Oh yes, atlasmagazine - the best site on the web 6 years ago and it still reads and looks great. At least once a year I check in the forlorn hope that there might be a new issue.
posted by niceness at 1:35 AM on July 21, 2003

I dunno niceness, there were some pretty cool things online in 1997.

Speaking of which. I really miss the past. What a fucking ripoff the 21st century has turned out to be. God damnit!
posted by delmoi at 3:03 AM on July 21, 2003

Yay, I adore Atlas, and especially love the Chinese Pop Posters. The editors were Amy Franchesini, who's gone on to do Future Farmers, and Olivier Laude, who grew up a poor, illiterate shepherd boy. I think Atlas is still one of the most beautiful sites around. There are five more issues here - click on the numbers at the bottom.
posted by iconomy at 5:00 AM on July 21, 2003

Dear Atlasmagazine:

Please make your website even harder to navigate for new visitors.

Thank you.

Delmoi: ain't it the truth?
posted by Ynoxas at 6:14 AM on July 21, 2003

Monkey Dressed as Michael Jackson

Nice stuff.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:04 AM on July 21, 2003

This weekend I walked by a newspaper ..uhm, dispenser thingy. What're those called? Anyway, somebody had glued to the front of it a parody propaganda poster of a woman reading a newspaper and the caption on it read something like, "thank you news media for only printing what you're told to print - it makes it easier to control the masses." Really. All those words. Some above the woman's head, some in the newspaper headline she was reading, some below the picture. Seemed like a lot of effort to get such a pointless point across.

But my point is, at least I knew what the propagandist was trying to say. With these Chinese pop posters it's intranslatable.
posted by ZachsMind at 8:16 AM on July 21, 2003

Speaking of which. I really miss the past. What a fucking ripoff the 21st century has turned out to be. God damnit!

Really. Where are the personal jet packs and Unisex plastic outfits? I remember as a kid, many years ago, thinking about the Year 2000. Holy shit, *that* was the future. Homes on Mars, hovercraft for everyone, skyscrappers 1000 stories high.

Instead, we got "reality" TV, SARS, and Java(tm). Ripoff indeed.
posted by Ayn Marx at 9:54 AM on July 21, 2003

Ynoxas: Sorry about that. (I'm the guy who did all the development work on Atlas -- the core team was Olivier, Amy, and me.)

But you've gotta keep in mind the times and the whole purpose of the site. Our whole mindset was geared toward coolness, and toward giving Amy all the room she needed to explore. And we started it in 1995, with the express purpose of exploring and testing and just seeing what happened -- whenever anything new came along, we tried it.

Can't say we paid much attention to usability, but we just had other fish to fry.

In any case, everyone's pretty much moved on at this point, to my own disappointment. Every year or so we sort of bat around the idea of a new issue, but it's just too difficult to get all three of us together to do it.
posted by macrone at 6:39 PM on July 21, 2003

Macrone: I would bet that its one of those things that is completely intuitive for creators and regular viewers, that's why I specifically said new visitors.

Obviously a lot of work has gone into the site. Hopefully I'm the only person who found the UI to be a stumbling block. It would be a shame to miss some of the content there. At least what I've been able to find. ;-)
posted by Ynoxas at 12:57 PM on July 22, 2003