India, July 11 -- Ah, early websites. Chunks of info dumped link by link, clusters of garish graphics. The Web Design Museum has preserved snapshots of versions of websites dating back to 1991. McDonald's site in 1996 has a Paint app-style drawing of Ronald McDonald welcoming customers; Christina Aguilera's 2002 website had pics of her brooding mysteriously above a list of her Most Recent Appearances. How to capture the the futuristic optimism of being online in the 2000s? Artist Sofi Xian coined the term Aero in 2017 to describe the vibes of the 2005 - 2013 internet era. Think of Windows wallpapers (fluffy clouds, blue skies, endless green fields), glossy skyscrapers, and utopian stock imagery. On FrutigerAeroArchive.Org, you can see how the style translated across web design, music players, games and TV. Remember when the biggest joy as a kid was sneakily playing online games during IT class in school? Flashpoint Archive hosts over 2 lakh playable games from the last 20 years, in all their colourful, noisy excess. There are crowd-pleasers such as Papa's Pizzeria (where we first learned how to hustle) and the strategy game Kingdom Rush (where we first learned how to make bad decisions). Today's iPad kids could never. The media player, which was launched in 1997, allowed you to customise skins, essentially themed doilies. Otakus had their fav anime characters staring soulfully out in the background; cyber bros made their skins look like The Matrix. There's a Winamp museum of over 100K skins from the era. If you're older than 25, you love those small, animated text badges that had flashy borders or blinking text, and were all over blogs and message boards in the 2000s. If you were basic, you put your name. If you were edgy, you'd put self-deprecating jokes. Blinkies Cafe allows you to create your own blinkies and pretend that it's 2010. Before whimsy became a social media trend, wide-eyed teen Millennials and baby Gen Zs were experimenting with making the internet their own. Enter custom cursors: Hourglasses, CDs, pixelated hearts, even tiny weapons. Engineer Tim Holman built an interactive section on his website where you can experience what it was like to surf the web with some old-school cursors. This unlocked a core memory we didn't know we had. If you mix RoboCop and Tron with glitchy, neon palettes, you get the vaporwave moodboard. The style started as an electronic music genre and morphed into an early web aesthetic, with Greek statues and pixel art. It was splashed all over Tumblr and Reddit in the 2010s. Now the surreal style lives on Pinterest. Wordy term for a simple idea - icons that replicate the look of real-world applications. Phone screens have flat logos now, but app designers used to love making icons seem like digital versions of IRL objects. On Dribble.com, users have created their own versions of the Maps, Clock, Radio and Camera icons. How much would you like to personalise your profile? OG MySpace users: Yes. The goth baddies - and guys - ran wild with creepypasta-style visuals. Most users' profiles looked as if a unicorn had vomited rainbows all over them. The website SpaceHey simulates the mood of being 15 and extra again, with their everything-goes profile pages. This is what the Metaverse wishes it could be. In the late 1990s, Geocities had web users creating their own "neighbourhoods", aka themed pages. The visual style was amateur - just normal people creating and uploading stories and pictures - but it's where internet users met friends and spouses and memorialised their lives. On The Geocities Gallery, there are snapshots of this wholesome age....