Before webfonts, a page title you cared about was a picture. The /gif/ directory holds the house's lettering: HOME.GIF, HOUSE.GIF, WHAT.GIF, new.GIF, toptitle2.GIF, and a run of year markers from I2001 to I2013. Every room name was a small drawing, made once, served everywhere.

What the piece presented

A title GIF was drawn by hand or set in a graphics program, saved at exactly its display size, and placed where a heading would go. The year markers deserve a second look: files named for 2009, 2010 and 2013 were drawn years before those years arrived, which means the house was built expecting to last. The navigation titles, bbs, profile, life, contact_me, exist as both plain and _f2 versions, the second set probably the rollover states.

What the record kept

All forty-four files in the directory survive in capture, and their naming is legible enough to reconstruct the site map from the lettering alone. The record shows a two-state navigation drawn entirely in pixels: hover a room name and the drawing changed.

What the drawings were for

Drawing your titles meant the site looked like no other, because the lettering was yours. It also meant every new room cost an evening at the drawing tool before it cost a line of markup. That friction is invisible in the files but it shaped the house: you drew a title only for a room you intended to keep.

The cost of a drawing

Every title GIF carried the cost of its making, and that cost shaped the site. A room did not exist until its lettering did; renaming a room meant redrawing it. The _f2 and _f3 variants show the keeper drawing each title at least twice, once for the resting state and once for the hover, so a navigation of six rooms was a dozen drawings.

This is why early homepages looked like their makers: the lettering was not chosen from a menu, it was produced. The skill required was small, but it was required every time.

The year markers

The I2001 through I2013 files are the strangest objects in the directory: titles for years that had not happened yet. Drawing I2013 in 2002 was an act of optimism or simply of batch efficiency, either way it assumed the house would stand long enough to need it. The marker for a year eleven years out is the single most hopeful file in the archive.

That the house did not survive to use the full set is part of the exhibit. The drawn years outlasted the house they were drawn for.

A lettering nobody else had

The deepest thing about drawn titles is that they could not be copied by copying code. Anyone could take the HTML; nobody else's site could wear the lettering, because the lettering was a picture of this house's name. The GIFs were the site's signature disguised as its navigation.

And the signature aged perfectly: a GIF from 2002 renders today exactly as drawn, which is more than any webfont can promise.

The directory's second population is the years themselves: I2001 through I2013, thirteen markers drawn at once. Whatever tool drew them, the keeper sat down and lettered thirteen years of a house that had existed for one. The file list is the most optimistic document in the archive, and the record's quietest proof that nobody planned the ending.

What is not shown

The tool they were drawn in, the typeface imitated, or the drafts that were thrown away. The GIFs are the survivors; the sketchbook is not in the record.