Inertia

Hungarian Web Design Community

Client

Inertia (Self-developed)

Roles

Visual identity, Graphic design, Full stack development, Content curation

Technologies

HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, Adobe Photoshop

Summary

In the early 2000's, while I was still attending university, I got very interested in web design. I started building websites for various clients, but I also wanted to share my newly found passion with everyone. This is how Inertia, Hungary’s first community for web and graphic designers was born, and my career has begun.

Inertia was halfway between a blog and a magazine, featuring design related news, job posts, contests, exhibitions, experiments, games, forums, and a lot of pixel art. It was also quite pink. The format was similar to other famous design portals at the time, such as Kaliber 1000, Australian Infront, Surfstation and Design Is Kinky.

During its relatively short lifetime Inertia grew into a vibrant community of over 1000 designers, and spawned such popular projects as stock.xchng (SXC), my first venture into stock photography and at one point the biggest free stock photo archive on the web, and Visual Culture 2001, a self-published, printed design album with the work of over 100+ renowned international artists.

Features

Design related news

Inertia's main content area with curated design news from all over the world: design trends, mind blowing websites, the latest awesome free font, etc...

Agency news + Jobs

In this section, design agencies could submit news about projects they just completed and also post their available positions here.

Msg-o-matik

Live message board on the front page where registered users could post anything that was on their mind. Users could create their own customized, pixel art avatars.

Forum

Oldschool forum section with design and programming related discussions.

Time.Crisis

Although Inertia hosted multiple contests, the most famous one was Time.Crisis, where people had to create something awesome using a randomly selected stock photo, in under 1 hour.

Exhibitions

This section had regular showcases of renowned designers' portfolios, usually focusing on a certain topic.

Experiments & games

Inertia was a place for creativity and experimentation. We created all sorts of eye candy effects and games in Flash, including my recreation of Invaders.

WhoAmI

In this section designers could introduce themselves using a set of template questions and answers.

stock.xchng

In stock.xchng, which eventually grew into one of my stock photo businesses, designers could exchange their own digital photos with each other.

Narita

Named after one of Tokyo's airports, Narita was a massive, categorized collection of all sorts of design related links — news, artists, resources and so on.

Splash screens

As another way to showcase creativity, Inertia displayed a random splash screen designed by members of the community any time someone visited the site.

IRC #inertia

Core community members always hung out on the IRC channel #inertia. It was a great place to exchange ideas, and many of the contests took place there as well.

Visual Culture 2001

Inertia Visual Culture 2001 is a self-published, limited edition, printed design album with the work of over 100+ renowned international artists. Capturing the trends of the early 2000's, it contains nearly 200 pages of beautiful graphics from true pioneers such as François Chalet, Jens Karlsson, Büro Destruct, Todd Purgason, and many more.

The idea was born in May 2001, during a late-night conversation. We wanted to create a printed graphic design magazine featuring the work of Hungarian artists and a few international guest stars, whose enthusiastic response eventually led to the decision of transforming the magazine into an international design compilation. After a call for entries was announced on various design portals, we received over 400 pages of amazing artwork.

It took me quite a few all nighters to put the album together using InDesign, as it was something I've never done before, but the excitement that I could work with some of my heroes kept me going. The result is the book you see below. I decided to share a digital version, because physical copies are hard to come by. Click on the cover for a trip back to this exciting era of web design.

Inertia Visual Culture 2001 | Front cover

Invaders

In the early 2000's, due to the limitations of web technologies and browsers, Flash was all the rage in web design. Agencies such as 2Advanced Studios who pushed the envelope with jaw-dropping Flash websites were universally admired, and Inertia regularly featured Flash based, interactive eye candy experiments and games that we made in our spare time.

One of the Flash games I made was a recreation of Invaders — in pink of course. The game's engine was written in Actionscript (the built-in script language of Flash), it featured multiple levels, and it also had a backend part: high scores were saved into a MySQL database using PHP.

Flash has been dead for a number of years now. In modern web development there's not much use for it any more. But that also means that games like this might be lost forever. Therefore, to preserve it, and also to have something fun on my portfolio, I decided to rewrite Invaders in vanilla Javascript. Enjoy!

Instructions: Use your mouse to play. Needs a viewport wider than 768px. Mobile version is coming soon!Note: Invaders needs a viewport wider than 768px, and a mouse. Mobile version is coming soon!