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Let’s all meet up in the Y2K
gist
Matt Sephton uses photographs from Blueberry, a London digital agency at the height of the dot-com boom, to reconstruct the material culture of early web work. The essay moves through translucent iMacs, table layouts, LAN games, improvised perks, and a chaotic office that felt like a social club while still shipping major client work. Its final turn, from exuberance to liquidation by 2001, makes the artifacts evidence of how quickly that world appeared and disappeared.
ideas
- Photographs preserve working culture. Desks, devices, magazines, toys, and whiteboards recover details that a conventional company history would usually omit.
- Technical constraints shaped the craft. Sephton hand-coded sites in HomeSite when limited CSS support still made table layouts and single-pixel spacer GIFs routine.
- Boom economics distorted ordinary bargains. A weekend deadline was valuable enough for Sephton to name the price of a classic Fiat 500 and receive it.
- Work and social life shared one system. Music, LAN games, constant movement between desks, and intensive client delivery belonged to the same office culture.
- The ending was abrupt. The agency moved from major clients and conspicuous spending to trade-press trouble and liquidation by 2001.
quotes
“Blueberry was more like a social club than a job, and we still shipped a lot of work”
“Everything I produced was hand-coded in HomeSite: HTML, JS, CSS.”
“So that’s what I got paid for a weekend building a site nobody else could get done.”
“By April 2001 the downturn was already in the trade press, and eventually the liquidators arrived.”