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Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: Old school website atrocities from Microsoft


Back when I graduated high school, most websites hadn't begun thinking about design terms like glossy, grungy, or even "not a complete trainwreck." Heck, plenty of them didn't give aesthetics a second thought. Or a first one, for that matter.

It's no secret that Microsoft has some skeletons in their design closet. Hot Dog Stand will haunt them until the end of time. Less talked about are the early designs of the Microsoft web site, which reside at the corner of Retro Street and Fugly Avenue.

Recently the cool cats at Royal Pingdom dug up some real beauties. The screenshots go back as far as April 1994 and they remind me why I didn't care about using a browser that supported images back then. I love the first example - to me the shape resembles a cheap CD after you break it in half. The halftone sunburst and field of stars? Pure win.

Filed under: Design, Beta, web 2.0, Humor, Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: Tiny Designer

Web 2.0 style is its own special brand of Fugly. Hundreds of sites capitalize on the volcanically-hot design trends that signal a Web 2.0 property, but botch the job and end up looking like they were made with cookie cutters in 2007. But now, botching the job can be even easier, with Tiny Designer! You can create your own hideous Web 2.0 elements in seconds, including plenty of gradients, that ubiquitous lime-green color, and (of course) the always-popular "beta" badge.

Can you believe that the entire Tiny Designer site was made using elements from Tiny Designer? I sure can: it's atrocious. From the glossy sticky notes (why?) to the misappropriated Twitterrific bird at the bottom of the site, everything about Tiny Designer does violence to the entire idea of design. If you're not too stunned by the eyeful of horrors that is the Tiny Designer front page, launch the design gallery and see what other abominations this Frankensite hath wrought.

And all of this is to say nothing of the clunky, stilted user experience of actually attempting to make anything in Tiny Designer. The tool's disorderly UI involves a lot of toolbars stacked on top of one another, and, of course, a lot of gloss. If you thought the dismal results people produced with Tiny Designer were somehow due to user incompetence, you'll change your tune once you try to do anything with it. I'm predicting a long weekend of nightmares about the entire web being rebuilt with Tiny Designer.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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