One of my magic words for searching for treasure on second hand sites has become "homepage". Now and then, there'll be CDs (that were often appendixes to magazines) that are filled to the brim with free to use images, all for your very own website!

A scan of the CD of A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage

A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage contains over 10,700 files.

Ten Thousand plus files! As someone who has gotten used to a floppy disk with 20+ images being an absolute windfall, this really demonstrates just how much of a leap in digital storage that CDs were.

Local webpage for browsing the files of A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage

The CD contains a local webpage that you can use to browse all these files, seperated into categories in a panel on the left.

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Example Websites

The first category shows us some example webpages made with the files on the CD, and there are some very good ones. Any of these would make me so happy to see alive and well on the web today.

An example webpage titled "Pochi House" featuring a cartoon dog

An example webpage for joining the Chorus Club

The simple but appealing designs of the next two show just how far a nice background layout and some cohesively designed elements can really make a webpage feel unique and personal... The first one reminds me of Animal Crossing.

An example webpage with a garden theme, featuring two waving moles

An example webpage with design like cutout paper and a sleepy cat poking out from under a kotatsu

The content on the CD was often heavily themed around different times of the year, made apparent by these New Year themed webpages.

An example webpage featuring a simple cartoon cat wishing the viewer a Happy New Year

An example webpage themed around the Year of the Dragon

The last four examples that I'll share here have a really pleasing aesthetic to me - a retro computer feel with limited colors, simple indented elements and the occasional grid texture. I could see myself actually using assets from these examples.

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Cut

The next category is titled "Cut", which I think refers to general purpose clipart like images. There were a lot of great ones, but here are some of my favorites:


I love the mix of everything going on here! The 3D beetle, the cartoon horse, the differences between the dragons, the cooked chicken dinner...

Even though the files on the CD share a lot of imagery throughout the different categories, I think a lot of these images were sourced from multiple places, which leads to the wide array of styles when compared to each other directly.

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Icons

Icons are always fun to find! Like the Cut category, there were lots to browse through, so I picked out some of my favorites again:

The cute tiny animals, the various nicely pixeled foods, the little icons meant for navigating through webpages...! I love to see it all so much.

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Buttons

For some people back in the early 2000s, even making your own webpage buttons could have been difficult if you didn't have any image creation software beyond paint, so premade buttons like these would have been very useful. Many of them here use imagery shared across other categories to help you create a more cohesive look.

Premade buttons featuring a cartoon crab

Premade buttons featuring a cartoon horse

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Banners

Similar to the premade buttons, there are lots of premade banner images to choose from too.

Premade banners featuring animals

Premade banners themed around Christmas

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Backgrounds

Even now I often find myself looking online for tiled backgrounds for various projects - unless you just make something yourself it can be kind of expensive, even for something simple! CDs like these seem to still be a great resource for things like seamless backgrounds and textures that you can use for whatever you want...

Seamless background tiles featuring natural elements

Seamless background tiles featuring geometric shapes

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Index

The index category has lots of images you can overlay text or buttons over for navigating to different parts of your website. I particularly like the cute little dragon one at the bottom!

Index images of fireworks and glasses of beer

An index image of a tanuki, insects and falling leaves

An index image of a cartoon person

An index image of a 3D cartoon dragon with multiple speech bubbles

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Lines

Just like I'm using horizontal lines on this webpage to break up text, it was also common to use a long images instead. So many cute ones to be found here!

Line break images including shaved ice, bubbles and fish, flowers and watermelon

Line break images including mistletoe and bows, animals hatching from eggs, toy robots and dragons

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Animation

Finding little animated gifs is another highly rated treasure find for me. Here's just a few:


I love the email ones at the end there! I might have to put those somewhere on here...

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Frames

I suppose these are meant for using as a frame over other images, like real life photos. Look at that cool "2000" Year of the Dragon one!

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Photos

Going through this category made me laugh, just because it's very fun to see a bunch of nicely photographed images of vegetables and office supplies.

Photo category for vegetables

Photo category for office supplies

These photos do look really good though! Considering their small file sizes too. There's something really appealing about these... Sure, I'll put them on my homepage.

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Sports

A whole multiple page category just for sports clipart! Sure!! Chuck those on the CD, we have basically infinite space in comparison to floppy disks.

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Instruments

Another whole category just for instruments! Get em on here!!

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Letters

I have to imagine the use case for these letter images is pretty limited but, damn, I really want a scenario to happen where I can write a letter on that snail one down there.

A letter image for wishing someone a Happy New Year featuring an astronaut cat

A letter image with a cartoon snail and an empty speech bubble for you to write in

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Office

You might've thought we already covered office themed images in the Photo category, but actually there's an entire office themed section all by itself.


I actually really like some of the things in here though, as you can tell by this website's homepage and the little computer gifs there.

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Pet

The last category is Pets, featuring mostly cats and dogs. Some good ones in here for sure, like the Pochi dog from the first example webpage I shared, some doctor and nurse pets and some good 3D renders.

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That was a look at A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage! Do you see why "homepage" is such a good search term now?

There's a lot more than what I shared here, so be sure to check out the files themselves below if you're interested!


If you'd like to SENSE UP your own homepage, an ISO of A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage can be found here on archive.org.