I can’t quite re-call the exact circumstances as to why I typed it in. Perhaps I was looking for inspiration, perhaps I was just procrastinating from the hard task I had at hand. Either way, I had a fresh Chrome tab open and my fingers eagerly typed in the URL as if the muscle memory of my teenage college student self suddenly took hold. 2advanced.com

My mind was set with the (slightly disappointing) expectation of seeing a modern design agency website, with more “Flat UI” and animated parallax scrolling than I could shake a stick at. But what came was something I simply wasn’t expecting.

After the realisation that I did have Flash installed. The website I saw before me was exactly what I remembered from 2004. Whilst it wasn’t quite the same version, it still had the very essence of the reason I ever used to visit it so frequently in my college years. The over-the-top animated preloader, transitions, case studies, the pixel fonts. It was all still there.

Nostalgia washed over me. I was once in awe of this website. The experience, the technical aptitude of those who made it, the sounds, the damn sounds! It was the pinnacle of the internet. There was nowhere to go from here. I recalled days and nights hunched over in front of a 17" CRT monitor, cursing at Flash as I tried desperately to build something to even a modicum of what I saw.

Shortly after, I became grounded with the thought: What happened? How did something that I deemed to be at the peak of it’s game just become stagnant*? Is this the fate for all of our work? My work? What’s the point? What is the bloody point?!

I reluctantly accepted that in the long term this is the fate for everything I put into pixels. But maybe that’s ok.

The 2Advanced Studios website made me focus on things that I would have likely missed otherwise. Throughout this time of exploration I was learning, or at least being introduced to, the concepts my college lecturers failed to teach me; The intricacies of interfaces, the importance of animation — building experiences, delight, wonder.

All I can wish for is that some of the stuff I’ve made over the years might have a fraction of the impact on someone else as 2advanced.com had on me.