The Colophon

What is real here, what is written, and where the facts came from.

← The Sheet

Everything in this archive was drawn from scratch.

Method

There are no screenshots in this museum. Every one of the 11 exhibits is a interface rebuilt in CSS, SVG and canvas — which is why you can press the buttons. Where an original could be observed running, its measurements were taken from it directly: Nairaland's link green, its type stack and its exact post metadata format were read off the live site rather than remembered.

The interfaces are ours. The media inside them is not. Every pixel of chrome is drawn here: the ringtones are synthesised in your browser from RTTTL, the plain-text format the phones themselves stored, and every melody was written for this archive. The Nokia wallpapers and its game of Snake are procedures, rendered to a canvas at one bit per pixel. The sound effects are oscillators. The handsets — a Bold 9700, a 5700 XpressMusic — are CSS, drawn from photographs.

What sits inside those frames is other people's. The videos in the YouTube case are embedded from YouTube and credited to the channels that uploaded them; each was checked against YouTube's own endpoint, which refuses videos whose owners disallow embedding. The photographs in the Facebook and blog cases come from Unsplash under its licence and carry their credit in the interface. Nothing was scraped, mirrored or re-hosted — it is embedded, and it is named.

The three wordmarks you can scratch off the stamps on the front page are set as live type in system faces — Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma — in the same way each replica sets its own chrome. They are recreations of lettering, not copies of logo files.

What is written

The wall labels are factual and sourced. The contents — forum threads, chat messages, blog comments, broadcast texts — are written for the archive. They are period-accurate in shape, register and subject, and invented in substance, so that no real person's words are put in anyone's mouth. Product names are used the way a museum labels a case.

One case names a living person. The blog is Linda Ikeji's, and everything stated about her there is documented and cited — the 2006 start, the cybercafé years, the 2007 Blogspot subdomain, the August 2012 search ranking, the October 2014 takedown and restoration. The post itself is bylined to this archive, not to her: no sentence in that case is presented as her writing. The comments beneath it are invented, because those commenters were anonymous and are not identifiable people.

Design

The stamp album is after the 1970s definitive issues of the Nigerian Security Printing & Minting Company — perforated edges, three flat spot inks, a heavy display face, a denomination in kobo, and a printer's credit line set in six point. The crimson-and-mustard poster is after the Lagos travel plates of the same period.

DisplayTac One
TextArchivo
Credit lineJetBrains Mono, 9px, letterspaced
ReplicasPeriod faces per exhibit — Tahoma, Trebuchet, Georgia, Courier
SoundWeb Audio oscillators, off until you turn them on
VideoEmbedded from YouTube, credited per clip
PhotographsUnsplash, credited in the interface
IssueDefinitive, eleven values, NIA 01–11
A note on accuracyWhere a replica had to choose between looking right and being usable, it chose usable — text contrast has been raised above what some originals shipped, and every case can be driven from the keyboard. Motion respects your reduced-motion setting. If something here is wrong, it is wrong by mistake and not by licence.

Sources

Nairaland Forum (the live site)Front-page structure, board list, post metadata format, link colour and type stack, read directly off the running site.
Seun Osewa — WikipediaNairaland's March 2005 launch and its founder.
2go — Ventureburn, 20122go's Nigerian user numbers against Facebook's in 2012.
The Rise and Fall of 2go — TekediaLaunch year, peak registered users, and the decline.
Linda Ikeji — WikipediaEvery dated claim in the blog exhibit: the 2006 start, the cybercafé years, the 2007 Blogspot subdomain, the August 2012 search ranking, the 2013 awards, and the October 2014 takedown and restoration.
lindaikejisblog.comThe blog as it runs today, after the move off Blogger.
Facebook Zero — Wikipedia0.facebook.com, its May 2010 launch, and its role in African growth.
Facebook launches 0.facebook.com — TechCrunch, 2010What zero-rating actually covered, and what still cost data.
BlackBerry and iconic 2010s tech in Nigeria — The NATIVEBBM's place in Nigerian social life and the PIN as an opening move.
BlackBerry Messenger, 2005–2019 — rip.soThe eight-character PIN, BBM's decline, and its last strongholds.
YouTube — embedded uploadsThe videos in the YouTube case play through YouTube's own player and belong to the channels credited on each clip: Official2Baba, officialpsquare, mygbeduTV, STYL-PLUS, Africa Studio 9, African BoxOffice Tv, Nollywoodhits and MOVIES WEB.
UnsplashEvery photograph in the Facebook and blog cases, used under the Unsplash licence and credited where it appears.