Then I searched every hard drive, every backup, every corner of my tiny digital empire, trying to find the PSD for that skin. The other day, I fired up some Mandy Moore for old time’s sake. I guess it was only natural that I wound up designing products that play music. Designing websites felt like something I had inherited or borrowed from the Print Generation. Form and function blurred together in wonderful, wholesome harmony. I was solving problems and thinking about users, not visitors. If my muse was lackluster, the work was anything but. That fire kindled into a Winamp skin celebrating my then-celebrity crush: Mandy Moore. When I found a message board full of custom Winamp skins, I realized that anyone who could create graphics could create a skin. The more I used Winamp, though, the more interested I became in its design. That was about as interactive as things got, especially if you skipped the Flash intro. So I created glossy onscreen brochures and business cards embossed with rollovers. Websites weren’t used, they were visited. You’d “CLICK HERE.” The next page would load. Javascript, specifically, AJAX, hadn’t yet brought the Internet to life. Simple navigation through predictable sitemaps.
In 2000, most of the websites I designed resembled brochures or posters or gift cards - digital approximations of the era’s conventions. My digital music collection was a junkyard of random MP3s and ripped CDs, but Winamp whipped it into something that made sense. I wanted to turn every knob, press every button. It looked like my Rat distortion pedal or Boss DD-3. I remember thinking, “Whoever made this has to be a musician.” More specifically, they had to be a guitar player. In 2000, most Windows and third-party applications felt impenetrable, but Winamp felt real. A booming (ironic) voice would say, “ Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass.” That would be Winamp, of course.įrom the second you opened it, you knew Winamp was something different. What would become my professional career also began: I wrote my first line of HTML, built my first website, downloaded my first MP3 from Napster, and fell in love for the first time with a software application. My shitty rock band recorded and released its first (and final) studio album. In 2000, I graduated from high school and used the gift money to buy my first personal computer. It’s also because Winamp was a key part of what it was like to come of age right at the end of the millennium (and first tech bubble). It’s not just because Winamp (with an assist from Mandy Moore) set me on the path that led me to become head of design at the streaming music service Rdio. AOL will officially shut down Winamp on Friday, and I’m sad about it.
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