The Under Construction Sign

1994

The canonical animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign, the universal placeholder that decorated half the personal homepages of the late 1990s. Place: Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, every personal homepage of the decade Figures: anonymous · copied without attribution · embedded in millions of pages The animated UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign emerges sometime in 1994-1995, no single author credited, as the universal placeholder for an unfinished section of a personal homepage. The canonical version: orange-and-black diagonal hazard stripes as a banner, the word UNDER CONSTRUCTION in bold sans, often accompanied by a small animated gopher in a hard hat swinging a shovel, or a flashing yellow police light, or a JCB-style digger with a rotating cab. Variants proliferate within months. There is a Geocities-blue version. A NASCAR version. A pink-glitter version for the Hollywood neighborhood. A tiny 88x31 BUTTON version for sidebars. None of the versions credits a creator. The GIF travels through right-click-save-as for years before anyone notices nobody knows who drew it. Video: A scrolling timelapse through hundreds of preserved GeoCities pages. The under-construction sign appears so often it functions as a sample rate.