Peter Hosey

There were a ton of ads that looked like this in computer magazines throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Not all ads looked like these, but a lot of them did. Not all of them were full-page, but many of them were.

I found these four examples by flipping through a random issue of MacUser magazine (August 1987 in case you're curious). Didn't take me long to have enough examples.

• Some ad agency's house style?
• Style guidelines of a sufficiently influential magazine that all these companies were also advertising in (or the parent company of several magazines)?
• Convergent evolution?

There was a period of time, when ad blockers were first taking off (as other ad platforms got steadily more invasive), where the prevailing guidance among communities I was in at the time was that whether you chose to block ads or not, you should definitely make an exception for your favorite webcomics, because they were either on Project Wonderful or the then-nascent Hiveworks, and their ads didn't suck.

(Hiveworks's ads still don't suck, but they're more of a closed intra-network thing—like the webrings people keep bringing up—rather than a more general advertising platform.)