The Golden Age of Banner Art
Explore our curated collection of early web advertisements, button wars, and animated GIF banners. Preserved exactly as they loaded in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Banner Art Technical Specs
Standard Dimensions
468×60 (Full Banner), 728×90 (Leaderboard), 88×31 (Button), 234×60 (Half Banner). Set by the IAB in 1996, these sizes dominated ad networks for over a decade.
File Format
GIF89a was the industry standard. Supported 256 colors, interlacing, transparency, and animation loops. File sizes were strictly kept under 15KB for 28.8k modems.
Art Techniques
Pixel-perfect dithering, custom color palettes, anti-aliasing hacks, frame-by-frame animation, and HTML table padding for layout. Created in Deluxe Paint, GifBuilder, and PhotoShop 3.0.
Delivery & Tracking
Server-side impression tracking via 1×1 pixel GIFs. Click-throughs used CGI redirects. No JavaScript tracking existed yet; everything was image-based and HTTP/1.0 compatible.
Contribute a Banner
Found a rare or personal banner from your old website? Help us preserve web history. Submit URLs or file dumps for archival restoration.