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Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday : Aiseikai Hospital has no opthamologist on staff


With all the hullabaloo over medical reform in the U.S., you might wonder what health care looks like in other parts of the world. At this hospital in Japan, your care comes with a healthy side order of flashing, blinking Lucky Cats, and a prescription strength dose of animated gifs.

Warning: If you're epileptic, we take no responsibility for what may happen if you click to view this Fugly Friday. And, for once, we're really not joking.

Granted, I don't read Kanji, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that this site is in need of some time in the emergency room. Even if the visible text were eloquent and poignant -- and I could read Japanese -- the overwhelming and incredibly inappropriate use of crazy color combos, frames and the dreaded solid black background of doom makes this a Fugly Friday to remember -- and avoid.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Humor, Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: Geocities Memorial Edition

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday : Yvette's Bridal

My optometrist was insistent that I not remove the bandages for another 24 hours. He also said I might have done less damage to myself if, instead of searching for today's Fugly Friday, I'd tried something safer like scouring my own eyes with a gentle bath of rock salt. He also said something about a fork. As I laughed, encased in my world of darkness and unable to see his face, a chill came over the room and I suddenly realized he wasn't joking.

So, before clicking on the misery that is Yvette's Bridal, just remember, you've been warned. According to the source, Yvette's was crafted (or rather, bludgeoned) into existence using Yahoo SiteBuilder. Once my eyes heal completely, I'll be mounting a campaign to have SiteBuilder banned as a dangerous munition.

From what I'm told, in more socially conscious jurisdictions, possession of SiteBuilder is already highly criminalized, or at least relegated to downtrodden neighborhoods where it can be segregated from productive society. Sure, they provide prophylactic templates -- and many of them don't take visual assault to an aggravated degree -- but, given SiteBuilder is capable of constructing maliciously eye-gouging wonders like Yvette's, it should at the very least require a background check, and a three day waiting period before you're allowed to download.


Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: RogerART


I would be remiss in continuing this series without a stop at RogerART.com -- a throwback on the web in so many ways. Run by Earth Citizen Roger Drowne, the site is all text and GIF's, they way HTML 1.0 intended. Roger's message is pure, I'll give him that. He revels in being consistently lumped into the "worst" website category, which I think is terrific. Roger has some painting ability with traditional media, but judging from his digital artwork, it leaves a bit to be desired, I think.

Roger eschews the tradtional top nav for a blast of text and GIF goodness that'll have you scrolling down in no time -- a convenient list of links to his other sites (also replicated at the bottom of the page in case you missed it). If you're color-blind (as I'm sure Roger would prefer) you won't be able to read random portions of the page. That's because random words are randomly colored random web-safe colors.

If you brave a scroll down you'll find quite the menagerie of crappy animated GIF's and half-assed Paint artwork. Roger's text will also have you checking your default settings, but don't worry: it's all part of the plan. Some text should be gigantic, and some text should be just overly large. You'll have a ball playing "is this a link" too, since there's a lot of blue text. Luckily, all URL's are using the default HTML spec in a handy blue with underline... you'll just have to wade through the sea of SMS-like gibberish to find them.

So sure, RogerART is a design abomination -- but is it art? Let's turn to our dictionary.app definition of kitsch:
kitsch |ki ch |
noun
art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way : the lava lamp is an example of sixties kitsch | [as adj. ] kitsch decor.
We have a winner! Here's hoping Roger continues to refuse professional design help for at least another 10 years.

Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday, a new Download Squad series


According to a statistic I just made up, almost half of all interfaces for software (web or download) look like garbage. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. With that subjectivity in mind we want to ask you: what are the ugliest, most cumbersome, least effective interfaces out there? Mind you, we're talking GUI here -- command line interfaces are a kind of beauty you simply can't assail. Let's not devolve into a ClearType battle, OK?

Submit your nominees in the comments and we'll take a look at the fugliness. Web apps, downloadable stuff, on any platform you wish, we'll open it up and peek at the steaming guts. Starting next week and running for every Friday (until we wipe out bad taste from the internet, naturally) we'll highlight one special ugly duckling. We'll try to be constructive in our criticism.

Despite the harsh moniker, we're not looking to take cheap shots. The ultimate goal is for developers to learn a little something about user interface design. While we'll keep it tongue-in-cheek, there's always a lesson to be learned in doing things wrong. Considering the specialized nature of design (and UI design in particular), it's completely understandable that indie devs will do what they can. If you take a look on the iTunes App Store, you'll see dozens of atrocious designs, but those are devs who likely have no training in this area. Again, totally understandable. Hopefully we can all learn a little something from these mistakes. Keep it constructive, but don't be afraid to point out foibles, that's what I say.

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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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