# Yesterweb (イエスタウェブ)

> The look of a movement that began in February 2021 as a Discord room and grew into a webring and a zine. It calls for leaving what it names the core web, the platforms run for profit, in favor of a peripheral web of hand written personal sites, and it dresses its pages in 88 by 31 buttons and stamps arguing that frames are still a good tool.

- IndexStyle No.539 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/yesterweb
- Kind: Aesthetic · Family: Digital Retro · Era: 2021–2023
- Mood: Rebellion, Nostalgia, Intimacy
- Color cues: #000000 / #56289B / #C26AB7 (cues taken from reference works, not a fixed palette)

## Defining characteristics

- Rows of 88 by 31 pixel buttons, put there to be copied by hand onto somebody else's page
- A tiled background image that stays fixed while the page scrolls past it
- Text heavy GIF stamps carrying the argument itself, such as frames are fine and you should make your own website
- Previous, next, and random webring buttons closing out the foot of the page

## Best used for

- Linking your own hand written pages directly to other people's pages instead of publishing through a platform
- Setting up your own machinery for binding a scene of personal sites together, a ring or a button exchange

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: A quirky display face for headings and a plain sans for body text; the manifesto stays as text no matter how long, never as an image.
- Layout & structure: Stack the content in window like boxes down the page with a vertical band running along one edge, and close the foot with a link list and the ring buttons.
- Material & texture: Purple and pink laid over black, a tiled image fixed behind everything, and buttons and stamps pasted in as raw GIFs with no compression pass and no shared dimensions.

## What to avoid

Collect the nineties signifiers but drop the argument and the reason for leaving the corporate web goes with it, leaving the nostalgic wallpaper the movement's own summary names as the trap.

## Application checklist

Before calling a piece an application of this style, check it against the defining characteristics:

- [ ] Rows of 88 by 31 pixel buttons, put there to be copied by hand onto somebody else's page
- [ ] A tiled background image that stays fixed while the page scrolls past it
- [ ] Text heavy GIF stamps carrying the argument itself, such as frames are fine and you should make your own website
- [ ] Previous, next, and random webring buttons closing out the foot of the page
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Web 1.0 (ウェブ1.0)** — Reuses the naivety of the constrained early web as directness and charm. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/web-one
- **Zine (ジン／自主制作冊子)** — Circulates personal and communal voices without publishers, through small runs, low budgets and DIY reproduction. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/zine

## Further study

- Yesterwebのマニフェスト本文と、The Role of Nostalgiaの節（懐古が運動を止めたという自己批判）
- 中心のウェブと周縁のウェブという二分の定義
- 88×31バナーとリングのウィジェットが、実際にどう手作業で貼り回されたか実例を辿る

## Reference works

- The Yesterweb — Reclaiming the Internet (運動自身の一次資料) — https://yesterweb.org/

## Source of record

- The Yesterweb — Reclaiming the Internet (運動自身の一次資料) — https://yesterweb.org/

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/yesterweb
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/yesterweb/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compose_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)