Back in 2024 I posted a few of these on Twitter (thread reader) after digging out old photos from the dot-com boom. I was working in London at a digital agency called Blueberry. Please take a seat for peak translucent plastic frutiger aero aesthetic, long before the term was coined, and some period flashbacks if you were working on the web at this time.

I’d come from graphic design agency Form, but wanted somewhere to do bigger web projects with other likeminded souls. Blueberry was more like a social club than a job, and we still shipped a lot of work for clients like Laura Ashley, Ben & Jerry’s, Ted Baker, The Times, Boo.com, Snow24, and many more I forget. Everything I produced was hand-coded in HomeSite: HTML, JS, CSS. This was before browser CSS support came of age, so it was all table layouts with single pixel spacer gifs: good times!

If you’d like to know how crazy those days were: at one point they asked me to work a weekend and I already had plans, so they asked what it would take. I wanted a classic FIAT 500, so I named the price of the car: multiple thousands of pounds. The management said yes, it was their only option. So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done.

Home & Away

That’s me on the left of the first shot, curling my bottom lip when I’m deep in thought as I still do today. I must be 23 or 24 years of age. HomeSite undoubtedly open somewhere in Windows. The reindeer on my monitor pooped little brown jelly beans when you pressed down on its rear end, a gift from my girlfriend at the time.

On the desk facing the camera, my good friend Morgan Gibbons’ (Creative Artworker extraordinaire) Graphite Power Mac G4 tower, Apple CRT, translucent Pro Keyboard and Mouse, Sony headphones, promotional postcards: Phwoar! G4, some Renault Clio car porn, and of course a nice cup of tea. His desktop wallpaper is Quake III, which we all used to play over the LAN “…in your face!”. There’s an official Dreamcast magazine in the corner featuring Crazy Taxi, which dates this photo to March 2000. I also spy a Bowser wrist rest in front of the keyboard, an Apple mouse mat with rainbow logo, and an Iomega Zip drive just to its right.

Bubblegum iMacs were everywhere on the floor. One sat dark among paper trays; another was on with Aqua-era desktop art and a purple translucent mouse.

Later I moved upstairs onto a secret project and upgraded to a Sony VAIO PCG-Z600RE laptop, a Palm Vx, and a Sony Ericsson phone. And of course I had a test iMac of my own. We can see my being a FIAT fan boy because by this point I was driving the car I bought with a weekend’s earnings. There’s also a NGPC (Neo Geo Pocket Color) in its box nestled amongst the mess of my desk, and a promo copy of Dreamcast game Crazy Taxi for me to take home.

For some reason I’m sat at somebody else’s desk, sizing up the height and fit of the chair. Diesel jeans and jumper, Deliverance food box on the partition (decades before Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, etc). I guess we must have been working late one night.

After that I think I complained and got moved downstairs again, sitting next to the legend that is Shaun Jackson, who I am still in touch with. IIRC I’m helping him out with a tricky bit of page layout!

Getting Things Done

The open plan floor, with offices at either end and a kitchen half way down, was all curved purple desks and CRT monitors. A hive of activity and house music or drum’n’bass. I have fond memories of BT (Movement in Still Life), various Deep Dish compilations (Yoshiesque) and the back catalogue Omni Trio being played regularly, at least by me.

Closer in: two computers per-desk, magazines and CD-ROMs on the partition, a MiniDisc player!

Everybody was always moving around as they worked on different projects. I’m pretty sure this is another photo from Morgan’s desk when it was one island away from his first desk. The PlayStation 2 and Phwoar! G4 are the giveaway. I’m sure somebody will be able to date that fashion magazine.

Reception

The entrance from the corridor: frosted Blueberry doors, glass wall looking into the bar stools, Christmas lights still up in the atrium.

Inside, reception had chrome stools and a bar-height counter. Visitors could surf the web sat in dentist chairs with iMacs on swing arms. Naturally!

Backroom

There was servers cabinet in most rooms, and we had a dedicated server room: rackmount drives, a switch with a bird’s nest of blue patch cables, a CRT console in the middle of the stack, and a beige tower on the floor beside it. It was in the server room that unwitting people were first subjected to Goatse (do not search this) and were cries would echo around the building as one of the network guys lost a game of Quake III or Unreal Tournament.

Todo

This whiteboard has my name next to some of Thursday’s tickets:

• Finish Instant Win — Matt
• All other graphic changes — Matt
• Home page — Karen/Gus
• Store designs / Postcard designs / Banner ads / Affiliate section — Gus/Karen

Viral Email

We had a sister company called Magic Button that did affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, a girl who worked there sent an intimate email to a guy she knew. He forwarded it to his friends, who forwarded it to their friends, and so on, until there were so many news reporters swarming the building that the girl had to take a few months off to calm things down. You can read more about that at The Guardian, 15th December 2000.

Game Over

By April 2001 the downturn was already in the trade press, and eventually the liquidators arrived.

Just before they claimed everything, I took a Bubblegum iMac as a parting “gift”. Then a second one, because the first didn’t have a DVD drive. For a while that machine ran OS 9 and briefly the OS X Preview. I used it to play imported DVDs and learn more about how Mac OS X worked.

Credits

Thanks to Morgan Gibbons and Anthony Hogbin for some of the photos and memories.