millennium | ten

Following M5, I went into a long period of not being able to figure out what to do for M6. I developed numerous prototypes but nothing ever really stuck. During this time (1998-early 1999) I got the chance to flex my creative side.

Ulysses

Ulysses was a return to JavaScript whiz-bang. It used load events from the 50 or 60 small images that composed its DHTML navigation system to show a running in-page progress dialog as it loaded.

Assorted Sketches

Eventually I gave up on M6, and moved right on to M7... (hey if Netscape could do it, so could I!)

During the same time, I also contributed to the design of several iterations of the Needleleaf Society homepage (whilst moonlighting as Iron Mouse):

And also other SM sites such as SMWPR.

Millennium 7

I finally developed Millennium 7 (no pictures right now) as an evolution of the design of Millennium IV, lots of blue, wavy lines, and DHTML. Again heavily nested tables were used. The nesting was so severe in places that I had to show a background layer for Netscape 4.0 to explain why the page froze the browser for a good 30-45 seconds while it was rendering.

By the time Millennium 7 "shipped" (as it were), my interest in Sailor Moon and anime was fading, and I'd found a new project to turn my JavaScript skills to. Before I gave up, I designed a few more prototypes, one (the "Andromeda" prototype) which would be the template to the predecessor of this site:

I wasn't in the mood to actually implement it though, since that would have taken weeks. Towards the end of 1999 I threw together a quick site and called it Millennium Eight. M5 remained on sailormoon.org until they stopped offering free web hosting, so the content was now a hodge-podge of non-Sailor Moon related stuff, mostly my Mozilla patches and ideas.

In 2000, I went to Mountain View to work for Netscape on Netscape 6. My web design ambition pretty much died during this time as I had something new and more interesting to work on. Midway through 2000 I registered bengoodger.com and tried to resurrect some of the content of M7, but it was too difficult to maintain so I replaced it with a simple page with contact info. In 2002 I resurrected the Andromeda prototype. The site was called Millennium, but bore no number. It was M9. Oddly enough, it was the longest lived design iteration, mostly due to lack of interest/time.

And that brings us to today, with M10. It's been almost ten years too, and things have changed quite a bit for me over that time.

 

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