Filed under: Fugly Friday
Fugly Friday: three wellsprings of ugly

Last week I covered RogerART, but this week I'm going to look at a great source of ugly sites. Three sources, in fact. The first is known by millions of people: Fark. Yes, I picked Fark because it has, traditionally, carried a lot of links to local news sites or personal sites. And let's be honest: most local affiliate sites (like your local ABC/NBC/CBS TV station's site) look like crap. They have been getting better in the past couple of years (competition breeds UI upgrades, apparently), but I still think the trend to bland, generic pages isn't anything to crow about. Thank you, Fark, for the years of fugliness. I won't mention the horrid Photoshop atrocities you'll find there, mostly because there's a certain folk art aspect to those hilarious GIFs...
Speaking of fugly imagery, the other two sites are jumping off points for even more fugly spelunking: Worst of the Web and Jim Westergren's list of "Worst Web Design Ever." Worst of the Web has archives going all the way back to 1996, but many of the sites they reviewed are either gone or upgraded -- you'll have to cross check with the Internet Archives to see the real fugs there. But Jim's list is pure comedy gold (RogerArt is on there, for example). The sites he features are a mishmash of personal sites and just plain crazy design disasters. Like the MIA site, which I'm not sure, but I think that atrocity is actually on purpose.
Do you know of any other lists of fugly sites? I remember one about 7 years ago that pointed to this guy, but I can't find it now.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Anon said 7:51PM on 3-06-2009
What about http://webpagesthatsuck.com ?
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Racetrack_Owner said 11:05AM on 3-09-2009
Every instance should reference the most ironic example, Jakob Nielsen's useit.com ... even as he rants about usability (going on more than a decade now), his site is so god-awful that it's actually difficult to read. He is a monument to the effectiveness of self-promotion in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary.
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