i grew up with the internet, and over the years i’ve seen the cool aesthetic that i grew up with be melted into this soulless corporate no-personality-having boringness. but there’s still a few gems out there that help me reminisce of the cooler times of the wild west internet that we used to live in, the optimism of the dot-com boom that tickles my brain in nice ways.

Links

Frutiger Aero Archive: a self-described tribute to the 2000s aesthetics that is a real gem to be honest. has a ton of cool wallpapers, old desktop icons, media players, all included with a custom green aero cursor for you to navigate the website. in true old fashion, there are blogs, forums, and webrings. a banger of a bookmark.
rw-designer: i know them mostly because of their insane library of icons and cursors, but they also have some other goodies like design software and forums. the custom mouse/icon art design collection is genuinely insane, and there are people that submit there daily. love.
Gosh, Yes - Vintage Ads!: this isn’t so much related to web aesthetics, but it does contain a pretty vast collection of print advertising from the 20th century, including stuff from old tech magazines. i plan on printing and putting up some posters for my college dorm next year, and i was frankly thinking of ripping some of the pieces from this website and printing them out. nerdy stuff but i find it so so cool
111loggedin: a youtube artist that makes a lot of cool music mixes, anything from the punchy kind of stuff you’d find at a club to more ethereal, ambient kind of stuff. very talented and encrypts all the titles of their videos in base64, so you already know this nerd is going to make stuff that slaps hard.
Classic7: this is a custom version of the windows 10 os that slaps a really faithful skin of windows 7, from sounds to icons to wallpapers. i’ve used it myself to maximize that old school windows aero look, but being pragmatic as i am it’s good to prioritize a functioning operating system that is compatible with most of what we need today. seems to have a pretty transparent development team on their discord, so i definitely would trust them with all my data.

Last modified on 2026-08-05