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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: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday: it doesn't have to be like this

Each Friday we take a look at the weird, bad and just plain fugly interfaces for desktop, mobile and web apps.. Welcome to Fugly Friday

After going through the submissions last week it struck me how so many educational portals or tools are not given the design love they deserve. Shouldn't there be a program where designers can volunteer their time to spruce up edu sites of all kinds? Maybe not for the for-profit schools, but there's no reason for Front Page-style mediocrity -- ever.

Anyway, I've seen firsthand what a crummy edu site can look like. Some schools clearly "get it," while some are obstinate in their fugly ways. Case in point: Josiah sent us a screenshot from the University of Akron's web editor UI (it's on the next page). It's amazing how crappy a site can look with such minimalism.

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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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