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The fonts are Times New Roman and Arial Narrow, the colors are maroon and mustard, and the cursor is the 8-bit pixel hand. When Slate revived its original 1996 homepage to celebrate its 30th birthday this fall1, the team found a lot to like besides nostalgia.
“I’ve read Slate since 1997, when I finally had access to my own computer at my first job,” Hillary Frey, Slate’s editor-in-chief, told me recently. At the age of 51, she said, “I’m speaking as an old. But I am a direct traffic girly and I know I’m not alone.”
Slate’s homepage has long functioned as a “fossil of what the internet was during that time,” said Ivylise Simones, Slate’s creative director. In 1996, Slate was trying to figure out what a magazine on the internet should even look like; in 2026, it’s among the last general-interest digital-native news sites, and print magazines are dying out. “Salon is one of our only lasting contemporaries,” Frey noted. “There are other sort of fellows from that era, like Feed and Nerve. They’ve been gone for awhile.”
In its 30th anniversary campaign, Slate has found its fossil-like nature to be something of a selling point. (It can also be a challenge.) Over the years, the site has published a number of posts about its history and editorial and design choices. A decade ago, then–news editor Chad Lorenz wrote “A history of Slate in nine home pages.” (At launch, Slate articles included page numbers and printing instructions.) A 1998 paywall, Lorenz wrote, was “fortunately” abandoned by 1999. But the paywall returned in 2020. (It was metered at the start, but today it’s dynamic, changing based on user behavior.) For its 30th birthday, the site is running a promotion: a year of access for $19.96.
“Going back to our roots, there are certain elements we are starting to really love,” Simones said, and she’s thinking about how to include them in the site’s ongoing redesign. She likes the spareness and simplicity of earlier versions of the site, she said, pointing to Reddit and Discord as places that are “more reminiscent of old homepages than the current, very stylized, very gridded layout” found across the internet. A less dense homepage on desktop, she said, is “refreshing.”
“Our editorial guiding light is the mix,” Frey added. Slate has verticals, but they’re not emphasized in the story selection at the top of the homepage; instead, life, politics, and advice stories are mixed together and weighted similarly. “Having an image for every story you share on the homepage is just not necessary,” Simones noted.
Some 1990s-era headline styles still work, too, Frey has found. One of her favorites is a 2002 piece by Slate founding editor Michael Kinsley: “The secret vice of power women.”
“He was writing it about his wife, who found tremendous satisfaction and relaxation in watching police procedurals,” Frey said. “That’s something I still identify with, though most of them now are from Finland and Norway. 100%, this headline would play on the Slate homepage right this second.”
- A wrinkle for 2026: The 1996-inspired homepage had to work on mobile, even though nobody was reading Slate on a phone 30 years ago.
