I used to draw my webpages
I couldn't afford a computer, so I designed websites by hand. Thirty years later, that's the whole reason I won't let a machine do the creating for me.
I designed websites in a paper notebook before I owned a computer
The year was 1996, and my family could not afford a computer. I wouldn’t get one of my own until college. But my local library, in a move I am forever grateful for, wired all of its machines to the ‘ol (new??) world wide web, and just like that, the door was open.
And man, did I get lost in the sauce.
I discovered GeoCities. I chatted ALLLL the time at a place called the Tokyo Tea Room. I looked up Game Genie codes for games I was definitely going to beat that weekend, and I devoured every scrap of gaming and anime news I could find. It was an addiction in the worst way, my guys, and I loved every single second of it.
Somewhere in all that loafing, surrounded by webpages other people had built, I landed on the thing I actually wanted to do. I didn’t just want to read these pages. I wanted to make my own.
The embarrassing dilemma
Here was the problem. I had a free GeoCities account, which meant I had my own little plot of internet land just waiting to be built on. What I did not have was a computer at home, and home was where I was at my most creative.
Now, the obvious solution here is for someone to lean over and say, “just design them at the library, dummy.” And that’s fair. That’s completely fair. But I was a teenager with unsupervised internet access for the first time in my life, and I was far too busy having the time of my life to do anything as responsible as using my computer hours productively.
So the question stood, and it was for real. How was I supposed to design webpages with no computer to design them on?
My solution was to draw them. In a notebook. By hand.
What was actually in those notebooks
I loved my notebooks back then. Beyond the occasional journal entry, they were stuffed with my random thoughts and a whole lot of sketches, because I was a teen who loved to draw (I still love to draw, but back then I really loved to draw).
As I fell into the internet age, my notebooks fell right in with me. I was copying down cheat codes and gaming news by hand, because the library didn’t have printers yet either. But I was also doing something a little wild. I was sketching out my dream webpages in full, complete with underlined links, hand-drawn logos, and web banners (and, y’all, web banners were a HUGE deal in the GeoCities era, a load-bearing pillar of any self-respecting homepage).
I was designing like a maniac. It was a completely computerless kind of design, with no way to ever actually publish any of it, and I poured myself into it anyway.
That’s the part I want you to sit with for a second, because I didn’t see it clearly myself until recently. I loved the designing so much that I did it with no computer, for no audience, with no way to ship the thing. The making was the entire point. There was no other point. Just me, a pencil, and a notebook full of wild webpage designs.
The candy store, then and now
The thing about the early internet that’s hard to explain to anyone who missed it is the sheer daily wonder of it. Something new and amazing showed up every single day, people were innovating in every direction at once, and the rest of us got to just stand there and watch it happen in real time. You were the kid in the candy store, except the manager had leaned over and said, “bet you can’t eat as much candy as you want, for free.” Welp. Challenge accepted, sir. All day, every day.
I bring this up because, fast forward to 2026, AI right now feels an awful lot like that. The chatbots update on what feels like a constant cycle, the services are generating every kind of content you can imagine, and the thinking models are getting pointed at real problems and actually making progress on some of them. It’s that same sense of something new showing up before you’ve finished marveling at the last thing.
But there’s one big ‘ol difference in this modern era. Back in the 90s, nobody was standing over the new creations calling them garbage. Today, a whole subset of people have decided that anything made with AI gets labeled “slop,” and the heat behind that critique runs hotter than anything I remember from the early internet days. I’m not here to settle who’s right about that. I’ll just note that the wonder and the contempt are sharing the same room right now, and leave it there.
Why I won’t hand the machine the whole thing
So where do I stand on this whole thing?
I don’t mind using AI as an assistive tool one bit. A good amount of what I make these days has AI somewhere in the process. But using it as the one and only tool, the lone artist doing the actual creating? I don’t do that, and not because some online tribe told me not to.
I come from a traditional multimedia background (Macromedia, anybody?… uhh… hello?), and even before that, I was the kid drawing webpages in a paper notebook for the pure joy of it. I love the design process far too much to just hand it over to a machine. The thing AI is offering to skip for me is the exact thing I loved then and still love now.
And that’s the part I keep coming back to. The notebook kid would have been genuinely baffled by the offer. Picture it. You walk up to a teenager who is so in love with designing that he’s doing it on paper, with no computer, for an audience of nobody, and you tell him you’ve got a machine that will do the whole thing for him instantly. He doesn’t want that. He would look at you like you’d offered to eat his Hostess snack cake on his behalf (and ain’t NOBODY eating MY Hostess snack cake). The drawing wasn’t the obstacle between him and the webpage. The drawing was the entire reason he was sitting there.
I’m still that kid. The offer hasn’t gotten more tempting just because the machine got better at accepting it.
I’m bringing the notebook back
As I sit here typing this, I keep thinking about that kid sketching out fanfiction-level webpages he had no way to build, designing with the kind of focus that would’ve made you think he was Doug Funnie with a library card (and yes, Doug eventually got internet episodes, but we don’t talk about those middle-school-era ones that hardly anybody I know watched).
My design process has changed many a time since then. But I don’t think the kid was wrong about anything, and the fear I keep hearing, that AI is going to cost people their creativity and their originality and their authentic self, would not have scared him one bit. It can’t take any of that from you unless you hand it over. I know, because that whole creative fire was burning years before I ever touched a tool, fueled by nothing but a library card, a spiral notebook (and a frankly irresponsible number of Hostess snack cakes).
I kinda wanna break out the notebooks again. Not as some productivity trick, and not as a protest against anything. It’s because that kid at the library understood something I’ve spent thirty years occasionally forgetting, which is that the wonder was never coming from the tool. Not the computer I didn’t have, and not the AI I do. It was coming from me, hunched over a hand-drawn graphic I’d never publish, having the time of my life.
The pencil didn’t make me creative. Neither will the machine. That part was always mine to keep.
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