This graph traces the term "Web Design" in literature from 1990 until today, and its steady decline sits oddly next to how technical the web has actually become, standardised, packaged, sold on the idea that the less one thinks about code the more "creative" one is, as an Adobe promotional video once suggested.
Meanwhile the strange, hand-built corners of the early web have been replaced by a uniform, templated, and ultimately boring web. But something this is shifting. A new generation of designers is turning back to brutalist, raw, personal-site aesthetics, treating handwritten HTML not as a limitation but as a form of resistance.
You can contribute to the timeline behind this chart here.