 90s website which meant including tiled GIFs that don't match at the seams, tons of web buttons, explosion GIFs and garish text. I also decided to make another website that was a rip-off of the one Whang made in his video, because of course I would but for the one I made myself, I think that I captured what Geocities was about back in the 90s: it's your space, nobody can stop you, go wild. Sadly, the end was nigh for Z.LD.

Nintendo DS (2020)

As I said the end was nigh, there was blog.colean.cc that got replaced with the journal but that isn't the focus. August of 2020 brought a Nintendo DS inspired dark theme that brought the blue back, I used some free, open source CSS to make this, which means it's legally stolen! Good job me on not being an absolute mug.

Dark Design v1 (2021)

Between August 2020 and August 2021, "bots are bad humans are better" are a common thing you see as I decided to put on a filter. The site remained literally unchanged until August 2021, where the first iteration of Dark Design was introduced. It was incredibly monospaced and existed as one page. I also brought Gemini support which was manually written at that time, now ewfm with some special processors do it for me. In September, without changing the design, I moved to the now-current directory listing idea of colean.cc, a hierarchy idea that I really enjoy and haven't gotten rid of since.

Dark Design v2 (2022)

By 2022, I had gotten my act together and blended serif, sans serif and monospaced fonts to create the modern design that is still used on colean.cc today, it's sleek, colourful and easy to get. It is also an incredibly simple design CSS-wise taking up about 15 lines of CSS. I added some shit to the footer and stuff from then and did some cool stuff, lost my hard drive and had to rebuild the entire site manually, bla bla bla. You get it, it's what you're looking at right now. I think Dark Design is here to stay, it makes me think of my website as less of a landing page thing and more of an explorative artform or hobby. It's fun to add stuff like the history of my webpages here. I hope everyone will continue to enjoy my site into the future... and that I'll have the necessary funds to keep it going!

So...

That was a brief history between 2017 and 2022 of my websiting. From garish black-on-whites, white-on-blue Bootstrap, stolen CSS, Nintendo DS and the Dark Design

Footnotes

You can enjoy some of the old websites here:


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